So, I'll start off by saying I'm not sure what happened at Harrah's in Las Vegas at the Democratic Caucus. But it sounds like nobody is really sure, least of all Dolores Huerta.
The story, from what I can tell, goes like this: the moderator at the Democratic Caucus at Harrah's in Las Vegas asked the audience if someone could translate the speech to Spanish, labor activist and Hillary Clinton supporter Dolores Huerta offered her services. Sanders supporters begin to yell "No!" repeatedly, asking for a "neutral" to do the translating, perhaps fearing that a staunch Hillary supporter may alter the language to favor her candidate. Or perhaps they can't trust that someone whose foundation has received money from Hillary's foundation can be trusted to fairly and impartially translate the speeches. That's a completely fair concern. The moderator realizes that the incredible lack of preparation on his committee's behalf is resulting in a scene. As one account says:
The caucus chair quiets us down and says, “We need a translator, the first person who gets to the stage can be the translator.” A Bernie guy went up, somebody else for Hillary went up, and nobody agreed with that. The caucus chair said, “Since there’s no consensus on a translator, the caucus will be conducted in English only.”
As far as I can tell, that is the only time that phrase "English only" is uttered and certainly the first time.
Now, this is where I have a massive problem. Dolores Huerta speaks to the media and absolutely lambastes Bernie Sanders supporters, insinuating repeatedly that they are racists.
She also said
In the event that there were one or two or even a handful of people yelling "English only" in the crowd, it is incredibly disingenuous and disrespectful to castigate essentially all Bernie Sanders supporters for this event. It was even more incredibly tactless and reckless to go to the media and light the fire of racial prejudice where it isn't. To make Sanders supporters wear the shame of racial prejudice of a whole community because a particularly prominent and persuasive leader of the Latino community wanted to opportunistically use an event of fabricated racial prejudice in order to sway some political leverage to her candidate is altogether unnerving.
There is no excuse for this. We should be discussing how unsettling it is that the Nevada Democratic Caucus didn't have the foresight to hire their own interpreter. We should not be descending into the bullshit and lies method of campaigning that has been the sole domain of the GOP this campaign season. The Democratic race has been issue-based. It has been above this duplicitous muckraking. Let's get back to that.
So, Dolores Huerta, you owe Bernie Sanders, his supporters, and most of all, the Latino community an apology.
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