Would-be Department of Hispanic Affairs isn’t needed

When Governor Bill Richardson vetoed a bill that would have created a Department of Hispanic Affairs, he explained that he could not approve a cabinet-level department because there was no provision for funding it, and instead created an advisory Hispanic Affairs Council and pledged to work with the Legislature next year to create a Hispanic Affairs Office.

While I applaud the governor for being fiscally responsible enough to say no to a new department when we can barely balance the budget for the departments we already have, I suspect we have not heard the last of this.

The implication of the governors statement is that he regretted not being able to sign the bill, and thought such a department was needed. 

I do not.

When I moved to Santa Fe from Los Angeles three years ago, the difference between Hispanic in California and Hispanic in New Mexico struck me quite forcefully. 

In California, where immigrants make up a significant proportion of the Hispanic population, there are Hispanic neighborhoods where the signs in store windows, billboards and ads on bus stop benches are in Spanish. Here in New Mexico most of the people with Spanish surnames are not only the great-great-grandchildren of American citizens, but their more distant ancestors lived here in New Mexico long before it became a U.S. Territory.

Many of them can trace their ancestry in what would someday be the continental United States farther back than any Mayflower descendant.

I cannot count the number of obituaries I’ve read in the Santa Fe New Mexican where an elderly man or woman with a Spanish last name is survived by several children and numerous grandchildren, whose eclectic mix of Hispanic and Anglo surnames are listed. 

Then there are those where the deceased has an Anglo name and the descendants are again a mix of Anglo and Hispanic. Not only do Hispanics here live in the same neighborhoods with Anglos, they go to the same churches and schools, work in the same businesses and liberally intermarry.

New Mexico is filled with Hispanic doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, accountants, CEOs and politicians.  Gov. Bill Richardson, despite his last name, is Hispanic (though not of the trace-your-ancestors-back-to-Cortes variety), as is U.S. Congressman Ben Ray Luján, New Mexico House Speaker Ben Luján (the congressman’s father), recently indicted PRC Commissioner Jerome Block, Jr., and numerous other elected and appointed officials in state and local goverments and in the state Democratic and Republican Parties.

In light of all this, I was surprised to discover that legislators saw the need for an entirely new department of state government to help Hispanics succeed. Funny, I thought they were succeeding. 

In fact, I thought they were so much a part of the mainstream New Mexican economy, society, politics and culture that the Anglo-Hispanic distinction was almost meaningless in political terms.

House Speaker Ben Luján obviously sees things differently, however, since he called state Senator John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, a “racist S.O.B.” in a dispute over a bill. 

At the time, I was scratching my head.  Racist?  Where on earth did that come from?  Am I, a dark-haired, dark-eyed Anglo, a different race from my Hispanic friends, some of whom are fair-haired and light-eyed? 

Even if you want to say that the cultural distinction between Hispanics and Anglos matters, the idea that the two groups belong to different races is nothing short of ludicrous.

At a time when the state is struggling to meet its existing budgetary requirements, a new cabinet-level department dedicated to helping a group of people that includes quite a few of the state’s political leaders seems more like parody than policy.