A not so brighter, whiter campaign speech…

“Race” and “raza” aren’t exactly synonoms, but the nuances of color in “la raza” has always been used in Mexican politics… usually ineffectively (I can remember when Lazaro Cárdenas Batal was running for Governor of Michaocán,
and his opponent took every opportunity to mention Cárdenas has an Afro-Cuban wife, as if that meant she practiced voodoo, or somehow “tainted” the candidate. Kelly Arthur Garrett with… uh… color commentary on the upcoming Presidential election.

A bitter twist in the campaign for Mexico’s next president was the work of Enrique Ochoa, the party president of the incumbent Institutional Revolution Party who last week decided to speak about the growing number of party members bolting to the opposition. Why he would want to call attention to this internal woe is anybody’s guess. Maybe it was just an excuse to make a play on words.

Superficially, what Ochoa said was that the defectors were party members who are no longer sticking. But instead of using the usual word for a member of his party  — priísta (PRI being the party’s acronym, pronounced “pree”) — he substituted prieto. He did it twice, in fact, to bring the joke home.

Read the whole piece here.