Photo courtesy of Univisión

I am so glad I didn't go to Miami for this :

Reporters who didn't speak Spanish were already anxious about the translation devices that didn't quite fit in our ears. (Porque soy de California, yo hablo un poquito Espanol.)

But 90 seconds before the forum began tonight, the Media Room had no sound - not in Spanish, English or French. Nada.

Spanish- and English-speaking reporters in the room erupted in a panic, sending University of Miami staff scrambling to try and fix the feed. What most reporters heard for the first 16 minutes of the debate was static - both from the closed television feed and from the translation device.

Even Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) seemed to have trouble, yanking the earpiece from his ear mid-way through his answer to a question on Iraq.

Notwithstanding the awe inspiring set and the hard hitting tonality of the questioning, I don't think that Univision did anything groundbreaking. On the contrary, by not allowing Dodd and Richardson to respond in Spanish, they pandered to the Democrats who still treat latinos as a political ghetto from where to get voting servants to work for their "mainstream" agendas.

Richardson complained, and with good reason, about not being able to speak in Spanish. Hillary, Obama, Edwards, they need to get over it. Spanish is the official second language of the United States, thanks in part to that little colony nobody ever mentions in these forums anyway, Puerto Rico. If they couldn't deal with it, then their muscling in the “English-only” requirement for the forum should be used against them at the voting booth.

As to the bilingual production in general, I am being nice by saying it was mediocre. The interpreters could barely do simultaneous translation. Having the interpreter's voice over the candidate was absolutely distracting, bordering on the ridiculous. And as Latina Bloguera pointed out in the podcast, there was no reason to choose an Argentinian to be Richardson's Spanish 'voice'. WTF was that about?!?!

Overall though, I take any opportunity I can get to look at Jorge Ramos, who's been rocking the silver fox look way before Anderson Cooper. Maria Elena Salinas was FLAWLESS and I absolutely looooved how she reiterated that both Obama and Hillary had voted to militarize the border and build that stupid wall; contributing to the anti-immigrant backlash that is sweeping the nation. I so need to get me more Salinas and Ramos on a daily basis.

LatinoPundit has the resumen de blogueros [1] over at his site. Los Bloggeros [2] has the podcast [3].

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