ABSTRACT
At the height of the 2012 U.S. Presidential election cycle, the nonprofit group known as the Commission of Presidential Debates announced its panel of moderators for the season’s events. All of them happened to be English-monolingual Anglo Whites. The U.S.-based Spanish language television network Univisión, recognizing that they had been effectively shut out by this decision, filed a request that an additional debate be held to focus on Hispanic-related issues. Under their proposal, the debate would be held in Spanish. The Commission denied the request, a move that prompted Univisión to host their own events – one night for each of the candidates, President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. The Spanish language events ended up being a ratings success for Univisión: 1.6 million viewers tuned in to watch Romney and 2.7 million to watch Obama. The entire spectacle – from the Commission’s decision to block the participation of a Spanish-language medium, to Univisión’s decision to host its own events in Spanish – was awash in language politics. Univisión’s further decision to hold its events in Miami, the U.S. city where Spanish is most closely linked with economic, sociocultural, and political success (Carter & Lynch 2015), is also hardly accidental.
