College commencement speeches typically include anecdotes from the speaker’s background and past experience. Sometimes the speeches even get political, such as when President Obama joked about Donald Trump’s proposed border wall in his speech at Rutgers University. But when a Univision anchor mentioned Trump and briefly spoke in Spanish to graduating Latino students at California State University at Fullerton, she was roundly booed.
According to the Washington Post, Salinas first addressed the entire CSU Fullerton graduating class without incident, saying some words in Spanish to the parents of the Latino graduates. Apparently, university officials had asked her to do this, since around 40 percent of the school is Latino.
Salinas, however, got a decidedly more hostile reaction when she addressed the College of Communications later in the day, getting boos from the crowd for what some say was her excessive focus on the Latino students in the audience and for bashing Donald Trump. The Washington Post has video of people booing after Salinas says this about Trump:
“… they blame us so much for so many things, that now they’re even blaming us, the media, for creating Donald Trump. Imagine that. “Isn’t that terrible? But we didn’t, right? Who did it? I don’t know. Who did it? But they’re to blame.”
Words like these prompted some to yell, “Get off the stage!” One of the students there, Denise De La Cruz, said that she saw everybody — at least in her row — “visibly upset” at what Salinas was doing.
Salinas has also gotten backlash on her Twitter page, with replies like these:
https://twitter.com/angelrealtor104/status/735480682529456128
https://twitter.com/Kacee50/status/735479720943308800
https://twitter.com/Jovisoul/status/735579805739933696
When Salinas herself replied to De La Cruz on Twitter, another student said it had everything to do with exclusion, rather than bigotry against Spanish speakers:
https://twitter.com/JakeHolzschuh/status/734570599465422848
Again, commencement speeches often address current events and political issues. Salinas’ wasn’t the first or the last to talk about Latinos or Donald Trump. This strong reaction could suggest how much tension has occurred around politics since Trump entered the president race. At the same time, it’s not like Obama doesn’t get his fair share of backlash, but his provocative speech about the current political climate got a decidedly warmer reception. Who knows what factors make it so that one speech gets booed and the other doesn’t?
(via Washington Post)