Feet In 2 Worlds senior producer Jocelyn Gonzales wraps up her video series on first-generation voters with an interview with Andrea Moya, who was born in Puerto Rico in 1986 and moved to New York four years ago to attend college.

Moya, who is originally from Guaynabo, works in film development in New York. In the video, she explains the particular relationship Puerto Ricans have with U.S. politics –“a weird dichotomy,” she calls it–, since only those who live in one of the fifty states are allowed to vote in American elections.

While Andrea’s family in the islands is interested in the U.S. elections, they cannot participate. At the same time, she is not voting in Puerto Rico’s gubernatorial election, but she plans to cast a vote for Barack Obama Tuesday. This will be the second presidential election she has participated in.

Fighting to keep Florida red (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

Both presidential candidates spent time in Florida in the past couple of days, fighting hard for the battleground state’s coveted 27 electoral votes. Hispanics –especially those living in Central Florida– are considered an important voting population to achieving that goal. But in a troubling sign for John McCain, one of his key Hispanic supporters in Florida is apparently unhappy with how the campaign is being run.

“They have completely ignored the Hispanic vote” in the central region of the state, Bill Negron, a member of the McCain steering committee in that area, told correspondent Maribel Hastings of the ImpreMedia Spanish-language newspaper chain.

Negron expressed bewilderment over the way the Republican campaign has been conducted in central Florida. As we’ve said before, that part of the state is considered crucial because of its high numbers of swing voters. Hispanics in the area –mostly Puerto Ricans– tend to counterbalance the heavily conservative south Florida Latino voters, who are mainly Cuban American.

“People ask me where McCain’s people are, where McCain is,” Negron told Hastings. “And it’s not only the Hispanic vote, but the vote in general. I don’t know if they took it for granted, or it’s just that they don’t know what they are doing, or that they don’t have the funds. But there was no work with churches, nor with civic groups and organizations here.”

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Pelosi at the last presidential debate at Hofstra University (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

This week, in an interview with the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspaper chain, Barack Obama promised to begin working on immigration reform in the first year in the White House.

The new president – whether it’s Obama or McCain – will need to work with Congress on this tough issue. A few days ago, deep in an Associated Press interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, there was a worrying sign for advocates of immigration reform.

At the bottom of an Oct. 17 story about likely post-electoral Congressional action, came these lines about next year’s session:

Pelosi also said Congress would have to tackle the politically sticky job of overhauling immigration laws in the new Congress, after a bipartisan measure collapsed last year.

The estimated 12 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally “are part of the U.S. economy. We cannot send them all home, and we cannot send them all to jail, so we have to address it,” Pelosi said.

Any solution would have to be bipartisan, she said, so it may require sacrificing some of Democrats’ past priorities, such as giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

“Maybe there never is a path to citizenship if you came here illegally,” Pelosi said. “I would hope that there could be, but maybe there isn’t.”

That last comment has sent pro-immigration bloggers into a rage.

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"Obama asks for the Latino vote"

Senator Barack Obama appears to have launched a Hispanic version of his closing argument to voters. In an exclusive interview with the Spanish-language newspaper chain ImpreMedia, the Democratic candidate said he intends to “guarantee that [immigration reform] will not be used as a political football” and added that he was “committed” to putting together “a recipe” for immigration reform “starting in my first year” in the presidency.

In his chat with reporter Maribel Hastings of L.A. newspaper La Opinión, he made the disclaimer that if elected president he would have to deal with some more urgent issues at the start of his term. But Obama gave assurances that he is still committed to pushing forward immigration reform during his first year in office. [The interview was available only in Spanish on the chain’s website Tuesday: what follows is our translation back into English.]

The Democrat –who’s been warning his supporters against complacency despite his steady lead in the polls– also urged Hispanics to get out and vote. It’s becoming widely accepted that Obama will need Hispanic voters to put him over the top in some key states on the electoral map.

“I hope everyone understands what is at stake: if we’re going to try and make fundamental changes, comprehensive immigration reform, and a health care system that works for everyone, then we will have to see the Hispanic vote get out in record numbers,” he said. “In the battleground states, they can make all the difference in the world.”

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North Carolina is now considered a swing state, and the Obama campaign has been targeting Latinos there. But the state’s Latino voting population is still relatively small. Could Hispanic voters have an influence on the allocation of the state’s fifteen electoral votes? Feet in 2 Worlds interviewed Gregory B. Weeks, an associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, to talk about this.

North Carolina at Pollster.com on Tuesday Oct. 21

It seems these days political news junkies can’t get their eyes off the electoral map predictions at CNN, Real Clear Politics or Pollster.com: whenever you look away, another state becomes a swing state.

Take, for example, North Carolina, a once-solid red state that now seems to be turning blue. The three websites were calling it a tossup earlier this week — and The New York Times described it as “a raging battleground.” If Barack Obama indeed wins the Tar Heel state, he will be the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so since Southerner Jimmy Carter did it in 1976.

Like a number of other states that voted for President Bush in the last two elections, the Obama campaign has jumped at the opportunity to try to “steal” North Carolina from the Republican column. Last weekend, Barack Obama campaigned in Fayeteville on his sixth visit to the state since the primaries, according to the Times. (John McCain was in Concord, near Charlotte, trying to defend Republican turf.) On Thursday, Obama’s running mate Joe Biden will make three stops in the state: Charlotte, Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, and Meredith College in Raleigh.

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Maybe not unprecedented like the Chicago Tribune‘s nor unexpected like Colin Powell‘s, but there were two other important endorsements for Barack Obama in the last few days.

Los Angeles’ La Opinión and New York’s El Diario/La Prensa, two of the nation’s oldest Spanish-language dailies, made public their endorsements of the Democratic candidate on Friday.

Both newspapers are owned by ImpreMedia which bills itself as, “The No. 1 Hispanic News and Information Company in the U.S. in Online and Print.” [In the interest of full disclosure, Feet in Two Worlds has worked with editors and reporters at both papers.] The two dailies carry considerable weight in the Hispanic communities in Los Angeles and New York, and beyond.

El Diario ran its endorsement on the cover, under the headline: “Necessary Change. A vote for Obama.” [The full text is available in Spanish and English.]

“Our country is perched on the edge of a cliff,” the newspaper said. “We are staring down a growing economic crisis.”

It added the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have “no end in sight,” and in the U.S., families have suffered from “stagnant wages, and the rising costs of everything from gasoline to food to health care.

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