Saturday, January 19, 2008

The Women in My Family...

...are voting for Hillary.

The hubby is visiting his extended clan up north to help celebrate his aunt's 85th birthday. Every woman in the family that he has spoken to and who intends to vote is voting for HRC. He's got the count up to 10 at the moment.

One cousin and her daughter tried to get to a rally for HRC being held at UC Davis the other day, but they couldn't get away. It tuerns out there was an overflow crowd at the auditorium and thousands of would-be attendees were left outside.

These women vary in age from his 85 year old aunt to some 20-something cousins. A quarter of them are immigrants, the rest are the daughters and granddaughters of those women. These are women without college educations for the most part, they work in everything from the dairy industry to the public schools, most are married and have had their share of marital conflict, and most are mothers. Ethnically, they are Portuguese, so technically they are "Hispanic", though in California, that really means you're from Latin American roots, not Iberian.

So, this is what Hillary supporters look like, the kind that the big name bloggers scoff they "never meet". Of course not. These women work 9 to 5 or are home taking care of kids. They don't hang out on the internet or at the local coffee house or in the student union building on campus. They aren't white, male, urbanites with fantastic earning potential and a big network of connected professional friends who are *so* full of Clinton Fatigue.

These women know what it means to not have enough food on the shelves or having to sew your own clothes or sit across the desk from some "important" man (like a bank officer or a lawyer) and try to explain in broken English what you need, while he stares at you like you're from another planet. These are people who are materially hurt under conservatives and who materially benefit from Democrats. They are also women who have dealt with enough smooth-talking men that they know full well that their needs and the needs of their children and grandchildren get pushed to the side when the men get together and decide what's important.

And, thus, they support Hillary,

Anglachel

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, that's interesting. My husband's part-Portuguese in ancestry--his grandfather's parents were from Portugal. I've usually considered people with ancestry from the Iberian peninsula Iberian, but sometimes call people with any kind of Spanish ancestry "Spanish-Latin" and with any kind of Italian ancestry "Italian-Latin" (I think there's "French-Latin" too). My husband calls that part of his family Iberian; I'd never heard of Californians considering that Hispanic/Latin-American. I thought Latin-American meant South- and Central-American ancestry to most people.

Eh, sometimes it seems like everyone's got a different way of defining things. I often wish humans would just declare everyone's everything and everyone's nothing, and then be done with all the labeling.

That's cool about all the women in your husband's family supporting Clinton--that gives me hope!