Rep. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) accused Tanya Contreras Wheeless, a Hispanic woman running for Congress in Arizona’s fourth district as a Republican, of not being authentically Latina because she took her husband’s last name.
Gallego suggested that Wheeless deliberately “hid” her Hispanic identity before running for office to avoid discrimination. “If you were Latino in Arizona around 2010 people were telling us to go back to Mexico,” he said, “you would hear I am not voting for a ‘spic.’”
“Tanya is Latina,” Gallego tweeted, “cuando le conviene,” meaning, “when it suits her.”
Following Republican Mayra Flores’s upset victory this year in Texas’s 34th Congressional District, which had traditionally been a Democratic stronghold, liberal pundits have smeared conservative Latinas. CNN said the conservative Hispanic women running for Congress were “not the ‘real deal,’” whereas the New York Times referred to the “Rise of the Far-Right Latina.”
