Mitt Romney and Mexico...

By AMARANTE CORDOVA
Special to The Paz Files

CHIHUAHUA, Mexico - Suddenly, the world is beating feet to my favorite taco stand here. This is where Willard "Mitt" Romney, the frontrunner in the Republican Party's 2012 presidential nomination race, reportedly ate his first street taco. It wasn't all that weird.

Romney's stubborn Mormon grandfather, Miles Park Romney, emigrated to Mexico in the 1880s ahead of prosecution for violating the Edmunds Act, which declared that polygamy was a felony. Young Mitt's father, George, was born at a Mormon colony near this God-abandoned desert town. It was, history notes, the Mexican Revolution of the early 1900s that forced his family to move back to the United States when he was a child.

So, is that enough for Mitt, the former moderate governor of Massachusetts to claim the Hispanic vote in next November's general election, a voting bloc said to belong almost unanimously to Demcratic President Barack Obama?

We shall see about that. So far, Mitt has done, or said, nothing to make anyone believe he's even after the Hispanic vote. He's courted Hispanics in Florida, but those guys are Cubans, and any Mexican-American living elsewhere in the country will tell you they are not Cuban.

The odds against Romney geting any meaningful percentage of the Hispanic vote are huge. He has gone out of his way to slam undocumented immigrants, including his gardener. Romney has fallen in line with his party's Right Wing zealots who want to finish building that fence along the Rio Grande, to keep out people who, we're told, helped his dad build that Mormon settlement in Chihuahua and who befriended his grandparents.

Romney would seem to be out of touch with his personal history.

"He's hoping his popularity with Cubans in Florida will translate to the Southwest, but it doesn't," said a New Mexican familiar with voting trends. "He'll not get anywhere with the larger number of Hispanics...

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