Gore and Bowles knew all of it: the remarkable increase in immigrants who became new citizens, registered to vote, and cast a ballot for the first time. The simultaneous rise in native-born Latinos who began voting again or did so for the first time. The tight races that turned on the strength of the Latino vote. And, especially important for midterm congressional elections (and a presumed Gore candidacy in 2000), the stunning fact that in 1996 Latinos registered and voted Democratic close to 80 percent of the time.
"They get it," Gonzalez says, leaning back in a chair at the California headquarters of the SVREP in Montebello, a predominantly Hispanic Los Angeles suburb.
It is this: Latinos have awoken from a long political slumber.
Consider the election results:
* After Democrats took back the California Assembly, the new majority elected Cruz Bustamante, a Fresno Democrat, speaker of the Assembly, making him the first Latino speaker in state history.
* The number of naturalized Latino voters in California increased by 6 percent from 1994 to 1996; these new citizens now constitute 26 percent of all Latino voters in the state.
* The Latino share of California voters increased from 9.6 percent to 13 percent between 1994 and 1996. In 1988 Latinos represented less than 8 percent of state voters, meaning that between 1988 and today the Latino vote in California increased by more than 50 percent.
From a membership of seven in 1990, the Latino Caucus in the state Legislature (80 Assembly members, 40 state senators) has jumped to 14. If coordinated, numbers like that could allow Latino lawmakers to hold up budgets and legislation to extract desired policies.
The reason for the outpouring of civic participation is simple. Republicans forgot one of the prime imperatives of politics: Do the math.
Willfully ignorant of the growing Latino population, and trends toward increased citizenship and electoral participation, the party stuck to its anti-immigrant policies -- from welfare reform in Congress that ended Medicare for legal residents to Proposition 187, the state initiative that seeks to deny services to undocumented aliens. Instead of serving its intended goal -- to motivate older, Anglo voters -- the posture prompted Latinos to protect, with their votes, the toehold they have on the American dream. As white voters dropped as a percentage of the total electorate this year, Latinos organized themselves like never before.
"It's the law of unintended consequences at work," Gonzalez says with a laugh.
Voter registration and citizenship drives are nothing new in Latino communities. The SVREP has been registering voters since 1974. What happened in November 1996 is commonly called critical mass.
The new surge began in earnest three years ago when Latino leaders responded to anti-immigrant attacks with a good old nuts-and-bolts democratic rejoinder. They constructed a new political machine, premised on a program of more aggressive naturalization and voter registration, that's been churning out new political participants without pause ever since.
Republican initiatives such as Prop. 209, which sought to end state-sponsored affirmative action programs, and Prop. 187 were the critical fuel. "We can take credit for the mechanics," says state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-L.A.), chair of the state Legislature's Latino Caucus. "But thank you Pete Wilson for the gas."
Like knotty roots buckling a sidewalk before breaking through, the organizing grew unnoticed by Republicans until last November when they finally felt the ground moving underneath them. And, like roots, the organizing grew into some unlikely places.
In California, the national center of the movement, Mexican-American social clubs in Los Angeles that had previously busied themselves organizing rodeos and soccer leagues added political fund-raising ($90,000 to be exact), citizenship workshops, and voter registration to their rosters of activities. (A taco shop on Whittier Boulevard became a place where immigrants could learn about the naturalization process and register to vote.) In Salinas, cannery and farm workers hooked up with the Teamsters union and a Yale sociologist this year and began naturalizing and registering at a record pace. In San Francisco, Centro del Pueblo, the longtime offices of nonprofits on Valencia Street, became a beehive of registration and naturalization for the first time. "We have people out the door at 9 a.m. every morning now," says Melba Maldonado, executive director of La Raza Information Center, which until this year was merely a social service referral agency.
Where all these newly energized citizens and voters end up, in the Democratic or Republican column, is uncertain. Remove the shortsighted immigrant-bashing from the Republican agenda -- which many Latino Republicans and consultants are trying to do -- and the party could have significant areas of agreement with the new Latino voters, who do not hew to classic liberal lines.
That's why Democratic Latino lawmakers and activists are capitalizing on the success of 1996 with a moderate agenda, one which allows no room for Republicans to accuse them of being self-serving or separatist.
"Our agenda is an American agenda," says Assemblyman Antonio Villaraigosa (D-L.A.), Democratic majority leader of the Assembly and, as such, Cruz Bustamante's right-hand man.
It's a refrain heard often among California Latino leaders, this appeal to common values. Although November provided a historic expression of Latino political power, that power will drive issues most everyone can agree on: education, safe streets, affordable health care, and secure jobs.
This moderate agenda is genuine. It's also a sign of the community's wavering party loyalty.
"The older Latinos will probably stay with the [Democratic] Party the rest of their lives," says Villaraigosa. "But with their children there is no guarantee. I would never argue that this [Democratic vote] will be for time immemorial."
However the partisan nature of the community shakes out, one thing is clear. "We're on the political run," the SVREP's Gonzalez says. "No doubt this surge will continue until 2006 at least."
Along the approximately six miles of Cesar Chavez Avenue in East Los Angeles -- from low-income Boyle Heights to affluent Montebello -- people's stories illustrate the complexity of the emerging Latino vote. For nearly every newly energized Latino voter (see "Profiles in Enfranchisement," p. 16), another is on the cusp of joining the electorate.
While organizations like the SVREP have been helping increase the number of eligible Latino voters in California by 2 to 3 percent each year since 1992, 35 to 40 percent of Latinos in the state who are eligible for citizenship and voting rights are still not registered to vote, according to Gonzalez.
Like the middle-aged man from Jalisco, Mexico, who works in a discount jewelry store in Boyle Heights. Aware of the political backlash against Latinos, he has yet to naturalize, although he says he wants to soon. Or Antonio Chavez, hanging out up the block at the newsstand his friend operates. At age 68, Chavez wants to naturalize to protect his Medicare benefits -- due to expire for those holding only legal residency under congressional reform -- but he can't speak a lick of English.
Sen. Polanco can still remember what first moved him to target such potential voters. "I was running from committee room to committee room in 1993 trying to quash the anti-immigrant bills the Republicans were introducing or attaching to other bills," Polanco says. "We realized that we had to organize the Latino Caucus and get it to be not only a policy apparatus, but also a political-organizing apparatus. We had a federal and state strategy. At a federal level, we pushed the administration to beef up naturalization."
Polanco sent letter after letter and took trip after trip to Washington, D.C., in a difficult campaign to convince the Clinton administration that creating new citizens was good politics for the Democratic Party. His efforts would eventually lead to Citizenship U.S.A., the Clinton program that turned 1 million residents into citizens in the last year, about 40 percent of whom were Latinos. (Any argument that Clinton originated the idea to beef up naturalization, Polanco says, is "baloney.")
At the same time, Polanco was also spending his "family days" back home, unfurling electoral maps and crunching numbers, targeting congressional, Assembly, and state Senate districts where Latinos and Democrats could win if legal residents became citizens.
Additionally, the caucus formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1993 and began raising money to salt the targeted races. By 1996, the Latino PAC and the campaign coffers of caucus members accounted for an infusion of $1 million into the accounts of Latino and Latino-friendly candidates. The goodwill purchased made it easy to muster the votes to elect Bustamante speaker.
Then, during the 1994-95 budget negotiations, Polanco cut a deal with Republicans and won passage of a bill that allocated $7.2 million to fund citizenship centers at community colleges and community-based organizations like the L.A. group One Stop Immigration. It was part of a well-conceived strategy.
Polanco knew that 5.2 million legal residents in California, Latino and non-Latino, could be converted into a political force. He also knew that the INS was capable of naturalizing only 60,000 people a year in California. In a 1993 press release, Polanco provided a clear example of how potent a newly naturalized electorate could be: "Had this population been naturalized, 3.7 million more people could have voted in the 1992 general election."
Fortunately for Polanco's strategy, the Republicans were not concerned. "The Republicans didn't think people were going to respond," Polanco says. "They maintained the stereotype that we were not interested in assimilating."
Setting down his coffee, he suddenly lets loose a belly laugh, recalling the GOP's reaction to his funding request. "Their attitude was 'let 'em have it,' " he says.
Coupled with other revenue sources -- including significant support from foresighted corporations like GTE and Pac Bell -- the new state money funds a still-growing assortment of naturalization, registration, voter education, and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) drives. The machine is really many machines, a loose amalgam of groups, all steering in roughly the same direction.
The changes at La Raza Centro Legal illustrate the awakening of Latinos. Before 1994 and Prop. 187, the group's activism was limited to providing free legal services to immigrants who ran into trouble with their employers or the INS. After Prop. 187, the group's director, Victor Marquez, was infused with a new urgency.
"Our focus is mainly on the most vulnerable populations, seniors, and disabled," says Marquez. "On the heels of Prop. 187, I sensed that the next population to be attacked would be the legal permanent residents."
Marquez won grant funding from the Tides Foundation and the San Francisco Foundation to tutor immigrants on the naturalization process. Over the last two years, his group has moved 10,000 clients through its new citizenship program and filed 5,000 new INS applications for naturalization. Currently, Marquez says, he's applying for a $3 million grant from the Lazarus Foundation in New York to run citizenship tutorials and English classes for 10,000 more seniors, disabled persons, and welfare recipients.
Another of the more ambitious programs is run by the National Association of Latino Elected Officials. Like Marquez's group, the NALEO was spurred to action by Prop. 187's victory; shortly thereafter, it started mass citizenship drives, huge events in community centers where hundreds -- in one case, 3,000 in one day -- were fingerprinted and made ready for citizenship. Since then, the NALEO, fueled by corporate and foundation philanthropy, has built its program steadily, from one event a month to 12 mass citizenship drives a month in the L.A. area, and has helped 40,000 people apply for citizenship in California since 1994.
After creating new citizens, the next step is to motivate them, and the native-born, to vote. That means three things: registration, education, and mobilization.
From 1995 until the end of the voter registration deadline in 1996, efforts on these fronts swelled exponentially. The SVREP was far and away the most active in driving Latinos, new citizens, and the native-born into voting booths. The group joined for the first time with the Chicago-based Midwest and Northeast Voter Registration Education Project and the Hispanic Education and Legal Defense Fund of New York. The triumvirate launched its national campaign with 20 organizing drives in late 1995, aimed at local races. And in California alone, 1996 saw the SVREP launch 65 drives in 75 cities.
Titled Latino Vote U.S.A., the campaign's slogan was "Su Voto Es Su Voz" -- Your Vote Is Your Voice.
The Christian Coalition may have been the star of political organizing in the 1994 elections, but the SVREP stole the grass-roots show in 1996. Nationwide the group registered and turned out on the order of a quarter of a million voters, most of them Latino. In California, the group registered 65,000 new voters. In its entire history up to 1996, the group registered 2 million voters. So 1996 represented one-eighth of the work of 22 years.
An SVREP drive looks like this: Organizers enter a city and scope out where the political power lies, who the community leaders are, what the hot issues are, where the Latino population is strongest. The group then picks a few locals and takes them down to L.A. for a three-day training session. Recruits are provided with political intelligence, maps, demographic materials, public service announcements, and a firm strategy on how to register, educate, and turn out Latino voters. Then they're sent home.
Showing the level of access the group has attained in Democratic Party circles, President Clinton held a fund-raiser for Latino Vote U.S.A. in May, where the group raised $1 million from 50 people -- equal to its entire California budget. "It was a bunch of corporates who wanted to sit with the president," Gonzalez says of the donors. It was also the largest Latino political fund-raiser in U.S. history, the group says.
The SVREP followed up two months later with a three-day June teleconference broadcast from L.A.'s Biltmore Hotel in Union Station to a San Antonio, Texas, hotel and a street fair in New York. $350,000 was raised from some of the country's biggest corporations, unions, universities, and media companies, which also gave an additional $500,000 in in-kind contributions. The proceedings had their own Website and were carried on the Internet.
After registering Latinos, the group launched a GOTV drive: massive mailings, television and radio commercials, and Election Day mobilizations with transportation to the polls. (Latino Hollywood also joined the effort for the first time: At the end of every videotape of the movie Mi Familia, starring Edward James Olmos and other prominent Latino stars, was a brief get-out-the-vote pitch.)
Spanish-language media played its part, too. In Los Angeles, the newspaper La Opinion, the largest Spanish-language daily in North America with a circulation of 250,000, put voter registration cards in a special section encouraging Latinos to vote. Local Spanish television stations held infomercials on the importance of voting. The three stations, traditional competitors, agreed to do what's called "roadblocking." If a viewer grew bored with a get-out-the-vote program and changed the channel to another Spanish station, they would see the same program.
Summing up the disparate efforts to motivate Latino voters, Gonzalez says, "That's what I call the 'churning.' "
Even corporate America joined in the churning. While Dole/Kemp commercials portrayed Latino gang members pouring over the border, corporate America embraced the community. The SVREP's campaign was greatly enhanced by the intimate relationships it has developed since 1994 with major corporate benefactors like AT&T, Browning Ferris International, Anheuser-Busch Inc., Miller Brewing Co., Taco Bell, the Coca-Cola Co., L.A. department store magnet Gary Cypress (an Anglo who has furnished many a Latino home in L.A.), and GTE. The Su Voto Es Su Voz T-shirts have the SVREP design on the back and the GTE logo on the front.
The reason for the corporate support is simple. Says Arturo Vargas, executive director of the NALEO: "It's a market."
The immediate California dividends of the Latino turnout were remarkable. In several legislative races, the Latino vote proved important, if not critical. And not just for Latino candidates, but for Democrats in general.
As a result, in 1997 the Democratic Party in California could be headed up in almost every major leadership post by Latinos.
The first sign that something potent had been put together came in the March primary in the 39th Assembly District in the San Fernando Valley. When Tony Cardenas, an outgunned Latino, beat a party-elite-backed candidate in the Democratic primary by drawing on the new Latino voters, Polanco knew a new avenue of power had been opened. (Cardenas went on to easily beat his Republican opponent in the general election.)
The size and scope of the new voting clout is still unclear. But there's enough evidence that the new Latino machine has created something big. Just look at the numbers:
The Tomas Rivera Center at Claremont Colleges in L.A., a Hispanic think tank, issued a 1996 report showing that 43 percent of the Latino population at the end of 1996 were naturalized citizens. Of that population, nearly half have naturalized since 1992. That means that more than 20 percent of the eligible Latino electorate has become eligible in the last four years. "Our sample suggests that as many Latinos were naturalized in the last four years as in the previous forty," the study concludes.
The newly naturalized join the native-born electorate, growing by hundreds of thousands of voters each year.
In 1994 Latinos pulled ahead of all other immigrant groups. And 150,000 Latinos turn voting age each year.
"All the pieces are in place," Gonzalez says.
Rosario Marin, a Huntington Park councilwoman and close friend of Gov. Pete Wilson, is having a hard time admitting that Republican immigration policies hurt her feelings or that they had a driving effect on Latinos voting Democratic in 1996. She is, after all, a "proud Republican" who was a featured floor speaker at the 1996 GOP convention.
She blames the media and Democrats, saying they distorted Gov. Wilson's stands on immigration. "Every time I heard the governor speak on immigration he was always very careful to say that legal immigration is good and that it was only illegal immigration he opposed," says the 38-year-old mother of three.
But after dodging for about 20 minutes, the naturalized immigrant from Mexico breaks down. "Of course it was offensive and hurtful," she says of Republican anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. "Of course it was painful to the Latino community, and it needs to stop."
Other Republican activists, from Anglo consultants to longtime Latino Republicans, say their party must realize that it can't continue to count on a dwindling niche of older, Anglo, suburban voters; the future, demographically speaking, is with Latinos.
The co-owner of Brooklyn Tire Service in East L.A. is another "proud Republican," he announces. And like Rosario Marin, he's Latino to the marrow. Sergio Becerra is the son of immigrants from Mexico who taught him the conservative values he holds dearly to today: hard work and love of God, family, and country. The former police officer and Air Force veteran professes profound confusion as to why nearly 80 percent of Latinos voted Democratic in November.
"I find it strange with the way we are brought up, because of our values of self-reliance and family and church, that so many voted Democratic," he says.
Indeed, the Tomas Rivera Center, in a 1996 poll, has found some significant conservative streaks running through Latino public opinion. While a majority of Latinos support affirmative action, a majority also favor curfew laws and a two-year limit on welfare (including for parents with small children), and believe that ending welfare payments after two years will make things better in Latino neighborhoods.
Opinions on immigration hold to more liberal lines, but still exhibit a certain conservatism. Forty percent of those polled favor government ID cards for citizens and residents that would be required for employment and public services. Likewise, 37 percent support significantly reducing legal immigration.
East L.A. college students Lynnette and Rumaldo Salcedo are good examples of how liberal and conservative ideals coexist in the Latino community -- sometimes in the same voter. The brother and sister, whose grandparents emigrated from Mexico, both voted against Prop. 209 this year, the first year of voting for both of them. "It was going to deny me my equal opportunity," Lynnette, 19, says, sounding like a true Democrat -- which she is.
But she also voted against the state measure to legalize medical marijuana. "It would make it easier for children to get drugs," she says. And Rumaldo, 22, says he registered and began voting to affect policies like welfare reform, which he hopes will make it harder for deadbeats to get "a free ride."
So why did the community come out so passionately for Clinton and other Democratic candidates?
"This is more an expression of Latinos rejecting the Republican Party than it is a reflection of loyalty to the Democratic Party," answers Fernando Gomez-Benitez, the Northern California director of the Latino Coalition on Civil Rights.
The most celebrated recipient of the Latino vote, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove), agrees. "The Latino vote is still up for grabs," says the 36-year-old financial adviser who drew on the Latino vote in her Orange County District to defeat Rep. Bob Dornan, the extreme Republican. "The Democrats have to get smart and put together a program to keep Latinos in their court. There won't always be a Prop. 187."
Sanchez typifies many things about the new Latino clout. Her party loyalty is in flux. She was a Republican until 1994, when she switched. "I didn't like the Pat Buchanan types who said a woman should be at home pregnant and in the kitchen," she says. "It also had to do with the beginnings of the anti-immigrant movement."
Sanchez is a first-generation child of immigrants. Her parents came here from Mexico 40 years ago, but only naturalized and started voting this year -- out of reaction to the anti-immigrant rhetoric, she says.
And like many new Latino voters, she does not hold to liberal dicta. "I am a conservative Democrat," she says.
Some more left-leaning circles in the community are pushing for things like another immigration amnesty and a $7 minimum wage. Asked about such bold strokes, most of the architects and elected beneficiaries of the new voter surge respond similarly: eyes roll, lips sneer.
Some elected officials have talked about using their newfound influence to push for more English-as-a-second-language classes and a streamlining of the naturalization process, perhaps letting legal residents with a college degree including U.S. history forgo the test. But generally speaking, policies tailored specifically for the Latino community are not a high priority.
Like other Latino elected officials, Sanchez avoids special-interest topics. "The issues we talked about transcend [race]," she says of her campaign themes. "We talked about crime and schools. Everyone worries about those issues. It's more important to have food on the table than whether lesbians and gays hang in your district. It's more important to send kids to good schools than if you support a woman's right to choose."
The new member of the Congressional Latino Caucus ponders just what she owes to the Latino voters, immigrant and native-born, who she says produced about one-third of the votes for her historic victory. "Nothing more," she says, "than I owe anyone else in my district who voted for me or not."
For Republicans looking to recapture Latino voters, she couldn't have said anything more depressing.
