Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg speaks during a town hall event at the Latin Chamber of Commerce in Las Vegas, February 15, 2020.
Over the past several weeks, Latinos who plan to participate in tomorrow’s Nevada caucuses have learned a few things about Pete Buttigieg. He knows that the president of Mexico is Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He speaks decent Spanish. His social and economic development plan “El Pueblo Unido: A New Era for Latinos” promises to improve economic conditions, address health disparities, invest in education, and more—though no more than the plans of his rival candidates.
One thing Nevada’s Latinos don’t seem particularly up on is Buttigieg’s record in dealing with the Latino community in South Bend, where he recently finished an eight-year tenure as mayor. As Buttigieg clearly hopes to win some Latino votes tomorrow, that’s probably just as well.
Buttigieg’s performance in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary provided him with the momentum and the money to move on to Nevada and South Carolina. That momentum could come skidding to a halt, however, when he’s confronted with black and brown voters in those two states. His proficiency in Spanish isn’t likely to compensate for his distinctly thin résumé—at least, not when he’s pitted against better-known candidates with more resources who’ve been in the state longer and who’ve made more compelling and convincing appeals to the state’s minority voters.
After focusing his energies on Iowa and New Hampshire, Buttigieg descended on Nevada as an unknown quantity to the state’s Latinos, one of the pillar communities of the Democratic coalition. A She the People late-January poll of nearly 400 Nevada women of color who were likely Democratic caucus participants found Biden at 24 percent and Sanders at 22 percent, while Buttigieg was the choice of only 2 percent of respondents. (A national Telemundo poll had him at 7 percent and a Univision poll at 8 percent.)
Following some early missteps like requiring Latino campaign staff members who did not speak Spanish to do translations, the Buttigieg campaign has been in catch-up mode. After a multimillion-dollar infusion of funds late last summer, Buttigieg opened nearly a dozen Nevada offices, hired Latino staff, and launched television ads in Spanish, some touting what they said was his record in South Bend.
None of the local or national Latino leaders interviewed for this article were familiar with Buttigieg’s dealings with or impact on South Bend’s Latino community. This lack of familiarity, however, may actually have tamped down contempt. A close look at Buttigieg’s record on municipal hiring and contracting raises questions about his commitments to diversity.
Unlike his relationships with the African American community, there has been scant national reporting on dealings with Latino interests in South Bend. The city does have a relatively significant Latino population; 15.3 percent, according to the latest census data. Yet in an analysis on municipal hiring based on the city’s 2019 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report, Notre Dame humanities instructor Ricky Klee found there was just one Latino administrator, the technology director, out of the more than 26 top administrators employed by the city. The Office of Community Investment, which oversees municipal economic and neighborhood development, had one Latino employee on a staff of nearly 40 people. There were no Latino administrators or other top officials in such key city departments as housing, transportation and utilities, and streets. A 2019 Democracy in Color report on diversity in hiring and contracting confirmed that Buttigieg hired just one Latino department head during his two terms in office.
Contracting with Latino-owned businesses in South Bend dropped precipitously over the course of Buttigieg’s two terms as mayor, a decline Klee attributes to absence of Latinos in departments like economic development who could have identified and cultivated existing businesses, fledgling entrepreneurs, and potential opportunities. “We’ve declined in diversity, that’s happened on the mayor’s watch,” Klee says. “He hired almost entirely Caucasian appointees.”
Nevada’s Latino voters have been inundated for the past month and a half with mailings (both digital and physical), texts, and phone calls from the candidates. Tom Steyer, says Fernando Romero, president of Hispanics in Politics, the state’s oldest Hispanic political organization, has been “really reaching out,” but is probably too late, Romero adds. He also gets about two mailings a week from Sanders and, only recently, literature from Buttigieg, too.
Romero appreciates Buttigieg’s fluency in Spanish (“Hey, look, I can speak your language; I took the time to learn it!” he says) but adds it’s by no means a deciding factor in anyone’s vote. Romero’s appreciation may not be all that widely shared among the state’s Latinos. Some in the Twitterverse have termed Buttigieg’s penchant for dropping Spanish phrases and sentences here and there “Hispandering” (“Hispanic” plus “pandering”). We should know by tomorrow night whether Buttigieg comes out of Nevada with anything more than this neologism.
This article has been updated.
