Until now, short-sighted conservatives have thought of Hispanics as something of a genial caricature of themselves, a caricature that accords with their personal impressions from fleeting encounters with bus-boys, landscapers, and others in service industries. The caricature is that Hispanics are quiet, docile, hard-working, and politically irrelevant people. The ideas of Hispanics themselves on wide-ranging issues–labor rights, immigration, religion, the meaning of family values–were willfully ignored. Sometimes conservatives went so far as to imagine Hispanics as they wanted them to be: “natural Republicans” who have yet to realize this fact. (I suppose that’s why Mexico, which is entirely made up of these “natural Republicans,” resembles Connecticut in so many important ways). ~Chris Roach

Mr. Roach aims even more withering fire at this idea than I did, and he does so with much greater precision and force.