Explicit

Combating the Hopelessness

Published Jan 23, 2024, 8:01 AM

Frankie Miranda, President and CEO of the Hispanic Federation, joined Danielle for an enlightening discussion about the diversity of opinions among Hispanic and Latinx voters, and the challenges Democrats face in 2024.

Good morning, peeps, and welcome to F Daily with me your girl, Danielle Moody recording from the home Bunker. Folks, I am very excited to welcome on today's episode to ok F Daily for the first time, Frankie Miranda, who is the President and CEO of the Hispanic Federation. And you know, why do I think that it's important over the next couple of months, the next painstakingly ten months that it's going to take us to get to election twenty twenty four. I want to speak with and we'll be bringing you interviews with people from different organizations, communities, generations, experience and perspectives on what's at stake in this election. Look, I know that you all know as you listen to OKAF on a regular basis, and my hope is that I provide you with the information, the fortitude, the focus to not only keep going for the next ten months, but to also educate those people around you. And that's exactly what it is that Frankie's organization does, which is educate membership and different organizations in groups about the issues that are facing the LATINX community. In this episode, we discuss Greg Abbott's horrific acts in Texas that cost a mother and her two children their lives. How did that happen? Well, they were drowning as they were crossing the Rio Grande, and instead of being aided, right, they were not because of policies that Greg Abbott has passed in the state of Texas. And it breaks my heart to think about the kind of community and culture we are living in where we just let people die, where elected officials can just let people die and then say that the only reason why he's not shooting them is because, oh, that would go against the federal government and the Biden administration. What, not against the quote unquote God that you all claim to love so damn much, right, not against the Bible that you all seem to cling to so damn much. So, it's just this idea that you can have politicians these days say. The most horrific thing is is Donald Trump did about the LATINX community, about Mexicans, right about quote unquote shithole countries and those coming from African nations, about you know, anyone and get away with it, and not only get away with it, but be celebrated and applauded. It's disgusting and it's vile. So in today's conversation with Frankie, we will talk about what is at stake as it pertains to the LATINX community, the difficulties in bringing together such a broad coalition of people, and how we prepare, if there is a way to prepare, and what is it that people need to know. So that conversation and interview my dear friends, is coming up next, folks, I am very happy to welcome TOKF Daily Frankie Miranda, who is the president and the CEO of the Hispanic Federation, which is an organization that is a compilation of different groups that are representing the very large LATINX community and organizing to build a movement around a community that is incredibly important to the continuation of our democracy and an incredibly important voting block. Frankie, let's start out with a couple of things. First, as folks are hearing this as we are recording today, it is definitive Donald Trump one Iowa hands down by over fifty percentage points. We have felt that this was going to happen. We knew that this was going to happen, but there is something about now seeing it and recognizing while listening to voters on the ground there that their resolve around Donald Trump as being their guy has not only not been shaken over the last several years and over his myriad of legal troubles, it has actually been fortified. Give me your reaction to his win in Iowa and what the Hispanic Federation is thinking in terms of the messaging moving forward.

Well, first of all, thank you Danielle for having me on the show. As you mentioned, we knew that Donald Trump was going to dominate Iowa. So for me, this is just like we knew that it was going to happen. We're going to just focus on what's going to happen in New Hampshire and other contexts. But what is really really surprising, to a certain extent, shocking in a way, is that the anti immigrant messaging resonated in Iowa. The propaganda and the misinformation about the immigration in this country, the way that is being framed is really really troubling, and that means that we have to spend even more efforts to clarify the record and making sure that that message is countered with facts, with facts about what is the real issue in this country and how Republicans have blocked real solutions not only to the immigration of people coming into this country, but also those that are here in the United States contributing to the economy, to every single aspect of our American life, but that right now have been targeted. That people are without health insurance, people are suffering with inflation, people are suffering from all of that. But it's because of those people that are invading our country, which is such a terrible and tacic message right.

Now in this country, you know, and I think that that is what is of deep concern, is that the misinformation campaign, which we know has been being weighed since twenty sixteen, has gotten more sophisticated and more strategic over the last several years, is working. And we know that it's working because there are little droplets that are being put into the sphere that people are picking up and they're running with. And what we know is that Donald Trump and the Republican Party doesn't have to win over votes, right they don't have to win over the LATINX community. What they have to do is peel away enough people from believing in the Democratic Party and the democratic process. And I think that that is something that we in the democratic community and in the movement have not recognized is that they're not trying to win people's votes. They're trying to put in enough misinformation and hopelessness into the sphere so that either people don't turn out right to vote at all, or they believe the lies that somehow the Republican Party is better off for them economically and it's working. And so what does it look like when we recognize that to be true, that it's about peeling off votes and it's about suppressing the vote, meaning increasing the amount of hopelessness. When we know that, what does a pivot look like.

It's a very good question. I think that about the case of Florida. There was so much hope about the LATINX community, the growth of the LATINX community in Florida, but there is a problem about messaging when it comes to our community. First of all, a lot of misinformation is being spread out in our community from many different social media platform forms. In Spanish, we don't know. We know, we have some sort of clue of what is being done through some efforts by the social media platform to curb the information in English, but we're still unsure of what is being done to curve that misinformation in Spanish. The reality is that for the Republican Party it has been very easy just to do a dumbed down message about and this is the best example that I heard of the analysis of Florida. You just have to have a noun verb socialism, noun verb communism, and that is the messaging that is being pounded in communities that have ancestral backgrounds or that recently arrived from countries that are in this array, in many cases through American intervention. But the reality is that that message is going to resonate. Unfortunately, on our side, we're talking about complicated, rooted causes and we have not been able to fine tune that messaging for our community. And you're absolutely right, you don't need to win the LATINX block. You just need to peel away enough votes to give them the advantage and get creating enough confusion to feel like, well, I don't want I run away, my family run away from a socialist regime. I don't want that to happen here. And that has been the very successful messaging that have been implemented by the Republican Party, and that somehow the Democratic Party has not been able to effectively counter. We know about the many successes of this administration. But for people in our community, they're not going to see that railroad being built until ten years from now. We're not going to see that broad ban expansion into our communities until years down the line. We're talking about real threats right now to democracy and real threats to our community. Latinos want to talk about the economy, they want to talk about jobs, But when you have that message saying like whoa wait a second, remember where you came coming from, and this is what's going to happen in this country, it's really really concerning, and that makes our effort even more more important to try to counter that.

Yeah, you know, I think that that is incredibly right. And I wonder too, Frankie, when we are listening to the Biden administration saying that saving democracy, that term, right, that phrase is going to be what they are riding into twenty twenty four. Is it too obtuse of a phrase? Do we need instead of saving democracy? Do we need to talk about something else?

Like?

But do you believe would resonate better if this is not it?

It has to be. First of all, our community is extremely diverse, So when we're talking about Puerto Ricans in New York, or we're talking about Cubans in Florida, or we're talking about Mexicans in Arizona. We have to ensure that we are talking. Fine tune that messaging, fine tune that language that really speaks to these different communities. But at the end of the day, what it's important is that our community, many members of our community have been running away from chaos, and we need to convince them that all of this progressive platform provides the stability that they're looking for, that it's going to add to the resources for better communities, better quality of quality of life, better opportunities for everyone. LATINX community believes in the American dream. LATINX believes that there should be some sort of order to their lives. Unfortunately, what it has been portrayed in both sides is that Donald Trump represents law and order and the other side represents this disarray and chaos. And we just need to make sure that people correlate. Again, we get into the deep, it's easier to be sending out a really dumbed down message rather than really talking about the root that causes for many of the challenges that we have in the United States and abroad. But we have to make an effort to really talk about some of these issues in a way that our community understands it and that people really see it as an opportunity to obtain that American dream that is so alive in the LATINX community.

I want to make a pivot to talk a bit locally about what is happening in New York where the both of us are right now, which is that over the past several months, migrants from a variety of countries and places have been bussed to New York from these quote unquote red States, used as political footballs and not as people with families and lives and dreams and hopes. And in trying to deal with an influx of people, Mayor Adams and the Governor of New York have put together makeshift housing in some of the hotels around New York City. And these people, these families and children are now being evicted from these places because of the sixty days that they had and are now being evicted and then told that they need to go back into the system. I'm not quite sure what they are supposed to do in the interim, given the fact that there is now after two years of no snow snow on the ground in New York and it is the middle of winter. What do you make of how we are supposed to be dealing with this influx of people in a humane way that we're not seeing happen right now?

Well, I must start saying that is undefensibleconscionable. What's going on when we are expecting people to figure out another way after kids have been enroll in school, that they are in a permanent shelter a situation, and that they need to go out in these weather and the weather condition and try to do this. But let's continue focusing on the important and most important point on this. Governor Abbat and others are coyotes that had been exploiting human beings and transporting them, in many cases against their will, across state lines just for political to gain some cheap political points. The federal government have allowed this to happen, and I have led municipalities and cities like New York to try to come up with solutions. New York have so far fulfilled their promise of being a sanctuary city and people have not been turned away. But it have gotten to a point in which we need federal intervention. We need to and again I'm not giving a pass to the mayor. We have been very forceful and we have been very serious about our criticism of the mayor. But at this point it's scrambling for solutions when the reality is that it should not be New York City solving these issues. It should be the federal government and putting a stop to the inhumane way that Governor Abbot and some others have been treating human beings that at the end of the day, our skill could be skilled workers that can actually feel that thousands and thousands of job openings the country is not able to keep up with filling up the jobs, even in New York That has been an estimated thirty thousand jobs that are open in red districts in blue districts where people are desperate to get more workers. Why are we not using this as a solution to our challenges in the economy to ensure that New York State and other states can actually expand and continue to progress. And we're seeing this as a problem. So at the end of the day, the mayor, including the executive, the lawsuit that he's trying to do with the buses trying to just prevent buses from dropping people in New York City, and now they're dropping them in New Jersey. We have seen our groups telling us that people are walking all the way from New Jersey, all the way to New York City to the intake center because they have been dropped off in the middle of the night in New Jersey. So every single policy that we can do locally are going to have a negative impact because it cannot be solved at the local level. This has to be resolved at the federal level, and the Biden administration has to act on this, and Congress has been the real obstacle here to find real solutions to our broken immigration system.

I think about too, justin New York in particular, where you know, there has been a issue with you know, corporate buildings right that used to house businesses and what have you, and because people have changed the way that they work and remote work and all of these things, that why aren't we utilizing the spaces that are vacant in some areas and turning them into homes like that is something that I also don't understand, right, Like you have businesses that have left or shut down, people that have gone into remote work. You're looking for a solve for all of this, you know, corporate real estate, and yet this is not made to be one of the solutions that we are using on top of what you just articulated, which is the fact that we have a lot of open jobs and positions. And so why are we not looking at this as this influx of people as a potential solution to larger problems that we have had. I honestly do not know, Frankie. Let me ask you this this final question. You know when you say that it is the responsibility of the federal government and of Congress, which I agree with you, to come up with a robust policies that deal with our broken immigration system, how do you see this issue now that it isn't just with border states, but it is now becoming an issue with other states. Playing in the twenty twenty four election cycle, Immigration for.

Our LATINX community is not trending as one of the top issues continue to be jobs, the economy, quality of live issues.

But little by little, we're going to continue peeling away some of the perception right that what is really important for not only the Latin EX community, but other communities, the racist undertone of the messaging around immigration can continue to create more fear mongering, more propaganda. And we know, we know that the influx of asilunce seekers presents a number of challenges, but the ultimate truth is that communication and accountability among federal, state, and local governments who have and can still have sustainstis substantially can mitigate these challenges. So at the end of the day, immigrants at trillions of dollars to our community, our economy, pay hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes, they are not really the problem. If we have figured out how to deal with influx of Ukrainian refugees in this country, we can find and creative solutions to deal with these black and brown issue of immigrants coming to this country wanting to work, wanting to do the best. And if Republicans are really serious about security and immigration, they should stop defunding immigration courts and all the processes that can actually single out the people that come to this country with the best intentions of working and creating a best future not only for their families, themselves and for this country, but also for those that do not have a incredible reason to stay. So if we're really serious about it. We need to work in making sure that they are real points of entry that people have the opportunity. And we have seen that every time we provide good solutions for a specific country for people to apply for assyglument and other reliefs, immigration from those countries undocumented entries have gone down significantly. So this is about creative solutions, but real communications among each other, and most of all, trying to stop governors like Governor Abbot from the humane way that he's treating these human beings crossing the border, even saying therein to say that the only thing that they are not doing is shooting them because the federal government will prosecute them. Yeah, this is unconscionable what is happening. But we need to continue pushing forward, and that's why the Federation continue to be committed to civic engagement, registering more people to vote, and really speaking the truth.

Frank you, Miranda, thank you so much for making the time to join Woke up and thank you for the work that you are doing leading the Hispanic Federation. Really appreciate you and hope that you will make the time to join us again soon.

Happy to be back, very very soon. Thank you Daniel, and thank you to everybody.

That is it for me today, dear friends, on woke ath as always power to the people and to all the people power, get woke and stay woke as fun

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