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Luis Orlando Gallardo Rivera is the head of an urban development agency in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico. He will be spending the next week in Orange County to attend a Fair Housing Policy Conference hosted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development at the Anaheim Convention Center.

Luis is a member of the left wing Popular Democratic Party (PPD) in Puerto Rico, and he maintains a personal blog at: http://www.barriomulas.com/blog/

In a desperate search for news articles on Orange County politics, I came across an interesting story in the Los Angeles Times concerning the rival campaigns of Patricia Bates and Cathryn DeYoung, both of whom live in the same pricey neighborhood and are fighting for the same supervisor seat. [L.A. Times]

Bates went on to win 44.6% while DeYoung 37.3% of the popular vote in the first round. (If you could even call it “popular” considering that voter turn out was only 27.6%.)

DeYoung has spent $2 million of her own dollars for the Supervisor campaign, a ridiculous amount considering that only 33,523 people voted for her. The rest of the vote was divided among two candidates who while are obviously tilted a little more to the left, seem too cautious to label themselves as “liberals,” “democrats,” or “progressive.”

Bates in her ballot statement (yet another neat feature) considers herself a “conservative” while DeYoung promises to “fight illegal immigration.” DeYoung also wishes to improve traffic (i.e. getting more Mexicans to stop driving and start using the public transportation so that the rest can speed down their 8-lane avenues with more efficiency.

While neither really flaunts a political party flag, I get the impression that both are similarly conservative. The LA Times labels them as former “political friends.”

I ask myself why exactly these people wish to occupy such a position. I highly doubt that it pays more than $2 million a year. This seems not to be a battle of values and ideology but of money and power.

I wonder how much of that 27.6% of the voter turn out was Latino.

With voter participation in Mexico a high 64% and that from El Salvador 67% it is obvious that the heavy politicized culture of Latinos fails to translate when migration takes place. These people obviously have no sense of association with their newly found homes. They are economic migrants interested in a quick buck, not the “American Dream” so visible in Orange County.