I caught up earlier today with Gabriel Sanchez, Albuquerque native and assistant professor of political science at the University of New Mexico.

While the week-long flap over now ex-Bernalillo County Republican Party Chairman Fernando C de Baca’s racially-charged remarks has mercifully passed, I thought it was worthwhile to ask an expert in Latino voting behavior (that’s Sanchez) to talk about the point C. de Baca was - let’s be charitable for a moment - trying to make.

“He didn’t put the words together correctly,” Sanchez began, ” but it does make sense that older Latinos have a different ideology about politics that would cause them to think different about African-American politics and leaders.”

In fact, teasing out the differences between older and younger generations of Latino voters regarding racially-charged questions is something Sanchez has looked at before.

“I had a dissertation chapter that was looking at [Latino] perceptions of commonality with African Americans,” he said. Distilling the essence of his conclusion, he offered this: “If you look at how much Latinos have in common with African Americans, younger Latinos were much more likely to say they had commonalities with blacks. That decreased as you got older. And that’s consistent with most of the work that I’ve looked at when you look at black/brown relations,” Sanchez said.

“There definitely is a generational impact there,” he added.

Sanchez went on to argue that we’re in uncharted territory given this year’s historic candidacy of Barack Obama, the first black major party presidential nominee. He made the point that polling data can vary widely as those surveyed conceal any racial or ethnic prejudice they might have.

“If I ask on a survey if race will affect your vote, not that many people are going to tell you truthfully,” he explained.

But young voters, particularly young Latino voters, Sanchez argued, are a different kettle of pescado.

“It’s kind of interesting,” Sanchez said. “The media young people are tuning into is definitely cross-cultural. You see a lot of diversity in television. My parents generation, there wasn’t a lot of programming that was dedicated to minorities. I think all those things play into those attitudes.”

While Sanchez believes that any bias among older Hispanics will only have a marginal impact this year, the real test will come on Election Day.

Still in his 20s and a self-described member of the hip-hop generation, Sanchez will clearly be parsing the results very closely.