Gains Still Small : Latinos Aim for Progress via Politics

In his 60 years, Roy Sanchez has lived two lives in this dusty little South Texas town.

His parents reared him and 13 other children in a house so crowded, he says, that “we lay on the floor like alligators.” The streets were unpaved and the sidewalks nonexistent. “When it came to drainage, good streets and sewers, they were all in the Anglo areas on the affluent side of town,” he says. “This place used to flood like hell.”

Now Sanchez is the second-term mayor of this city of 4,400, a majority of them Latino. He proudly shows off the new sidewalks and retaining walls in the Mexican-American side of town.

“Things have changed around,” he says. “We just wanted some say-so. They used to throw a bone at us. Now when I pick up the phone and say, ‘Mayor Sanchez calling,’ they listen.”

Local Successes

Latinos nationwide are hanging their hopes on politics as a similar force for progress. Electoral successes like Sanchez’s have been repeated locally in areas with large Latino populations--most notably San Antonio, Miami and Denver, which also have Latino mayors.

The nation’s 18 million Latinos make up 7.4% of the total U.S. population. And 3,202 of them hold elected office, double the number 10 years ago, said the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

Even in the 1988 presidential race, Latinos could make a difference. Six million Latinos live in California, 4 million in Texas and 2 million in New York. Most of the remainder live in New Mexico, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Arizona and Colorado. Those states have 193 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

Since the Cenus Bureau includes illegal aliens in its count of ethnic groups, an undetermined number of Latinos would not be eligible to vote. However, with the passage of the immigration overhaul legislation this year, growing numbers of immigrants are expected to seek amnesty and add to Latino voting clout.

Blacks Largest Minority

Still, dreams that Latinos will grow into a national political force remain unrealized so far. Outside the nine states where 88% of the nation’s Latinos live, they have little political muscle. The explosive growth in the Latino population in the 1970s is showing signs of leveling off, and Latinos are not about to overtake blacks, who make up 12%, as the nation’s largest minority.

Beyond purely mathematical considerations are several other daunting obstacles to Latino political power at the national level:

--Crushing poverty. “The very poor are so preoccupied with the struggle to survive that they have neither the interest nor the energy to get involved politically,” said Robert Brischetto, executive director for the Southwest Voter Research Institute in San Antonio.

--Internal divisions. The three major Latino groups--Mexican-American, Puerto Rican and Cuban-American--agree on some issues, such as bilingual education, but often pursue vastly differing political agendas.

--Foreign roots. Many Latinos in the United States remain focused on political issues in their countries of origin--Cuban expatriates concentrate on the overthrow of Fidel Castro, for example--rather than in their new land.

--Language barrier. More than half of all Latino adults are functionally illiterate in English, the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families says, contrasted with 44% for blacks and 16% for whites.

--Voter participation. Latinos vote in smaller percentages than Anglos and blacks, partly because of the same outright discrimination that blacks have faced but for other reasons as well, including a perception that politics is “dirty.”

Grass-Roots Efforts

Nationally, Latinos will constitute a large interest group for the foreseeable future, growing in influence but simply one among many. So, like other immigrant groups and minorities before them, they are focusing on efforts to build grass-roots political power.

Robert Menendez, the first Cuban-American mayor of Union City, N.J., says Latinos are just beginning a three-step journey.

“The first step is believing you can beat City Hall,” Menendez said. “The second step is, when you beat City Hall, believing the system works for you.” The third step, he said, involves “integrating with other Hispanic groups” and convincing Anglos and blacks “that you can represent them” fairly.

Al Luna, a state representative from San Antonio, is one of those who have beaten City Hall. “We got in,” he said, “and now the question is what are we going to do. To be respected, you have to show you can win some battles.”

The local Latino politician who is best known nationally for storming City Hall is Henry G. Cisneros, the 40-year-old mayor of San Antonio who was first elected in 1981 and reelected handily every two years since then. He is often referred to as a “successful model of ethnicity” because his heritage appeals to Latinos while his assimilation--his polished, unaccented English, his Harvard education--pacifies Anglos.

‘Can Change Attitudes’

“We need more Cisneroses,” said Ricardo Romo, associate professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin. “If they don’t fix a single pothole, they can change attitudes.”

Nationally the 3,202 Latinos who hold elected office are only half as many as the 6,424 elected black officials. They represent only about 0.5% of all officeholders. Among them are 14 members of the U.S. House of Representatives but no senators. There has never been a Latino in the President’s Cabinet or on the Supreme Court.

“We’re just starting to show up on the radar scope,” said Harry Pachon, executive director of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. “The coming into power has been a long process.”

That process began in earnest among Mexican-Americans after World War II, as servicemen who had been heroes overseas returned home to second-class citizenship, to segregated bathrooms marked “hombres,” unable to buy houses or attend schools in Anglo neighborhoods.

That “proved to be a tremendous acculturating and consciousness-raising experience,” said Mario T. Garcia, professor of history and Chicano studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dissatisfaction with their treatment, he said, led Latinos “to try to change things through the political process.”

Vigorous Efforts

In their 1985 book, “Hispanics in the United States,” Joan Moore and Harry Pachon note that in the late 1940s groups such as the American GI Forum and Community Service Organization launched vigorous efforts, including voter registration, lobbying and investigations of discrimination, focusing mainly on Mexican-Americans in California and Texas.

Puerto Ricans in New York had formed clubs as early as the 1920s and 1930s that “tended to mix social and political objectives,” Moore and Pachon found. Cubans who poured into South Florida after Castro seized power in 1959 created organizations that were preoccupied with overthrowing Castro’s Communist government.

No. 1 Political Issue

Today many Cubans still dream of deposing Castro, whereas for numerous Puerto Ricans the question of statehood is the No. 1 political issue. Similarly, many of the Mexicans who came to this country have chosen not to seek U.S. citizenship in the belief that they will one day go home.

Strategy Meetings

Here in Floresville, however, Sanchez, whose grandfather crossed the border to Texas, has both feet planted squarely in the United States. A longtime supervisor at Kelly Air Force Base outside San Antonio, he had been a school board member for 17 years when he and other Latinos decided in 1983 that it was time for a Mexican-American to run City Hall. They began holding strategy meetings in El Mesias United Methodist Church.

Led by Andrew Hernandez, the church pastor, activists organized a massive registration and get-out-the-vote campaign. On April 7, 1984, Sanchez defeated the incumbent Anglo businessman, 817 to 630, to become the town’s first Latino mayor. Sanchez won again last year, and three of the four council members are now Latino.

During a walk through Floresville, hometown of former Gov. John B. Connally and the peanut capital of Texas, Sanchez recalled that after his first election, “you could see hate in the faces” of the Anglos. But now several Anglos approached him to chat amiably. “They got over the hurt,” Sanchez said, “whether it’s pretending or not.”

Percentages of Groups

Mexican-Americans like Sanchez represent 61% of the nation’s Latinos, the Census Bureau says. Puerto Ricans are 15% and Cubans 6%. The fast-growing “other” category, including Central and South Americans, has grown to 18% of the Latino population.

Among the three major groups, Cuban-Americans are the most conservative, Puerto Ricans are the poorest and Mexican-Americans are the most economically diverse. Where two or three of the groups are well-represented in the population, as in Chicago, the rule is peaceful coexistence rather than vigorous cooperation.

That not only dilutes Latino political power, but also makes it difficult for politicians to solicit the support of Latinos as a homogenous group. That in turn helps to contribute to low Latino voter turnout. The Census Bureau estimates that in the 1986 congressional elections 36% of eligible Latinos voted, contrasted with 43% of blacks and 47% of whites.

Demography also militates against Latino political activity. Federal researchers say 29% of Latinos were officially poor in 1985, almost triple the 11% rate for Anglos.

Jobless Rate

The Latino unemployment rate runs about 50% higher than that for whites, although it is substantially lower than the black jobless rate. Of employed Latinos, 32% are in jobs paying between $5,000 and $15,000 a year, compared to 31% for blacks and 17% for whites.

By most educational measures, Latinos fare no better than blacks. Fewer than half, for example, graduate from high school.

“Economics and education are the best predictors of individual political participation,” said Jeffrey R. Henig, associate dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at George Washington University. Candidates do not try to appeal to the poor and the uneducated, who in turn tend not to vote; that only reinforces the candidates’ choice to ignore that segment of the electorate.

University of Chicago political scientist Gary Orfield said all this adds up to a “first-class, five-alarm crisis that nobody is paying attention to. You’re looking at a community in a fundamental crisis.”

Local Effort

The answer, says William C. Velasquez, director of the San Antonio-based Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, starts with political involvement at the local level. During a recent speech in San Antonio to a women’s group called Hispanas Unidas, he said: “If you want the streets paved and if you want better schools, you better get a Mexican in office.”

Latinos, he said in an interview, “measure how well the American democracy is working by the local government. If they can’t win at the local level, they opt out.”

Velasquez has arguably done more than anyone else during the last several years to promote the election of Latinos through voter registration drives and court challenges to voting rights violations.

In the last seven years, he said, his group has spent $500,000 on suits against cities in which council and school board members are elected citywide rather than from districts. Such schemes, he says, are designed by cities’ Anglo power structures to prevent the election of Latinos from voting districts in their neighborhoods.

More Officeholders

Velasquez’s organization has concentrated its legal crusade on Texas, New Mexico and Colorado and has scored notable successes especially in Texas, where, the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials says, the number of Latino officeholders grew from 565 in 1973 to 1,466 last year.

Velasquez is now training his sights on California, where Latinos last year held only 450 offices, up from 231 in 1973. Through the 1988 elections, he plans to conduct a series of voter registration campaigns and challenges to allegedly discriminatory local election practices.

Barbara Milman, a consultant to a California Assembly committee, said that of the state’s 1,028 school districts, all but 41 have at-large elections, in which board members are elected citywide. The result: In a state with a 23% Latino population, only 6% of the state’s school board members are Latino.

Where at-large systems have been replaced with local election districts, Milman said, voter turnout among minorities has increased “because people feel there’s a reason to vote.”

Even in cities with election districts, gerrymandering can dilute Latino voting power.

Los Angeles Case

Los Angeles, despite its nearly one-third Latino population, had only one Latino, Richard Alatorre, on its 15-member City Council until last February, when Gloria Molina won a special election. Her victory came only after the city redrew district lines under pressure from the Justice Department, which in 1985 filed a suit charging that the city’s election districts intentionally diluted Latino voting power.

“We gave the City Council several chances to be fair,” said Linda Wong of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a plaintiff in the suit. “But the (Anglo) power structure felt threatened by the changes that would occur.”

Around the country, organizations similar to Velasquez’s are engaged in voter registration and education efforts in areas with large numbers of Latinos.

In Union, N.J., Luis Caban of the National Puerto Rican/Hispanic Voter Participation Project, said his group has identified 18 municipalities in the Northeast with at-large governments in which Latinos could be elected from single-member districts.

Bridging Gap

And, in Columbus, Ohio, Juan Andrade Jr. of the Midwest Voter Registration Education Project said his organization sets up “eyeball-to-eyeball dialogue” throughout the Middle West between officeholders and citizens. He said this helps to bridge the gap between government and voters, inspiring more political participation.

“Otherwise,” said Andrade, “we’re relegated to just having these officials walk through our neighborhoods during election time. We get to see them, touch them and smell them, but that’s not enough.”

Cesar A. Batalla, vice president of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights in Bridgeport, Conn., said: “We are on the threshold of really moving beyond having other people set agendas for us. Too long we’ve been called upon in November without having been in the inner circle preparing the agenda.”

Latinos nationwide ridicule the “blue eyes” who breeze into town thinking they can get Latino votes by merely putting on a sombrero and eating refried beans at a local restaurant. Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-La Puente), chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, recalled recently asking one Democratic presidential candidate if he would promise to name a Latino to his Cabinet. Torres declined to identify the candidate, but sources said it was Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.)

‘Going to Change’

“He hedged and said he didn’t want to make that kind of commitment so early,” Torres said. He called the response an indicator that Anglos view Latinos as “a community that really hasn’t shown it can make a difference. Now that’s slowly going to change.”

Arnoldo Torres, a California political consultant specializing in Latino affairs, said: “All candidates today view American society as white, black and women. No candidate today has a vision of America that includes Hispanics.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson makes the “most overt appeal,” Torres said, but he makes the mistake of viewing all Latinos as liberals when in fact many “don’t like blacks because of the perception that affirmative action programs benefit blacks but not Latinos.”

Spokesmen for both major political parties say they will court the Latino vote in 1988--but only to a point.

“We cannot appear to be a captive to any group,” said Terry Michael, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.

“Ours is not an effort to promise a piece of candy to each and every special interest,” said Robert Schmermund, spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

Acceptance Held Lacking

Joseph Trevino, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, retorted: “Neither party can claim it has fully accepted blacks and Hispanics into the party.”

At the presidential level, voting patterns have given politicians of both parties good reason to take the Latino vote for granted. Democrats have been able to count on the Mexican-American and Puerto Rican vote, and Cuban-Americans have typically served up their vote to the Republicans.

In largely Cuban voting areas in 1984, exit polls showed that 70% to 80% of Latinos in Florida and 87% in Union City, N.J., voted for President Reagan. In heavily Mexican-American areas of Texas, the Latino vote went about 75% for Democrat Walter F. Mondale. But Brischetto said Mexican-Americans between 18 and 25 are only half as likely to identify themselves as solidly Democratic as are their older relatives.

Many Latinos foresee huge political gains by the year 2000 because they expect to become the nation’s largest minority by then.

“The demographics are on our side,” said Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza. Thanks to high birthrates and rapid immigration--combined with an improved count by the Census Bureau--the Latino population grew by an extraordinary 61% between 1970 and 1980, contrasted with 18% for blacks and 6% for whites.

‘Spreading All Over’

And Trevino likened Latinos to cultures growing in “a little petri dish. We’re spreading all over the United States.” He predicted that there will be two Latino senators and two Cabinet members by 1996.

But more dispassionate analysts doubt that Latinos will overtake blacks any time soon. In 1986 they were outnumbered by blacks, 29 million to 18 million, and they almost surely cannot sustain for long the growth rate of the 1970s. Predictions to the contrary, said Frank D. Bean, director of the population research center at the University of Texas, are “sensationalistic.”

Bean said birthrates for immigrant groups are historically highest when the groups are new to the United States and tail off with subsequent generations. And last year’s immigration law, he said, will decrease the flow of illegal immigrants.

More Blacks

Gregory Spencer, a Census Bureau demographer, said his highest-growth projection for Latinos puts their number in the year 2000 at about 30 million, still substantially below the 36-million estimate for the black population by the turn of the century.

Latinos inevitably are compared with blacks--their poverty, their fears of being taken for granted by the Democratic Party, their dilemma over whether to accentuate their ethnicity or try to integrate into the larger society. Many Latinos could pass for Anglo.

“Sometimes I say why not be a part of the big picture,” said Rita Elizondo-Thomson, director of the Washington office of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. “But they (Anglos) don’t listen to us. We really must consolidate our own power and speak as one.”

Some Latinos and blacks have been trying for years to combine the power of the two groups into a “black-brown coalition.” M. Carl Holman, president of the Washington-based Urban Coalition, has been a principal in the effort, but he claims success only in a “great number of efforts around specific issues.”

Going Separate Ways

For the most part, however, blacks and Latinos go their separate ways, as they have in Dade County, Fla., over county job appointments. Holman blames the “divide-and-conquer” tactics of white conservatives.

Coalitions sometimes materialize in cities where the two groups, along with liberal white Democrats, hold the balance of power. That happened this year in Denver and Chicago, where two incumbent mayors, Federico Pena, a Mexican-American, and Harold Washington, a black, won reelection. Holman said several nationally known Latinos rallied Chicago voters for Washington.

Torres, the political consultant, is trying to organize a “summit with blacks” to discuss national common concerns such as education, crime, housing and health care. “We have the potential to be awesome,” Torres said.

On the local front, Sanchez is more concerned with “chuckholes and drainage.” Not that he doesn’t think big. “I’ve always been a dreamer,” he said. “I dream of being President, and at least I became mayor.”

LATINOS’ POLITICAL PRESENCE

The nine most heavily Latino states control 193 of the 270

electoral votes needed to win a presidential election.

Latino Percent of Electoral State population* population votes California 6,100,000 23% 47 Arizona 493,000 15 7 New Mexico 548,000 38 5 Colorado 310,000 10 8 Texas 4,100,000 25 29 Illinois 731,000 6 24 Florida 1,100,000 10 21 New Jersey 609,000 8 16 New York 2,100,000 12 36

Overall, Latinos number 18,300,00, making up 7% of the U.S. population. * 1986 figures

Source: Census Bureau