Brewing Boycotts

Here's the current column Ruben Navarrete wrote for the current issue of Hispanic Trends:

The immigration debate has me rethinking my view on boycotts and other forms of economic pressure.
What changed my mind? Some ticked off Hispanics and one terrified beer company.
I liken boycotts to a temper tantrum. Whether it’s Southern Baptists calling on their flock to forgo Disney products, or the United Farm Workers union asking supporters not to buy grapes, or, more recently, a top Vatican official asking that Christians boycott the film, The Da Vinci Code, I’m not sympathetic to those who resort to economic blackmail to get their way.
But now, I’m having second thoughts. Boycotts can be an effective weapon – if used in self-defense. As the nation’s mood on immigration gets ugly, many Hispanics – especially Mexicans and Mexican-Americans – feel put off and picked on. Why wouldn’t they? What with border vigilantes burning the Mexican flag, an Internet video game letting players shoot Mexicans crossing the border, Hispanic officials in California receiving death threats, a Mexican restaurant near San Diego being firebombed, and a 17-year-old Hispanic youth in Houston being beaten and sodomized by two white boys who yelled racial slurs.
Confronted with the vile and the vicious, Hispanics have the right to defend themselves. They can organize and protest and vote. But there’s also the big gun in their arsenal – about $700 million in annual spending power, a figure expected to swell to $1 trillion by 2010.
Besides, the nation’s 40 million Hispanics are fiercely brand loyal. If you get their attention and deliver a quality product, Hispanics won’t just beat a path to your door. They’ll bust down the door, plop down in the living room, open up their wallets, and stay for decades. Likewise, if they get a bad taste in their mouth about you, your company or product, you could lose millions, perhaps billions, of dollars for much of the foreseeable future.
Which brings us back to the terrified beer company. Miller Brewing Co. is based in Wisconsin and that just happens to be the home state of Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. The Wisconsin lawmaker is also the author of HR 4437, an enforcement-heavy immigration bill that has been criticized by Hispanic organizations and immigrants rights groups as excessively punitive. The bill makes unauthorized presence in the United States a felony. Over the years, Sensenbrenner has received political contributions from - you guessed it - Miller Brewing Co.
A group of Hispanic activists in Chicago connected the dots and demanded a meeting with Miller executives, where the activists informed the company that they were prepared to launch a national boycott of their product to protest the company’s support of Sensenbrenner.
You see – and this is hardly a secret - Hispanics drink a lot of beer. In fact, marketing experts say Hispanics drink more beer per capita than other racial and ethnic groups. It seems that 50 percent of the beer consumed in the U.S. comes from just nine states - including California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Illinois, and New York. They’re the same nine states with the highest concentration of Hispanics.
So what would happen if Hispanics suddenly got the word to stop buying Miller beer?
Something like that happened before. A generation ago, the most popular beer for Hispanic community was Coors Beer. Thanks to a series of public relations blunders in the 1970’s, and the zeal with which the Coors family lent its support to a rightwing political agenda in the 1980’s, Hispanics lost their taste for the Colorado brew.
Anheuser-Busch Inc. rushed to fill the void, and gained an advantage in market share that it seems determined to never surrender. The St. Louis-based beer company recently created a marketing division aimed at Hispanics and increased its 2006 spending on advertising in Hispanic media to more than $60 million. Today, the two top brands of beer for Hispanics are Budweiser and Bud Light, both produced by Anheuser-Busch.
As it turns out, Miller Brewing Co. has also made a substantial investment in pursuit of the Hispanic market, inking a $100 million, three-year ad package with a well-known Spanish-language television company. So when the activists threatened to boycott, it got Miller’s attention. The brewery agreed to run newspaper ads denouncing the Sensenbrenner bill and to even help the group of activists campaign against the measure in Washington.
Soon thereafter, Miller Brewing Co. put out a one-page ad in a Spanish-language newspaper announcing its opposition to HR 4437, which it described as “anti-immigration legislation.” In a statement, the company insisted that it had a history of supporting Hispanic organizations and pledged to “continue to support the Hispanic community and the rights of immigrants.”
Miller executives deny that they caved into the threat of a boycott by Hispanics. We may never know. It’s a question worth thinking about – over a beer.

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Ruben Navarrette is a member of the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group and a frequent contributor to National Public Radio.