State Will Test Parties’ Appeals to Latinos

California, home to more Latino voters than any other state, is poised to show the nation a slice of its future this November.

Republicans are courting these voters as never before, and, because a third of America’s Latino voters live in California, the state will provide a key testing ground in this year’s general election.

Democrats have a strong hold on California’s Latinos for now. But California Latinos may be up for grabs--if not in this election, then in future ones. The fastest-growing group in the electorate, Latinos are an unpredictable group that defies easy labels.

Their ranks include people such as Gloria Balbuena, a Mexican-born mother of nine and working-class Republican, and Richard Verches, a UCLA-educated attorney and pro-business Democrat.

They are independent-minded voters such as Manual Jerez, a carpenter from Guatemala, who can discuss the fine points of U.S. presidential politics all the way back to Watergate.

They are voters whose interests cut across class lines, such as Joe Medina, a white-collar worker in a downtown high-rise, who was raised in a tough section of East L.A.

Republicans must make up for lost ground among these voters. Until the late 1990s, when they handed Democratic candidates super-majorities of 75% or more, California’s Latinos were more conservative, and their party loyalties more likely to shift. In the 1980s, Republican candidates such as Ronald Reagan were able to claim more than 40% of their votes.

That is enough to fuel giddy Republican dreams that Latinos could be the next Reagan Democrats. One current GOP theory holds that if a sizable number of Latino voters break with the Democratic Party in November--say, 40%--that could tilt the balance toward George W. Bush in what appears to be a close California race.

Demographic realities make that a tantalizing possibility for Republican strategists.

Sometime in the last two years, according to census figures, California reached a historic marker: Whites slipped below the 50% mark as a percentage of the population. Latinos, now a third of all Californians, will outnumber whites in the next two decades. They still are a minority, but now, everyone else is, too.

That is “challenging fundamental beliefs,” said Verches, president of the Latin Business Assn. “The leadership of this community knows we need to think and act, not as a minority, but as the majority. There are responsibilities with that.”

How Latinos choose to exercise those responsibilities may depend on which of two competing ethnic identities they ultimately adopt: One vision is of Latinos united as a beleaguered ethnic minority; the other sees Latinos as upwardly mobile immigrants.

2000 Election is Key to Future

November’s vote is considered key to their future. Will California’s Latinos remain firmly Democratic, as have African Americans? Or, like Italian Americans, will their children and grandchildren begin to behave more like whites, voting on the basis of economic class, not ethnicity? “It’s a very difficult choice for this generation,” Verches said.

“Latinos want to be like everyone else,” said Harry P. Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute. “But they keep being reminded they aren’t.”

Latinos constituted 14% of all California voters in the 1998 election, up from single digit percentages in the 1980s.

California’s Latino population is growing. But Latinos also have gained political strength through changing behavior: Although only 3 million of California’s 10.7 million Latinos are eligible to vote (the rest are noncitizens or younger than 18), more and more are registering.

These new California Latino voters are disproportionately young, poor and foreign-born. They have been voting for Democrats but increasingly are likely to register as nonpartisans or with third parties. They tend to be economically liberal and socially conservative, just when both parties are straining to be the reverse. They are ethnically homogenous--more than 90% Mexican American--but split along generational lines.

Most observers say California Latinos’ political involvement hit a turning point in 1994, with Proposition 187, the measure to bar illegal immigrants from attending schools and using other public services.

A rush to citizenship among legal Latino immigrants and a mobilization of Latino voters followed. A recent study by the Tomas Rivera institute showed the magnitude of change: Between 1994 and 1998, Latino voter numbers in Los Angeles County grew at more than five times the rate of population growth among eligible Latinos.

These new voters favored Democrats even more strongly than their predecessors. They defied conventional political wisdom, which says that poor and uneducated people are far less likely to vote than others. About 40% had less education than is needed for a high school diploma, according to the Field Institute.

They are what some analysts call “the 187 cohort”--a voting group radicalized by Gov. Pete Wilson, who strongly supported the measure.

Six years later, the effects of Proposition 187 are still being felt:

Florindo Villa, an Echo Park construction worker, just got his citizenship this year, and happily credits Wilson with prompting him to apply. He says he still carries “this hate” over Proposition 187, and in November, he will finally vote against the Republicans.

Voters Looking Beyond Prop. 187

Proposition 187 notwithstanding, Latinos are not a single-issue constituency. “I care about the world, I care about pollution, I care about education,” said Robert Felix, a Mexican-born truck driver from Long Beach, awaiting citizenship. “I like the Democrats, but I like George W. Bush as a person.”

Gloria Balbuena, the Glassell Park mother, railed at Wilson for suggesting immigrants were “taking money from the government, when we were working.” But she is a fan of Ronald Reagan and will vote Republican when she gets her citizenship.

Manual Jerez, 53, the carpenter who became a citizen four years ago, reads Spanish newspapers, and the little he can make out from English newspapers.

Between the two, he can discuss with equal ease, in Spanish, the death penalty in Texas, judicial appointments and the transfer of the Panama Canal--which he opposed. “It’s our canal--we built it, we maintained it. Why should we give it away?” he asked.

He also considers the Republican Party discriminatory and prefers the Democrats as the party of workers. He yearns to get a peek inside the Democratic convention down the street from his apartment. “Am I not Democratic enough?” he quipped.

U.S.-born Latino voters tend to be better-educated and more affluent than immigrants. Along with those immigrants who registered before 1994, they also show more tendency to swing.

Many are what Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, calls “the working middle”--blue-collar voters with an affinity for labor.

“We are suburban, but from crummy suburbs,” said Gonzalez, who grew up in Norwalk. “We like Dodger dogs and tacos.”

While largely Democratic, this group is less partisan than the new immigrants and younger voters, radicalized by Proposition 187, Gonzalez said.

Joe Medina, a financial asset manager, is one such voter. A South Pasadena resident, he is planning to vote for Bush in this election, saying he has been disappointed with the Democrats.

Medina, 34, is a second-generation Mexican American: “My dad was a diesel mechanic in the Teamsters--a real Democrat,” he said. “At first he passed it along to me. But now”--Medina scrunched up his face--”the Democrats just haven’t come through.”

Now, according to Mike Madrid--a Republican political consultant for Guerra DeBerry and Co.--Latino voters must decide: “Will we follow the tired path of the aggrieved racial minority? Or will we redefine ethnic politics in this country?” It’s a theme the Republicans are hitting hard, asking Latinos to see themselves as “heroes, not victims,” as one party official put it.

Many Democrats say the message may be effective. Latinos have an optimism that is at odds with the sense of being a potentially vulnerable ethnic group, according to some analysts.

“My father dealt with racism and discrimination all the time,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, a Democratic National Convention vice chairwoman. “But he always had an optimistic view that we would have a better life.”

Yet the fact remains that, despite progress in ownership of businesses and homes, Latinos represent a disproportionate share of California’s poor. More than half of Latino adults did not finish high school, and Latinos are the least likely of any group to get college degrees, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission.

Those who do finish college will earn, on average, three-fourths what whites earn with the same education. Thus the notion that upward mobility erodes Latinos’ sense of ethnic identity doesn’t always pan out.

Not a Typical One-Party Family

Take the Rodriguez family of South Gate. Minerva Rodriguez, a real estate agent, and her husband, a warehouse worker, came from Mexico, worked hard and now consider themselves solidly middle class.

She is a Republican and new citizen. She says she has never experienced discrimination. She believes in self-reliance, low taxes and advancement for the middle class. “If they raise the minimum wage, what does that do for us?” she said.

But her daughter, Brenda Rodriguez, 22, is a staunch Democrat, partly out of ethnic loyalty. “Latino Republican is an oxymoron,” she said.

Brenda was born in Los Angeles and graduated with a sociology degree from UC Santa Barbara. She works for the Walt Disney Co., plans to go to law school and has a white boyfriend. She speaks Spanish, but only with effort. Her sense of ethnicity comes from mixing in a white world:

“Here in South Gate, everyone’s Latino, so you don’t feel like a minority,” she said. “Then you go to college, and you sit in a class with 100 kids, and only five are Latinos. It’s like culture shock. Even though you think you are the same, you are not.”

This is a painful element in the mix that forms Latino ethnic and political identity, said Pachon: the fact that ethnicity is not just how you define yourself, but how the rest of society defines you.

“Remember when Bush called his grandchildren ‘the little brown ones?’ ” said Joe Ortega, a Los Angeles attorney. “Well, no matter how assimilated you are, eventually someone says, ‘Oh, there’s the little brown one.’ ”

Latino Votes Could Be Crucial

For the Democrats, the Republican gambit for Latino votes will force Democrats to home in on issues, said Maria Echaveste, deputy White House chief of staff.

For Republicans, the fight is at the margins, and the challenge is to break up a Latino ethnic voting bloc. At a minimum, Republicans need a symbolic electoral victory in California, a large enough margin for Bush to “stop the bleeding” from 187, said Pachon.

Many Democrats say they won’t succeed. The Latino vote often appears to be poised to swing before elections--then doesn’t, said Antonio R. Villaraigosa, state assemblyman and Los Angeles mayoral candidate. “At the end of day, it will be more of a story than a reality,” he said.

But if Republicans don’t succeed this time, said Pachon, “it will be a long, hard winter for the Republican Party over the next 10 years.”