While First Lady Jill Biden’s “breakfast taco” debacle from Monday has shined a very unflattering spotlight on the Democratic party’s growing inability to connect with average Hispanic Americans, an opinion piece published at CNN that was critical of GOP Latinas is also raising some eyebrows.

Attorney Raul A. Reyes, an NBC Latino contributor who writes opinion columns for CNN and who is also on the board of contributors for USA Today, penned a piece for CNN Tuesday in which he declared that conservative Latina women like newly elected Texas Congresswoman Mayra Flores are “not the real deal” because their views allegedly are not “an authentic reflection of Latino voters”:

Conservatives are heralding them as “real deal” Republican candidates. They are seen as proof that the GOP can win over Latino voters. They are three Latinas from South Texas: Mayra Flores, who won a special election to represent part of the Gulf Coast, and Monica De La Cruz and Cassy Garcia, who are in congressional races in districts along the Mexican border.

[…]

Flores made history as the first Mexican-born woman to be elected to Congress. These women have drawn national attention for seeming to shatter the myth that Latinos generally vote Democratic. As Garcia recently told The New York Times, “The red wave is here.”

But the rise of Flores, De La Cruz and Garcia deserves to be seen in context. While these Latinas may be having a moment in the spotlight, they hold views outside the Latino mainstream. Their current prominence is more of a publicity coup for the GOP than an authentic reflection of Latino voters.

Reyes then proclaimed that Flores, De La Cruz and Garcia were staunchly conservative on issues like abortion, gun control, and immigration before trying to make the case that “most Latinos” think otherwise according to select polls, which in his view meant that the “red wave” among Hispanics was a GOP-generated myth.

In a tweet posted in response to Reyes’ argument, Flores quipped that maybe she wasn’t “the right type of taco”:

As per CNN: I'm not the real deal

Maybe I'm not the right type of taco 😅 pic.twitter.com/ORfN9BKtrb

— Mayra Flores (@MayraFlores2022) July 12, 2022

Just last week, the New York Times also hit out at Flores, De La Cruz, and Garcia, all of who the paper called members of the “far-right,” which is media speak for “any member of a minority group who does not march lockstep with Democrat party dogma.”

Flores told Fox News in a statement after the NY Times hit piece was published that she’s used to these kinds of media attacks and that she would not let them deter her from holding Democrat politicos who have failed “my people” to account:

“I am proud of my culture and my beautiful family,” Flores, De La Cruz and Garcia as examples of ” told Fox News Digital in a text. “I was born in Burgos, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and raised with strong Conservative values to always put God and Family first. I have received only hate from the liberal media and constantly [been] told by the left to go back to Mexico. They don’t support us immigrants, they only use us for political power and don’t care about our well-being. I am here now and I won’t allow them to continue taking advantage of my people.”

In my view, what Reyes seems to not get (whether intentionally or not) is that no one is arguing that “most” Hispanic voters feel one way or another about abortion, gun control, and immigration. Instead, the argument has been that Hispanic voters are not monolithic like Democrats and their allies in the press have made them out to be over the years.

Like all groups, they have differing ideas on what the priorities of our elected officials should be, and that is playing out in certain parts of the country like Florida, where Hispanic voters are increasingly abandoning Democrats in droves thanks in large part to their embrace of socialism, the dangers of which Cuban Americans in South Florida, in particular, understand all too well.

We’ve also seen it in the southern part of Texas, where Democrats prioritizing so-called climate change and obsessing over “woke” dogma instead of jobs and the economy has turned off a growing number of Hispanic voters.

No, there’s not a Hispanic voter exodus everywhere in this country, but even in blue states like California, they are becoming more and more dissatisfied with what Democrats have to offer as evidenced by the 2021 recall election to replace Gavin Newsom. Though unsuccessful, that election, too, sent warning signs to Democrats that they better stop assuming they’ll always have Latino voters in their pockets.

Obviously, Democrats like Reyes haven’t listened.

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