The Hispanic Republican by Geraldo Cadava

Author:Geraldo Cadava
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Reagan’s Revolución

As a surrogate for the Reagan-Bush campaign, Fernandez accepted the invitation of the Republican national convention’s program committee chair, Mike Curb, the lieutenant governor of California, to speak on the first night. Fernandez’s speech would come right after Gerald Ford’s, live before a television audience of millions of Americans. Curb had already found an African American to serve as the convention’s secretary, a state senator from Maryland named Aris Allen. “Every time there was a vote on the floor,” one reporter wrote, “Allen’s face would appear on the screen.” But Curb wanted to feature a Hispanic as well. He asked a friend whether he thought Ben Fernandez would be good. His friend asked back, “The one born in a boxcar?” To which Curb responded, “That’s the one . . . Boxcar Ben.”

Fernandez got the invitation the week before the convention began, and arrived in Detroit on Saturday, July 12. He headed straight to the historic Leland Hotel, just a mile away from the new Joe Louis Arena—named after the African American boxer—where the convention would be held. The other Hispanic delegates stayed there as well. Cuban Americans from Miami huddled in the hotel room of one of their delegates, sipping Cuban coffee and discussing a party platform that criticized Castro and Carter in equal measure. It contained “everything that Cubans hope for,” said Carlos Salmán, head of the Miami-based Reagan Para Presidente Committee. They were readying to hand out one thousand anti-Castro pamphlets to attendees entering the convention center. Fernandez complained about the smell of cigarette butts and wondered why the hotel didn’t have air conditioning in the middle of summer. It reminded him more of the railroad boxcar he was born in than a hotel fit for a former presidential candidate. But the show had to go on. On Monday morning, the day of his speech, he had breakfast at the Plaza Hotel with members of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly (RNHA), bought himself a new shirt for prime time, and headed to the convention center.

The convention in Detroit was just the beginning of the sprint by Fernandez and other Hispanic Republicans to help Reagan and Bush win the election. Two Mexican Americans from California, Alex Armendaris and Fernando Oaxaca, were national cochairs of the Viva Reagan-Bush campaign. They were marketing and media executives, respectively, and both had worked for Nixon and Ford. As was customary, the Hispanic campaign picked up in early September, at the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Week. And again, for many Hispanic Republicans this was too late. After fielding enough phone calls from Hispanics who were confused about campaign strategy, Armendariz and Oaxaca sounded alarm bells, telling the higher-ups what they were hearing from New York, Florida, California, New Mexico, and Texas. Hispanics attended the convention and then wondered, “What now?” They had assembled the “troops, wagons, horses,” but were “waiting for a goddam [sic] general!” Please, “let’s don’t blow it,” Oaxaca pleaded in a letter to the higher-ups in the Reagan campaign.

Hispanic

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