Copyright © 2014 by Matt Barreto and Gary M. Segura.
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Book Design by Jeff Williams
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barreto, Matt A.
Latino America : how America’s most dynamic population is poised to transform the politics of the nation / Matt Barreto and Gary M. Segura ; with contributions from Elizabeth Bergman, Loren Collingwood, David Damore, Justin Gross, Blanca Flor Guillen, Sylvia Manzano, Adrian Pantoja, Francisco Pedraza, Gabriel Sanchez, and Ali Valenzuela.—First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61039-502-1 (ebooks) 1. Hispanic Americans—Politics and government. 2. United States—Politics and government—2009-I. Segura, Gary M., 1963– II. Title.
E184.S75B367 2014
320.973089'68—dc23
2014015544
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 Latino America: An Introduction
PART I
UNDERSTANDING LATINOS AND THEIR PLACE IN THE POLITY
Chapter 2 Unity and Diversity
Chapter 3 Ronald Reagan Was Wrong
Chapter 4 Now You See Us, Now You Don’t
PART II
LATINOS AT THE POLLS, 2008–2012
Chapter 5 The 2008 Democratic Primary
Chapter 6 November 2008
Chapter 7 What the GOP Victory in 2010 has to Say about Latino Political Power
Chapter 8 A “Decisive Voting Bloc” in 2012
PART III
THE LATINO AGENDA
Chapter 9 The Prop 187 Effect
Chapter 10 Immigration Politics and the 2014 Election
Chapter 11 Obamacare from the Latino Perspective
Chapter 12 Latino Environmental Attitudes
Chapter 13 Some Final Thoughts
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
We dedicate this book
To Juan and Catalina, Enrique James, Ana Victoria, Itati, and Fiby, And to Daniel Javier and Clara Victoria Who represent the future Latino America we study here. . . .
Chapter 1
LATINO AMERICA: AN INTRODUCTION
Sometime in April 2014, somewhere in a hospital in California, a Latino child was born who tipped the demographic scales of California’s new plurality. Latinos displaced non-Hispanic whites as the largest racial/ethnic group in the state. And so, 166 years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought the Mexican province of Alta California into the United States, Latinos once again became the largest population in the state.
Surprised? Texas will make the same transition sometime before 2020, and Latinos have had a plurality in New Mexico for some time. Latinos are already over 17% of the population of the United States, and that number will grow toward a national plurality over the course of this century. The America that today’s infants will die in is going to look very different from the nation in which they were born. Oh, and by the way, more than half of today’s children under age five are nonwhite.
The pace of demographic change and its impact on both the racial structure of American society and the future makeup of the electorate are illustrated clearly in Table 1.1. In the 1950 census, the white share of the population reached its peak at just under 90%. And in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, nearly 80% of all Americans were white. Meanwhile, in 1970, just 4.7% of Americans identified themselves as being of Hispanic ancestry. These populations were concentrated in New York and Chicago (Puerto Rican), Miami (Cuban), and the Southwest, from Texas to California (Mexican). Since 1980, however, the share of all Americans identifying themselves, unambiguously, as white has fallen precipitously, and Latinos, at 17%, are now present in every state and are the largest minority group in more than half of them. Nationally, the Latino population includes not just Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans but also large numbers of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Dominicans, Hondurans, Colombians, and countless others.
TABLE 1.1Historical Trends in White Identification in the US Census
Source: US Bureau of the Census. For 1800, see US Bureau of the Census, “Table 1. United States—Race and Hispanic Origin: 1790 to 1990,” available at: www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab01.pdf. For 2010, see US Census Bureau, “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin 2010 Census Briefs,” March 2011, available at: http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf (accessed June 1, 2011).
The ethnicity question in the census allowed us to count Hispanics separately from others answering “white” to the race question. It is ironic in the extreme that Latinos had been previously classified as “white” since that nominal status did not prevent them from being sent to segregated schools, kept off juries, being refused burial in local cemeteries, and other indignities historically reserved for the nonwhites in American society. White privilege clearly did not extend to Latinos.
The rapid growth of the Latino population will change America in profound ways. In the 1990s, Latino activists were fond of citing the 1992 report that salsa had displaced ketchup as America’s most frequently purchased condiment, but that change really just scratches the cultural surface. Latin food, music, and dance have gone fully mainstream. Lin-Manuel Miranda won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2008 for In the Heights, a story set in the largely Dominican community of Washington Heights, New York, almost exactly fifty years after West Side Story introduced Americans to Puerto Ricans living in the same city. Yet at the same time, English-language television continues to feature very few Latino lead characters. And although Latinos outnumber African Americans overall in the United States (and in more than half the states), African Americans are far more visible, both culturally and politically. Latinos may have restructured the race discussion in this country, once so powerfully dominated by the black-white dyadic relationship, but it is clear that the Latino story is very much a work in progress.
The central argument of this book is that in the twenty-first century American politics will be shaped, in large measure, by how Latinos are incorporated into the political system. The Latino electoral history of significant inter-election movement over time suggests that Latino population growth will combine with growth in the Latino electorate to present both political parties with new opportunities in their approaches to Latino voters. Such opportunities are not, of course, without precedent—the large-scale incorporation of urban immigrants in the early twentieth century played a significant role in realigning the American electorate and establishing the New Deal coalition, which dominated national politics for two generations.
If
the past is prologue, the more than 53 million souls who make up this (mostly) new American community may well rewrite the political history of the United States. The demography is relentless—live births contribute more to population growth among Latinos now than immigration does, and over 93% of Latinos under age eighteen are citizens of the United States. More than 73,000 of these young people turn eighteen and become eligible to vote every month! There will be no stunning reversal of these numbers—there will be neither a sudden surge in white immigration and live births nor a Latino exodus. Each day every congressional district in the United States, and nearly every census tract, becomes more Latino than it was the day before.
If these new Americans represent political opportunity, they also represent political peril. For Republicans, the current numbers look grim. These new Americans enter the electorate two-to-one Democratic. In 2012 they voted nearly three-to-one Democratic. It wasn’t always so. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both performed significantly better among Latinos in their reelection fights. But those days appear to be long gone, and as we discuss later in this book, it’s high time for the GOP to get to work on rebuilding its brand with the Latino electorate.
The Democrats face perils of their own. The party’s failure to provide meaningful outreach and effectively mobilize voters has led Democrats to leave millions of votes on the table, and they will continue to do so if nothing changes in their approach. Moreover, with the Democratic Party’s reliance on minority voters—most notably African American voters—and rainbow racial coalitions, it must carefully nurture policy agreement and strategic partnerships between the minority groups. Rivalry—or worse, direct conflict—could undo the Democratic demographic advantage.
The complexity of Latinos as a group makes for a politics more nuanced and less lockstep than the political behavior often described by the media and casual observers. Nevertheless, over the last several elections there can be little question that Latinos have become a political force—a force whose potential may not yet have been realized, but a force nonetheless. Latinos have been moved to political action by different issues at different times. In 2006 immigration reform and hostile GOP-sponsored legislation dominated the headlines, just as would happen again in 2010. But in 2008 immigration was all but missing from the electoral agenda while Latinos focused their attention on the economy, which was hurting them far worse than other American racial/ethnic groups, and on the Iraq War, for which Latinos were paying a terrible price. In 2012, though the economy was still important, immigration was once again the moving issue.
As the Iraq War demonstrated, Latinos are not just a one-issue constituency. In the 1990s, when Cruz Bustamante became California’s first Latino State Assembly speaker in the modern era (and later lieutenant governor), he liked to say that the “Latino agenda is the American agenda.” For most Latinos, good jobs, good schools, and safe neighborhoods are the dominant issues. More recently, health care and environmental issues have begun to play an important (and related) role in the “Latino agenda.” Latinos are among the most underinsured populations in America (although their health outcomes are not as bad as we might expect looking at average incomes), and many live in neighborhoods that present significant environmental challenges, such as particulate pollution, which increases the incidence of asthma.
Latinos, like all other Americans, have a lot of worries, a lot of goals, and strong views about the country and its government. Our hope is that this book will serve as a broad introduction to at least some aspects of modern Latino life and aspirations in the United States.
THE AUTHORS ASK: WHO ARE WE? WHY ARE WE HERE?
In some respects, the two of us represent several characteristics of the group we describe. One of us is Peruvian, the other Mexican, and both of us are of mixed parentage. Neither of us grew up in a Latino-intensive locale, at least not at the time of our upbringing—Matt Barreto was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but raised from age two in Topeka, Kansas, and Gary Segura is from New Orleans, Louisiana. Like most of America, both Topeka and New Orleans have experienced rapid recent increases in the size of their Latino populations.
Both of us are the sons of veterans. The connection between the Latino community and military service is strong and long-standing, and as we discuss in Chapter 6, it played an important role in Latino opposition to the Iraq War and in the 2008 election. Matt Barreto’s dad came to the United States at age seventeen and was drafted into the Vietnam War by age nineteen, as a legal resident but not yet a US citizen. He refined his English skills in the Army and would earn both a bachelor’s and master’s degree after his military service. More than ten years later, right after Matt was born, he became a naturalized US citizen. Gary Segura’s dad was a generation older, born in the United States during the First World War. He joined the US Army Air Corps before the Second World War broke out and served as a tail-gunner in the South Pacific before being grounded and hurt. He never went to college—in fact, during the Depression he left school at thirteen to go to work in a furniture factory to help support his eight siblings. His youngest brother, Lloyd, died in the Korean War.
We came to know one another at the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI) at the Claremont Colleges, where Segura joined the academic staff in 1996. He began polling there during the 1996 presidential election, working with the late Harry Pachon, Rudy de la Garza, Louis DeSipio, Jongho Lee, Adrian Pantoja, Nathan Woods, and others. Barreto came aboard as a research assistant in 1999, working with Segura and other TRPI researchers on a pre-election poll of Latinos prior to the 2000 presidential election; he subsequently began graduate studies at Claremont Graduate University in 2000. Barreto and Segura continued to collaborate on polls of Latino voters with Pachon, de la Garza, and DeSipio in 2000, 2002, and 2004. These early TRPI polls represented some of the very few political polls of Latino voters in the 1990s and early 2000s. When Segura left Claremont, Barreto transferred to the University of California at Irvine, where he earned his PhD in political science.
We continued to work together, and in 2004 we published the first piece on Latinos in the American Political Science Review in over seventy years.1 In 2005 we found ourselves together on the faculty of the University of Washington, where we again polled both the general population and Latinos—the former by founding the Washington Poll, a statewide poll of the Evergreen State, and the latter through membership in the Latino Policy Coalition alongside Fernando Guerra of Loyola Marymount University. In 2007, with Mark and Andrew Rosenkranz of Pacific Market Research, we founded the partnership now known as Latino Decisions.
This book, like Latino Decisions, is a collective enterprise. We received fine and important contributions from the rest of the Latino Decisions team and our contributing analysts, each of whom is a successful social scientist in his or her own right. We note those contributions throughout.
Everything we have to say in the coming chapters—much of which is based directly on our work over the last seven years—reflects two core commitments that both Latino Decisions and we ourselves have made to define our research approach. First, Latino interests are best served if the data collection—and thus the claims made on the basis of the data—is indisputable. Scientific rigor in the pursuit of public opinion and community engagement is of no use if data are poorly collected. Second, we never say anything as pollsters that we do not believe is true as scholars. This principle has not always won us political friends, but we believe that our commitment to it has been the right thing for Latinos and for Latino Decisions.
To ensure the accuracy of what we say in our polling, we combine the finest current social scientific techniques with cultural competency so that our bilingual interview teams can ask the right questions in a manner that our community will understand, using the right format, question design, and sampling strategy. In 2012, amid our extensive polling of Latino voters, an article in Time magazine called Latino Decisions “the gold-standard in Latino American polling,” and we were named to Politic3
65’s list of “The 30 Latinos & Latinas Who Made the 2012 Election.” We stand behind every result we present in this book.
AN OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK
We begin, in Chapter 2, by examining some of the characteristics that complicate any narrative of Latinos as an identifiable electoral and social bloc, such as differences in generation, nativity, and national origin. Those differences notwithstanding, there is a growing sense of Latino identity that bridges these differences and is becoming increasingly palpable and politically relevant.
In Chapter 3, we examine three critical aspects of the question: what do Latinos think about government? First, we demonstrate that, despite a strong commitment to norms of self-reliance, Latinos (and other racial/ethnic minority groups) repeatedly express a preference for a government that acts to improve the lives of its citizens and reduce inequality. Second, we explore Latino religiosity and its impact, if any, on the political beliefs of Latinos. We discover that religion is experienced very differently among different groups: as it turns out, Latinos are neither as socially conservative as popularly conceived nor as susceptible, through their perceived social conservatism, to the arguments of modern conservatism. Finally, we show that on matters both big and small, Latinos vote consistently as economic pragmatists—liberal pragmatists—who favor tax increases to balance spending cuts and generally prefer Democrats to steer the economy while blaming the GOP for economic ills. These views stem from the economic and social vulnerability of Latinos in the face of low-income parentage, weak educational opportunity, and bias in the mortgage market.
In Chapter 4, we introduce several people we had a chance to talk with in-depth. Rafael, David, Juanita, and Anita, all residents of metropolitan Houston, shared something in common with Catalina and Alfredo M., who lived in the Los Angeles area: none of them voted. For economic reasons among others, Latinos don’t vote as frequently as other Americans. Some don’t vote because they are not registered, while others are registered but have chosen of late not to go to the polls. Our interviewees’ answers to our questions about this voting behavior allow us in this chapter to explore the frustrations and opportunities in Latino voter turnout.
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