My friend was in trouble. He was being questioned by the strictest nun in the school.

Sister Robert Mary asked him to give the Latin word for “speed” and its declension.

The correct answer is “Celeritas, celeritatis”.

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My friend didn’t know that. He kept coming up with variations that failed to achieve their goal.

After what seemed like 10 minutes, he finally did it. All that remained was to indicate the gender.

“Celeritas, celeritatis – masculine,” he said.

It is of course feminine, as any student of Latin knows.

But not him. We were expecting fireworks, double detentions or something.

Instead, something incredible happened.

Sister Robert Mary started laughing. For the rest of the semester, she let him sit in the back of the class and draw Japanese bombers and American fighters.

At the end of the semester, she gave him a red X for a grade.

Since we call him by his nickname: “X”

That’s the grade I would give the Democratic Party after its debacle with Latin languages.

Our Democratic friends seemed to think that their use of the term “LatinX” to describe Latinos would win them points with Hispanic voters.

Instead, exit polls showed that 45% of self-identified Hispanic voters voted for Donald Trump.

Many of these voters said they were insulted by efforts by liberal elites to impose the gender-neutral term “LatinX” on a language in which every noun has a gender.

“The wake-up system doesn’t work,” said Jose Gomez Rivera, a former State Department employee who taught at Rutgers-Newark but recently moved to Texas. “We hate “LatinX”. Spanish is a gender-based language. You can’t change that.

No, you can’t. Back when I was studying Latin and French in high school, I remember wondering why the creators of Latin languages ​​thought they had to impose a gender on every noun.

The Spanish word for “penis,” for example, is “verga,” which is feminine.

Do you want to change that? We would have to go back a few millennia.

As for me, when I go to Latin America, I am happy with the way things are going.

And they are not who my liberal friends think.

Consider the elections held earlier this year in one of my favorite Latin American countries, El Salvador.

I was there during the war years when, ironically, it was safe to travel.

But at the end of the war, young people returning from Los Angeles decided to create gangs modeled on Los Angeles. MS-13 gangs terrorized the country – until a right-winger was elected president in 2019.

Nayib Bukele went after gangs with tactics such as cordoning off neighborhoods where MS-13 collected “rent” from merchants and arresting anyone suspected of having gang ties.

They weren’t hard to find. Many had gang tattoos on their faces.

Civil liberties advocates opposed it, but El Salvador went from one of the most dangerous countries in the Americas to one of the safest, with a lower murder rate than any country in the world. exception of Canada.

Earlier this year, Bukele was returned to power with 83 percent of the vote.

So much for the myth that Latin Americans are naturally left-wing.

“You’re not going to get their vote by constantly pushing the woke agenda,” said Gomez Rivera, who lives near Austin. “In Texas, where I live, the blue zones are disappearing.”

Blue zones on the border are also shrinking, Rick Cavazos said. Cavazos is a retired Border Patrol agent who is the former mayor of the border town of Los Indios.

When I called him to discuss the recent Democratic debacle with the Hispanic vote, he cited the turnaround in Starr County, a border area with a 97 percent Hispanic population.

No Republican had won this county since 1896, but Trump wore it comfortably this year.

“There was a lot of chaos there during the Biden years,” Cavazos said. “Latinos also want law and order there. That’s why Starr County flipped.

And when it comes to immigration, many Texans resent the newcomers, he said.

“People say: ‘My loved ones had to wait; why are all these people jumping the line?’ ” said Cavazos.

They won’t be skipping lines much longer, he said.

“Morale is high” at the Border Patrol, he said. “I hear this from my former colleagues. They know what to expect.

What they expect is a crackdown that will be supported by the mandate Trump won in the election, Cavazos said. The Donald appointed his own immigration czar, Tom Homan, who has 30 years of experience in Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Cavazos said Homan would make it his first priority to coordinate with politicians who run sanctuary cities to ensure that inmates with criminal records are deported after their release.

Trump couldn’t do that in his first term.

But many Latino voters appear to have changed since then.

There must be a word for that.

But it certainly wouldn’t be a word you couldn’t pronounce in Spanish.