Both Morales and Pablo Manriquez, who worked for a year and a half as the DNC’s Hispanic media director, described an atmosphere in which their pleas to invest in Latino engagement often were met with disinterest. Manriquez said he at times paid his own bus fare and slept on friends’ sofas to meet with Hispanic television and news executives in New York.
“There was only one other Hispanic in the entire third floor,” Manriquez said of his time at the DNC. “And when I did see one I had to speak to them in Spanish so people wouldn’t try to undercut us from doing our job.”
Both Morales and Manriquez left the DNC during the presidential campaign, leaving the committee for weeks without a Spanish speaker on its media staff…
[C]onfidence that Hispanics would recoil from the Republican nominee may have led to complacency when it came to traditional campaign tasks like canvassing, Spanish-language television ads and an aggressive media strategy.
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