Lenin famously remarked that capitalists would sell their enemies the rope by which to hang them. These days, the capitalists are Spanish-friendly and are happy to destroy America for money by making it “bilingual.”

The New York Times Magazine observes how a Hispanic-focused ad agency creates marketing messages that are more culturally appropriate to that audience. Business prefers a direct route to Juan’s wallet, unencumbered by waiting for him to learn English or assimilate to mainstream America.

In comparison with some of his colleagues in Hispanic advertising, in fact, John Gallegos runs a moderate-size shop. There are more than a hundred United States ad agencies, not including the publicistas in Puerto Rico, that now work almost exclusively in Spanish. The bigger Hispanic agencies have accounts like McDonald’s (Me encanta, which roughly translates to “I’m lovin’ it”), and Chevrolet (Subete, “Get in”). Bounty’s slogan in English, “The quicker picker-upper,” appears in Spanish as Con Bounty si puedes - “With Bounty, yes you can.” T-Mobile does Estamos juntos, “We’re all together.” Toyota does Avanza confiado, “Advance confidently.” Wal-Mart reportedly spends more than $60 million a year on reaching Hispanics, and for some years the Wal-Mart Spanish tag line, composed by a Houston agency called Lopez Negrete Communications, was Para su familia, de todo corazon. Siempre. Which lofted the blunt English “Low prices, always,” into a line enduring enough for a tombstone: “For your family, from the heart. Always.”

From this vantage, the grim admonitions of anti-immigration groups are hard to hear distinctly; they’re drowned out by the sound of cash registers.
[How Do You Say"Got Milk" en Espanol? New York Times Magazine 9/23/07]

An industry magazine reveals an interesting nugget from the marketing world: Hispanic consumers are seen by companies as being more brand-loyal than us independent Americans.

SOME OF THE MOST APPEALING characteristics of Hispanic consumers may be more transitory than marketers think. Take the notion of brand loyalty, where Hispanics supposedly show more long-term affinity for brands than their mainstream “Anglo” counterparts. New data from Nielsen Homescan’s Hispanic market research suggests that brand loyalty among Hispanics drops, depending on their degree of acculturation, as measured by language of preference.

For example, only 33% of English-preference Hispanic households purchased a particular cola to the exclusion of others, versus 70% for Spanish-preference households. And this trend is broadly reflected across a variety of categories in food and packaged-goods, including laundry detergent, cereal, toothpaste and beer.
[Media Daily News Adios: Nielsen Finds Hispanic Brand Loyalty Declining 8/23/07]

Language assimilation decreases brand loyalty among immigrants — fascinating. One can assume companies that have a big market share among Hispanics will want to maintain their edge by pandering even more and will support policies that keep immigrants in linguistic ghettos.

Vietnam veteran and author David Drake has published the latest in his series of Republic of Cinnabar novels, now available as an ebook from Baen Webscritptions.

The Republic of Cinnabar series is a science fiction series based on various incidents in Earth history. This one is based on Thomas, Lord Cochrane’s activities in helping Chile get free of Spain. Cochrane was seeking in South America what the Bush Administration is seeking in Iraq: patriots who wanted peace, good government and national prosperity more than they wanted to enrich themselves and their relatives. These were, and are, in short supply.

They’re not that easy to find in American politics, although the dedicated work of many Congressmen and Mayors continues to inspire, (Senators, not so much.)

Here’s what David Drake had to say about the historical context.

What comes through powerfully in every English memoir I’ve read involving Latin America at that time is that almost none of the players (Bolivar may have been a exception) had a concept of a nation that was greater than the individual’s own clan/family/tribe ruling as many of its neighbors as possible. Consistently when a region revolted from the colonial power (Spain or Portugal), the districts revolted from the capital and then the wealthy magnates revolted from the district government (which was generally run by one of the several powerful families in that district). The magnates than spent their time in burning out rival magnates.

If you’ve been following Latin American politics for the past fifty years or so (I suspect the problems go much farther back, but I personally don’t), you might reasonably come to the conclusion that nothing much has changed. For even more vivid modern examples of clan-based politics, consider Iraq and Afghanistan.

The business of When the Tide Rises is taken largely from real events in Chile, Peru, and Brazil. The major naval action, however, is based on the 1811 Battle of Lissa. (The 1866 Battle of Lissa is fascinating, but in fiction you couldn’t make one side as incompetent as the historical losing side was. As one example, the gun crews of the defeated flagship forgot to load shells and therefore fought the battle firing blank charges.)

I write to entertain readers, not to advance a personal or political philosophy (I don’t have a political philosophy); nonetheless, my fiction is almost always based on historical models. When you read When The Tide Rises,you might occasionally think about today’s news and remember that it’ll be tomorrow’s history.

Heaven knows, I thought about the news while I was writing.Introduction To When The Tide Rises.

[Disclaimer: David Drake is not responsible for this posting--I'm just quoting him.]

There’s movie out about evictions and expulsions of black Southerners in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s reviewed in the New York Times:

Banished - Movie - Review - New York Times
Movie Review
Banished (2006)
September 26, 2007
When Jim Crow Came to Town, With Eviction Notices
By MANOHLA DARGIS

There are ghosts haunting Marco Williams’s quietly sorrowful documentary “Banished,” about the forced expulsion of black Southerners from their homes in the troubled and violent decades after the Civil War.

The blogger Rhymes With Right thinks that the NYT might bring itself to mention that the white men doing the evicting were Democrats, of the kind that Strom Thurmond once was, and Robert Byrd, in a sense, still is:

But what I find interesting in this review, even with the commentary on the Wilmington incident (which I wrote about last year), is the fact that a single word appears nowhere in the entire piece. This despite the fact that it is crucial to the story being told, and the evil being perpetrated. It points to the thing that linked the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators of these great evils, and the overwhelming beneficiary of them.

The missing word?

Democrat.Rhymes With Right - A Fascinating Movie, A Missing Word

My first thought was that if there’s any ethnic cleansing of blacks happening today, it’s being done by Hispanic gangsters–who probably are Democrats, of course, but certainly not Dixiecrats.

My second thought was that there were people driven out of their homes by violence within living memory–it was called “white flight.”

Here’s Steve Sailer’s description of the process:

My late father-in-law was a classical musician, a union organizer and strike leader, and a Democrat. He owned a house in an all-white neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago that was so crime-free that his first grade daughter walked to her school a mile away. Then, blacks began moving in. Committed to integration, my father-in-law joined a liberal Catholic neighborhood group organized to prevent white flight. In 1968, however, his young children were physically attacked three times on the street and, following Martin Luther King’s assassination, rioters looted all the shops in the neighborhood.

So he sold his house for a crushing $18,000 loss. Being a big man who never did anything in a small way, he moved his family to an abandoned farm 63 miles outside Chicago, where they lived without indoor plumbing for their first two years.

And he started voting Republican.

You know, that sounds like it might make a good movie.

In and earlier blog item, I wrote

“You know what would be a really useful thing to know in this story of interracial violence at a Lancaster, California school? The races of the students involved. Since this story is about nothing but race, it seems to be the first thing you’d ask. “

A reader pointed out this story which actually contains this detail, and adds that a teacher received a deep cut on his forearm:

The fight reportedly started in a hallway as students were heading for homeroom, the superintendent said. A Hispanic student and an African American exchanged racially charged insults, then progressed to shoving and punching, he said. A female teacher tried to intervene and was knocked to the ground and kicked. A male teacher then got involved and subdued one of the combatants, but he came away with a deep cut on his forearm, the superintendent said.

Both injured teachers were released from work to seek medical attention, while substitute teachers took over their classrooms.AV Press: Teachers hurt in student fight

Edited by Chilton Williamson, and with writings from David A. Hartman, and Peter Brimelow, among others., Immigration and the American Future is now available through Amazon.