La Nueva Frontera: Courting A Sleeping Giant

The spirit of Cinco de Mayo wasn’t the only thing that inspired George W. Bush to deliver his weekly radio address in Spanish last month. His strategists have been doing the math, and it goes like this: unless Bush raises his marks with minorities–particularly Hispanics–he could lose the 2004 election by 3.5 million votes. By next year, Hispanics will be the dominant ethnic group in at least 15 additional House districts; and every state slated for a new seat in Congress has a growing Hispanic population to thank for it.

The biggest political news of the 2000 Census was that Hispanics–more than half of them tracing their roots to Mexico–have become the largest minority group in the U.S., surpassing African Americans at least six years sooner than expected. Where that’s happening is turning out to be as surprising as how fast. Of the congressional districts that saw the biggest increases in their Latino populations over the past decade, not a single one is in a state along the Mexican border. Rural areas saw huge growth in Hispanic populations, but so did cities and suburbs. By the end of this year, four of the eight largest U.S. cities may have Hispanic mayors. “It’s the only part of the electorate that’s growing,” says Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.

But while that means that politicians in places as diverse as Las Vegas and Jasper County, S.C., are courting these constituents as never before, Hispanic political clout still lags far behind the numbers–and will for perhaps a generation to come, Latino leaders fear. Even in parts of the country where Latinos have long been the largest ethnic group, they only “help shape things,” says University of Texas political scientist Rodolfo de la Garza. “They don’t lead things. They don’t define things.”

Where Hispanics have just arrived, they’ve only just begun to crack the city councils, the school boards and the county commissions. Though Hispanics account for one-fifth of Nevada’s population, there are only two Latinos in the 63-member state legislature, and virtually none hold local office in the cities and counties where they are the most highly concentrated. “We’re on the ground floor of political empowerment,” says Gonzalez.

The once-a-decade exercise of redistricting now under way in every state will help mobilize Latino voters and encourage them to seek elected office. But no one expects Latinos to show the kind of huge gains that the Congressional Black Caucus made after the 1992 election. Indeed, the boom in the Hispanic population has fostered political tension between the two minority groups. “On issues, we’re very close,” Gonzalez says, “but power is power.” Black legislators in Georgia, a state that saw a quadrupling of its Hispanic population over the past decade, opposed a bill that would expand a minority-business tax break to include brown-owned firms.

There are many reasons that Latino political influence has not kept pace with the Census, the most obvious being that many of those counted are neither citizens nor even legal residents of the U.S. Hispanics are more dispersed than, say, African Americans, which means legislators have to work harder to draw districts to maximize their voting power. And those enormous Census numbers do not translate at the polls, at least not yet. More than a third of Latinos are under the voting age; and those who are eligible to vote often don’t. Though the Latino and African-American populations in the U.S. are roughly the same size, 6 million more blacks are registered to vote. Turnout rates are lower than average even among more educated and affluent Hispanics.

But what really worries Hispanic leaders is that many newcomers don’t seem to want to participate. For whatever reason–longer waits, higher application fees, cultural factors that work against assimilation–a smaller and smaller portion of new immigrants are even trying to become citizens. Some Latino politicians blame bilingualism, the cause for which they fought in the 1970s and 1980s, for discouraging assimilation. “A Latino can exist in their own community and never have to learn English to survive,” says Texas Congressman Charles Gonzalez. “My fear is that we have not only isolated ourselves, but we have handicapped ourselves.”

And yet, if all these factors make it more difficult for Latino politicians to play traditional ethnic politics, they have also forced the most successful among them to adapt to the realities of an increasingly multicultural electorate. Former state assembly speaker Antonio Villaraigosa beat 14 other candidates in April’s Los Angeles mayoral primary with help from labor, women’s groups, environmentalists and the Democratic Party establishment. Villaraigosa made a strong showing among gays, despite the fact that he was running against an openly gay opponent, and among Jews, though there were two Jewish rivals on the ballot. For this week’s runoff election, Villaraigosa even won the endorsement of L.A.’s current mayor, Richard Riordan–a Republican.

George W. Bush, for his part, intends to stay ahead of the curve. The day before Cinco de Mayo, he invited 200 guests to the South Lawn for mariachi music and Mexican food. “Mi Casa Blanca,” he declared, “es su Casa Blanca.”