Oxnard Drive Attempts to Bolster Latinos’ Clout

A voter registration campaign aimed at increasing the political clout of Latinos is kicking off here today with a push to register 1,500 new residents before the November election.

But some say that target, set by a local arm of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, is too modest, especially in a county where nearly a quarter of the voting-age population is Latino.

“I’m not so sure that we are considered one of the priority areas for Southwest Voter--maybe we have been more of an afterthought,” said Hank Lacayo, president of the Latino advocacy group El Concilio del Condado de Ventura.

“I am glad they are here, but I wish they would have set a higher goal,” Lacayo said. “Maybe we need to make the point with them that we are an important part of the puzzle.”

Southwest organizers said they have not set the bar too low, and that 1,500 is a realistic goal in light of other groups’ attempting to do the same thing.

There is another Southwest Voter group organizing in Fillmore and Santa Paula.

“We see our effort as part of a larger goal to give Latinos a voice,” said Beatriz Garcia, the project coordinator. “We chose 1,500 because there are several other projects in the area that are targeting the same people, and we wanted a goal we would be able to reach.”

Garcia estimated there are between 20,000 and 40,000 Latinos in Ventura County who are eligible to vote but unregistered.

Antonio Gonzalez, president of Southwest Voter, said the aim in all 130 of the group’s project sites is to keep the registration campaigns small.

“In L.A. we have 20 different projects,” aiming to register about 40,000, he said. In 1996, the last time such an effort was conducted, about 33,000 were registered.

Nationwide, there are an estimated 13 million Latinos eligible to vote--nearly half of whom are not registered.

Drives like the one by Southwest Voter are part of a growing effort to tap the long-ignored Latino population.

With the combined efforts of El Concilio, Southwest Voter and the get-out-the-vote movements by the Democratic, Republican and Green parties, some activists estimated that 12,000 new voters will be registered in the county this year.

Assemblyman Tony Strickland (R-Thousand Oaks) said his office is registering about 500 new voters a week. Many of those people live in the Oxnard area, where the office’s efforts have been focused.

Both parties and the presidential candidates are courting Latino votes as never before.

“Without a doubt there are growing numbers of Latinos active in California and Ventura County,” Strickland said. “They are becoming the majority--a force to be reckoned with. We consider them very important to the Republican party.”

Get-out-the-vote efforts are not new to Oxnard.

Karl Lawson, a longtime board member of El Concilio, said it is shortsighted to scramble to build a voting base this close to an election. He said that, to be effective, the focus should be shifted to legal residents who have not bothered to become citizens because they see no incentive.

“The largest untapped pool of potential voters are people who have not yet become citizens, even though they could,” he said. In the area that includes Oxnard, El Rio, Santa Paula and Fillmore there are about 20,000 immigrants who have permanent resident status, he said.