Voting Project Uses Carnivals in Drive to Register Latinos

Step right up, folks, to the house of smoke and mirrors, the swirl of spotlights, the silver-tongued hucksters and the spinning rides going nowhere fast.

Yes, the carnival is a great introduction to politics, according to leaders of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Fund.

The group is staging carnivals in working-class neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles in its campaign to register 20,000 new Latino voters for the mayoral election next spring.

So far, the effort has been frustrating, said Jose Sanchez, a high school junior, who spent hours trolling for new voters at a Boyle Heights carnival sponsored by the group.

“People around here don’t care,” he said. “They react like I’m trying to sell them something.”

Southwest Voter President Antonio Gonzalez knows the challenge. His group also plans to open 12 storefront offices as part of a $200,000 effort to steer the mayoral race toward such concerns as crime and affordable housing.

About 290,000 Latinos are now registered to vote in Los Angeles, nearly one-fifth of the city’s electorate. Southwest Voter hopes to help raise that proportion to 25%. In the 1997 mayoral election, Latinos accounted for 15% of the vote.

Carnivals are the sort of inexpensive entertainment that attracts young parents and teenagers, the two groups most likely to register for the first time, Gonzalez said. The chore in predominantly immigrant neighborhoods, he said, is finding people who qualify.

“We have a large noncitizen population in the city that makes the effort to find new voters like searching for a needle in a haystack,” he said.

Few this month know that better than Sanchez. Since a Salesian High School civics lesson inspired him to join the registration effort, the 17-year-old boy has faced more rejection than a gangly teenager can handle.

During one recent weekend, he recruited 75 new voters after spending 15 hours wandering among hundreds attending the carnival at Cesar Chavez Boulevard and Soto Street.

The eldest child of Mexican immigrants, Sanchez feels a sense of civic urgency. Although he is unsure of who is running for mayor, he can’t wait to turn 18 in March so he too can vote.

“Things are messed up in my neighborhood,” he said. “The streets are always dirty, and the cops never come around when you call them.”

With a blind father and a mother struggling with advanced diabetes, Sanchez has little patience for the apathetic nonvoter.

“It’s their loss,” he said, walking away from yet another rejection.

His eyes lit up, however, when he came across Irene Hernandez, 20. She agreed to register because, she said, the presidential election taught her “every vote really does count.”

Next was Refugio Guerrero, 34, who recently became a U.S. citizen and was happy to register.

But, as he filled out his form, the Ventura resident who was visiting family in Boyle Heights later confessed: “I probably won’t vote in the next election.”

Sanchez walked away and sat at an empty booth set up by Southwest Voter, watching the spinning, dangling feet of riders enjoying a ride called “The Yo-Yo.”

“I’ve been on that thing about 30 times this weekend,” he said.