Expansion of Latino Voter Rolls Celebrated

Little notice was taken when William C. Velazquez started a voter registration drive in Texas 25 years ago to spur Mexican Americans into politics.

The impact of Latinos on elections at the time amounted to a ripple in a vast sea. But analysts now predict that 5.9 million Latinos will cast ballots in the 2000 presidential election, serving as key voters in several states. And their influence is only expected to grow.

The rising tide was celebrated Saturday aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach by a crowd of about 800 attending the silver anniversary conference of the now-powerful group started by Velazquez--the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.

Vice President Al Gore joined the mostly Latino politicians, business leaders and community activists as part of his campaign to win support from among California’s 2.1 million Latino voters.

Entering to the recorded brass and percussion of Puerto Rican pop singer Ricky Martin, Gore practiced his Spanish before the crowd, striking tones of unity with the country’s immigrant roots.

“Somos un nacion de inmigrantes, y con orgullo,” the vice president said. “We are a nation of immigrants, and with pride.”

Along with Texas Gov. George W. Bush--who declined an invitation to attend--Gore has been campaigning aggressively for the Latino vote. In a Times poll conducted last month, Gore was leading Bush among California Latinos, 54% to 37%.

Citing his support of immigrant rights, plans to improve preschool, elementary and secondary educational programs, and efforts to raise the minimum wage if elected, Gore anchored his speech on family values.

“Nosotros familias merecen lo mejor,” he said several times to a cheering crowd. “Our families deserve the best.”

Such attention is proof that “Latinos are right in the middle of the action this time around,” said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the voter project.

The San-Antonio based nonprofit group has launched the career of nearly every key Latino lawmaker in California, including Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and Rep. Xavier Becerra, both Los Angeles Democrats.

Southwest Voter also operates from Los Angeles, with sister organizations in Chicago, New York and Miami. At the conference, the group announced a $5 million voter registration drive in 23 states, to be conducted with other Latino voter organizations in 600 communities.

Besides California, “Latinos are very well positioned in Illinois, Ohio and Michigan,” Gonzalez said. “There are good concentrations in Washington and a few of the Rocky Mountain and desert states.”

Organizers of the drive seek to encourage Latino participation in the November 2000 election, hoping that chief Latino concerns such as education, health care access and employment will loom large in the presidential and local races.

“We are a one-trick pony” of grass-roots activism, Gonzalez said. “It’s what we do best. We mobilize Latino political potential, the result of which has been a significant increase in power that the community wields in terms of expressing itself, punishing politicians not advocating for Latino issues and electing those who do.”

With 7.1 million Latinos registered to vote in the country, organizers will work to enroll about 1.5 million more, Gonzalez said.

The hope is to add fuel to a civic fire that motivated once-dormant Latino voters in the mid-1990s, caused in part by anti-immigrant rhetoric used by some politicians. Sparked in part by the passage of California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, Latino immigrants became citizens at record rates in time for the 1996 presidential election, helping boost the Latino vote by 800,000 from four years earlier to 4.92 million.

Southwest Voter and other such organizations expect to be able to push the Latino vote beyond the 6 million mark, Gonzalez said.

The focus of the drive will be to inspire voters and candidates to cut into social and economic inequities faced by Latinos, despite their newfound political muscle and a surging middle class.

Several workshops at the conference critiqued the performance of some Latino local officials in regard to their effect on the lives of constituents.

“The point of our work has not been simply to get our people elected,” Gonzalez said. “The point is to generate meaningful public policy.

“It’s like you’re on this long marathon with your head down, just kicking up dust, until you look up 25 years later and say, ‘Geez, we’re here,’ ” with 5,000 elected Latino officials nationwide. “At some point, you have to say, ‘OK, what’s it for?’ ”

A report released Saturday by Southwest Voter’s research arm, the William C. Velazquez Institute, details the status of California Latinos in housing, education, employment, health and business.

Using data from various government, health and business institutions, the report gives a generally poor grade to Latino legislators working to make strides in those areas.

In every category, the report finds, Latinos lag behind other ethnic groups, with higher dropout rates, lower homeowner percentages, poorer access to health care and greater unemployment.

Whereas 80% of whites, African Americans and Asian Americans have health insurance, roughly two-thirds of Latinos do, the report says. While three-fourths of white high school students graduate, only half of Latino students receive diplomas. And whereas whites have a per capita income of nearly $22,000, Latinos average $10,700, falling behind blacks at $12,300.

At one panel, Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina expressed frustration with low standardized test scores and high dropout rates. “Our kids are getting dumbed up” by the system, she said.

Gonzalez said: “We need to measure ourselves by our ability to close such gaps. The point of power is to use it on behalf of the constituency’s interests.”

The extent to which Latino voters believe that their needs are not being met by legislators should not be taken lightly, warned Mike Madrid, a Republican political analyst.

Although Gore is now favored in state Latino polls, a self-described “compassionate conservative” like Bush, who is in good standing with Mexican Americans in his home state, could persuade voters here to think Republican, Madrid said.

If any Republican candidate can erase the anti-immigrant stigma against the party embodied by Proposition 187, it’s the fluently Spanish-speaking Bush, Madrid said.

That view, however, was not helped by Bush’s absence from Saturday’s conference, some said.

“The Republican Party in California has acted miserably in terms of doing honest outreach to Latinos,” said Fernando Oaxaca, a business consultant.

Bush took heat earlier this month for initially declining to attend a joint conference of minority journalism organizations in Seattle even though he was already in the city. After critics questioned his commitment to minority issues, the Texas governor showed up the next day for a 15-minute walk-through, refusing to answer reporters’ questions. That inspired even more criticism.

In the aftermath, Bush’s staff unsuccessfully tried to rearrange the governor’s schedule last week so he could attend the Southwest Voter conference, Gonzalez said. The initial invitation was turned down six months ago, he said.

“The door is always open,” Gonzalez said. Republican presidential candidates have all but ignored the state recently, he added.

The Republican Party, which boasts about 273,000 registered Latinos in California, is attempting to improve its historically cold relationship with the community, said Madrid, who has helped coordinate church and business-sponsored voter drives.

What leaders from both major parties are just realizing is that economic and political sophistication within the community “is finally hitting a point where your political identity is no longer identical to your ethnic identity,” he said.

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to define what ‘Latino’ means,” Madrid said. “Latinos are urban, suburban, rural, poor and wealthy people who have been here for only three weeks and for three generations.”

What that means, said Assemblyman Rod Pacheco (R-Riverside), is that the Latino vote will probably be up for grabs next year, as it should be.

“The larger topic,” he said during a panel discussion on Latino voting habits, “is that for us to succeed, we need to be at every level in every field. That’s how you avoid being taken for granted.”