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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.
