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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.
