¿Is Mitt a Mexican?

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who’d like for us to think he’s the GOP front-runner for U.S. president, is causing many of us Latinos a headache – and not just because he’s willing to spread the ideologue rhetoric about immigration reform.

ROMNEY: A Mexicano named Mitt?



For the fact is that the Romney family lived for a time in Mexico. One faction of the family still lives there – a faction that can call itself second-cousins to Mitt.

WHICH HAS SOME people wondering – Is Mitt Romney a Mexican? Is he a Mexican-American? Is he Latino (or the type of Latino who’d rather call himself “Hispanic” or “Spanish”)?

Or is he just another white guy trying to get Latino votes in the upcoming Jan. 31 Florida primary elections?

Romney himself hasn’t talked much about this fact – which seems to mean that people are being allowed to perceive Mitt in accordance to what they want to believe about him.

Personally, the only one of those questions that has a straightforward “yes” or “no” answer is the first.

NO! ROMNEY IS not a Mexican. He was born in Michigan (the state where his father served a stint as governor). And as National Public Radio is reporting, Romney has second cousins who live in Mexico and have Mexican citizenship – but he has never met them.

He’s never ventured to his father’s birthplace in Chihuahua or to the communities in that Mexican state where his family lives.

The fact that the Romney family passed through Mexico for a time during their stint in the Americas doesn’t seem to be a crucial factor in his life.

Which is his choice. I’m not going to mock Mitt for not embracing his Mexico ties (including the fact that his father was a Mexican, by birth). Personally, I think he’s missing out on what could be the most interesting aspect of his character. But it’s his life.

BUT IT MEANS I am going to get all bothered when certain political people try to claim that Romney’s campaign for president has some sort of special appeal to Latinos because of these Romney family ties to Mexico.

They just don’t mean much.

For the record, the Romney family fled the United States in the 19^th Century for Mexico – in large part to get away from the hostility and intolerance of the U.S. society for their Mormon religious beliefs.

Within Mexico, they settled in special colonies that enabled them to avoid intermingling with the Mexican people (which, to me, sounds an awful lot like what the conservative ideologues accuse Latinos of doing in this country).

BUT THEY WEREN’T totally unlike the native people. For when the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s cropped up, many Mormons fled those colonies to come back to the United States. My own grandfathers came to this country around that time because the revolution caused so much unrest there was no chance of a worthwhile life there.

Among others who came were the members of the Romney family who directly result in the creation of Mitt. His father, George, was 5 when he left Mexico.

I couldn’t help but notice that NPR report I alluded to early that found a Mormon colony today with 40 Romney relatives.

They’re still going out of their way, it seems, to live apart from Mexican people in Mexico.

THERE JUST SEEMS to be too much of a separation, and in my mind the fact that Romney can say with a straight face all that nonsense-talk about immigration reform being unnecessary shows the separation.

Even NPR noted that Mitt’s Mexican primos wish they could have a few moments alone with him to try to talk some sense into his head.

So is it right to think of Mitt as a Mexican-American? Only in his wildest of fantasies should he be thought of as one. Because it would be an improvement.

  -30-