Latino Voters Can’t Be Treated as a Bloc

Over a plate of barbecued ribs, chicken sausages and red beans at a family reunion in Rosemead last month, Carlos Cabrera, a Republican turned libertarian, is tangling with his brother Jorge, a strident Democrat.

Carlos thinks gubernatorial hopeful Cruz Bustamante is a revolutionary based on his membership in a leftist student group in the 1970s. Jorge, a former member of that organization himself, scoffs at the suggestion.

At the same table, another Cabrera sibling, Patricia Wright, a Republican from Texas, takes offense at her sister Alicia’s criticism of President Bush and his handling of the war in Iraq.

“This country is too gross,” said Alicia Ayerbe, a 1960s radical.

“That hurts,” Patricia replied, dismayed by what she saw as her sister’s lack of patriotism.

Meet the Cabreras.

They are three brothers and four sisters, all born in Mexico. Though their family arrived in the United States in 1958 and they all grew up under the same roof in East Los Angeles, it is difficult to find much common thread among their political views.

So it is, to some degree, with Latino voters in general -- despite a popular perception of them as a monolithic voting bloc. Though 70% or so of Latino voters routinely support Democrats, their allegiance is weaker than that of the party’s most reliable supporters: blacks and Jews.

With a Latino population growing so rapidly that it has the potential to sway elections, political strategists in the recall election and beyond face two important questions:

How much of the Latino vote is up for grabs?

And more fundamentally, how many Latinos will vote?

The conventional wisdom has been that Latinos are staunch Democrats and will continue to swell the party ranks. In the 1990s, Republicans reinforced that view by supporting ballot measures that many perceived as anti-immigrant.

Republican strategists, though, think they see an opening -- nationally and even in GOP-wary California. As Latino voters move up the economic ladder, these strategists reason, old concerns will likely be overtaken by the desire for upward mobility, a strong Republican theme.

Because of the star power of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the leading Republican, and widespread dismay with Gov. Gray Davis, the recall election result could set “a high-water mark for what Republicans can hope to achieve in California” in the foreseeable future, said Daron Shaw, a political scientist at the University of Texas who consulted for the Bush presidential campaign in 2000.

The latest Times survey suggests he may be right: Of likely Latino voters, about half support the effort to oust Davis, a Democrat.

And although on the second half of the ballot, 54% back Democrat Bustamante, 37% said they plan to vote for one of the top two Republican candidates, Schwarzenegger and Tom McClintock.

That is a greater share of the Latino vote than any Republican has won in California since 1988.

Democrats say the numbers represent nothing more than a peculiar moment in history.

But they have another worry: Latinos tend to vote in relatively low numbers. With less than a week until Tuesday’s election, polls suggest that Bustamante has no chance of winning without a high Latino turnout.

“If Latinos don’t come out and vote, I will no longer defend my community,” said Art Torres, the veteran Latino politician who chairs the Democratic Party in California. “Shame on them for not getting off their sofas and going to the polls.”

American Experience

The story of the Cabreras offers one view of the complexity of Latino voters. Their U.S. experiences, rather than their Mexican roots, seem to define how they vote, or whether they vote at all.

In the late 1950s, their father, who had been in California working as a printer, moved his wife and children from their home in Leon to Tijuana. There they waited for visas and worried about how they would fare in the United States. One sister, Connie Soto, remembers Carlos shielding her from camera-toting Americans, telling her, “Get down, the tourists are taking our pictures. They are going to make fun of us when they get back.”

But after the family moved, eventually settling on Eastern Avenue in East Los Angeles, the children meshed into the neighborhood. They attended Roman Catholic schools. Some adopted English names. Jorge became George, Concepcion changed to Connie, and Alicia went to Alice.

Their father, Jesus, joined a union. Even before he became a citizen, in the 1960s, he declared his allegiance to the Democratic Party, like the vast majority of blue-collar immigrants.

But it was the era of civil rights and Vietnam, more than the influence of their father, that shaped the children’s views. Like many Latinos of their generation, the Cabreras were taught that fitting in meant shedding their Mexican ties and embracing U.S. icons.

“John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were our heroes,” recalled Jorge Cabrera.

In 1967, Carlos volunteered for Vietnam. His service put a wedge between the siblings. While Carlos was off fighting, Jorge and Alicia joined the antiwar and Chicano movements.

“I was very radical back then,” said Alicia, who was tear-gassed in a Chicano rally in Los Angeles. “I wanted to get all my people -- Mexicans and Chicanos -- doing better here. This state, before it was California, it was a Mexican territory.”

Carlos returned from Vietnam “a very dissatisfied and sad person,” he said. Alicia took him to some meetings of MEChA, the student group that she and Jorge -- and Bustamante -- belonged to. But Carlos couldn’t relate to the activists.

“I was scorned by many of them,” he said. “They said I was a vendido” -- a sellout -- “that I was siding with the white man.”

Carlos started his move right. He saw Republicans as the party that got the United States out of the Vietnam War. When he became a citizen in 1976, he cast his first vote -- for Republican Gerald Ford.

Meanwhile, the family’s Mexican Catholic roots were losing their grip on his siblings. Separation and divorce, starting with that of their parents, were becoming the norm in the family.

For most of the siblings, politics was a sidebar in their lives. Mostly they were interested in their jobs -- as postal workers, housewives, an accountant. All but one left the old barrio in East Los Angeles for places such as Rosemead and Carson and Pasadena. Democrats and Republicans were things they thought about at election time every two years, if that.

It was no big deal to miss an election.

The very notion of a “Latino vote” may be missing the point.

The Latino population itself is highly diverse and is in flux. There are foreign-born Latinos who arrived in the last decade, and those whose great-grandparents were born here. There are Latinos still struggling to escape minimum-wage jobs, and those entrenched in the middle class.

Latino political evolution in California is an unfinished story.

Republicans made some advances in the 1980s. It was Ronald Reagan who set the peak. According to the Times’ exit poll in the 1984 election, he won 46% of Latino votes. George H.W. Bush got 37% in 1988.

Back then, however, Latinos made up about 7% of voters, and most came from families that had been in the United States for several generations. Much has changed.

Republicans dimmed their prospects considerably in the 1990s by endorsing a series of ballot initiatives that many Democrats and Latinos saw as anti-immigrant. The most important was Proposition 187, which sought to deny public health care and schooling to undocumented immigrants.

Analysts say there are few Latinos without some link to an illegal immigrant, often a relative. But even on this issue, Latino voters were somewhat divided, with 23% supporting Proposition 187, according to a Times exit poll.

Not even his wife’s prior status as an illegal immigrant stopped Carlos from voting yes. He was the only sibling to voice support for the measure. Illegal immigration “will dilute the American culture,” he said.

His brother, Jorge, a lawyer who handled immigration and political asylum cases in the early 1990s, argued that “without the presence of cheap labor, a lot of businesses would go under.”

Not in dispute is the measure’s political fallout. Its major provisions ultimately were overturned in court. But large numbers of immigrants feared they would be stripped of their rights.

Between 1994 and 2000, more than 1 million Latinos registered to vote in California -- an increase that accounts for more than 90% of all new voters during that time, and 46% of all Latino voters, according to a 2000 Field Institute study. The new voters are mostly young, poorly educated and clustered around Los Angeles. About 44% are foreign-born.

None of that substantially changed overall party allegiance: Of the new Latino voters, 59% registered Democrat and 18% Republican. Elections showed even stronger support, with some Democrats in key races winning as much as 75% of the Latino vote.

But neither party can afford to believe these numbers are static.

A Family Divided

Early on, it was widely expected that Bustamante -- aspiring to be the first Latino governor in 128 years -- would energize his natural constituency. But surveys suggest he has not been wholeheartedly embraced, possibly because of what analysts describe as a lack of charisma.

“Never in the last 15 years have we seen the leading Democrat going into the final stretch of a race with less than 75% of the Latino vote,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant.

On Bustamante and the recall, the Cabrera siblings, as usual, are divided.

Carlos, a 55-year-old real estate agent, supports the recall. He plans to vote for the most conservative of the major candidates: Tom McClintock, the Republican state senator.

One sister, Blanca Holte, who has voted only three times -- for Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush -- said she supports the recall and Schwarzenegger. Connie likes Bustamante, but she never became a citizen and therefore cannot vote.

Jorge, 49, opposes the recall but supports Bustamante. “It doesn’t matter to me if he’s boring,” he said. “The important thing is where he stands on the issues. Schwarzenegger has glamour, but that means nothing to me.”

Alicia, 58 and a retired accountant, also likes Bustamante, though she will be out of the country Tuesday and will not vote. Her 51-year-old sister, Patricia, who left California in 1971 and later settled in Texas, is mystified by the debate.

She wonders why so many California Latinos are reluctant to shed their Democratic tradition, as she did, and join the Republicans -- in her opinion, the more patriotic party. In Texas, she said, Latinos “strongly believe in America.”

Nowhere else -- except among the Cuban population in Florida -- have the Republicans, including George W. Bush, had so much success in courting Latinos as in Texas.

In California, even Republican strategists concede the courtship is only beginning.

Latinos account for 15% of registered voters in California -- enough to heavily influence election results.

But by 2015, Latinos could have the power to decide elections, analysts say. By then the children of the Latinos who arrived in California in the 1990s will have reached voting age; Latinos could constitute a third or more of the electorate.

Of course, the extent of their influence depends on whether they register to vote. Latino registration remains low -- 52% of eligible voters compared with 85% for whites -- as does election turnout.

Newly naturalized immigrants, eager to exercise their rights, are the most likely to vote, various studies show. That tends to help Democrats, given the current demographics. But the party can’t necessarily rely on those voters in the future.

Madrid, the Republican consultant, points out that Latino Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to cross party lines.

There are signs that immigrant-rights issues do not rile Latino voters as they did a decade ago. The new Times poll, for instance, showed that 40% of likely Latino voters oppose the new law allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

Madrid acknowledges that permanently winning over voters would require the Republican Party to appeal to “the aspirations of the middle class” -- making it easier to finance college, for example, or to buy a home.

The party, he said, cannot simply rely on movie-star politicians, candidates who stump in Spanish, or even the appeal of conservative stands on abortion and gay rights consistent with the Catholic faith.

It may be that no political party offers Latinos a natural home.

That is true of many Cabrera siblings, and it is true of their children, 13 in all, who have carried on the family tradition of eclectic politics.

One, who never registered to vote, admits to not knowing who is running in the recall. Another considers himself a “child of Reagan,” even though he was never old enough to vote for him, and collected signatures last spring in the recall effort. His sister considers herself “very liberal” and votes Green or Democrat.

What seems to define those who vote is a fierce streak of independence -- a reluctance to register with a party even if they routinely back its candidates.

Carlos Callejon, the 30-year-old son of Connie Soto, said he will oppose the recall and back a Latino -- either Bustamante or Green Party candidate Peter Camejo.

But he is not so easily classified. He works in a warehouse for the city of Los Angeles and belongs to a union. He has never voted for a Republican, favors gun control and roots for Mexico in the World Cup soccer tournament. But he said there is too much smut on television, opposes gay rights and agrees with the Bush administration’s homeland security policy.

His voter registration would please neither of the major parties: independent.

“I guess I’m quite liberal,” he said, later adding, “I’m also conservative in a lot of ways.”