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By John A. Gutiérrez
Soledad Hiciano didn’t expect much from her visit to the White House last week. “I went there with very few expectations,” the Executive Director of the Asociación Comunitaria de Dominicanos Progresistas, or Community Association of Progressive Dominicans (ACDP, by its Spanish-language acronym) said recently.
“I thought they would want to smooth things out, and [that] it would be very shallow,” she added.
Hiciano was referring to the White House’s recent attempts to shore up its support with Latino communities. The failure of the Administration to pursue any meaningful immigration reform, the heartbreaking defeat of the D.R.E.A.M. Act, and the dramatic increase in the number of deportations of undocumented immigrants by an administration that has ostensibly presented itself to Latino voters as sympathetic to immigrants, has, arguably, served to make the White House very nervous that Latino voters will not be as enthusiastic in their support for the President’s reelection as they were in 2008.
In the Obama-McCain face-off then, Latinos voted by a margin of more than 2-1 for Obama, 67% versus 31%, according to the Pew Hispanic Center in a Nov. 2008 study.
In efforts to seemingly offset the loss of critical Latino support, the White House organized last week’s two-day White House Hispanic Policy Conference. The stated mission was to bring together “Hispanic leaders in elementary, secondary and higher education, state legislators, and national and local community non-profit leaders…to be briefed on the Obama Administration's policies and initiatives.” More than 160 Hispanic leaders from 25 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico joined over 100 Administration officials.
If Hiciano arrived in Washington attracted more by the prospect of making connections with federal agencies whose grants could help shore up her agency, she left feeling that she has allies in the nation’s capital. “I didn’t think they would give us that level of attention,” she said.
In fact, more than 100 administration officials, including high-level administrators from virtually every federal agency, were on hand to discuss not only funding opportunities but to debate strategies and learn from the nearly 200 Latino leaders from across the United States and Puerto Rico who were on hand. For Hiciano, the face-to-face contact with agency officials was critical since she is actively looking for federal support for her programs.
“It was complete access to the federal government,” she said.
That doesn’t mean that the meeting didn’t find Latino leaders and the White House disagreeing on substantive issues such as immigration. “We discussed immigration and the increased number of deportations. We explained how they were separating families,” said Hiciano, who added that she felt that the Administration officials seemed to want to get a fuller picture of what was happening in Latino communities across the country.
One of the highlights of the summit was President Obama addressing the participants. The President recommitted himself to passing national immigration reform but was plain that he needed the Latino community’s help.
“He made it clear that he shares our vision but he was also very clear that he needed our help to get immigration reform done,” said Hiciano.
At the end of the two-day summit, organizers announced that another session would be held in the fall expressly for Latino non-profit organizations to discuss issues such as their sustainability as organizations and to share best practices among themselves.
In the end, Hiciano’s visit proved to be much more substantive and successful than she ever expected. “I was very happy,” she said, now back in Washington Heights.
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