Latino diversity -- a Question

In a generally convincing article arguing that New York Democrats should be less sanguine about the prospect of Michael Bloomberg's reelection as mayor -- which could mean 16 straight years of Republican mayors -- Greg Sargent makes an intriguing point:

If the Dems continue to desert Ferrer, it will help Rove achieve another key strategic goal: winning Latinos to the GOP, a minority-outreach effort that he actually takes seriously. A victory for Ferrer, New York?s first Hispanic nominee -- coming right after Antonio Villaraigosa?s election as the mayor of Los Angeles -- would mean that Latinos had won city halls in major cities on both coasts. That would be deeply meaningful for Hispanics nationwide, reaffirming Democrats as the party truly interested in elevating them and making it tougher for them to bolt. National Dems seem blind to the potent symbolism that such a bicoastal victory would carry. But you can bet Rove isn?t blind to it.

That's a creative defense of the dreary Ferrer: He's no Villaraigosa, but together he and Villaraigosa average out to an inspiring bicoastal pair.

But I'm interested in another question, and I wonder if anyone reading this is enough of an expert on Latino politics to offer an informed answer -- is this true? Is it the case that Mexican-Americans in Texas would be inspired by the election of Hispanic mayors in New York and LA? Or El Salvadorans in Northern Virginia, or Latinos in Chicago? Or old-line Hispanic families in New Mexico?

I might be a little naive about this, since I was probably 20 years old before I really understood that there Hispanics who weren't Puerto Rican. But I now know that even within New York City, the worlds and the experiences of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are very different, and it's hard for me to imagine that Latino communities in other places and with roots in other places have much more of a common identification.

And if there is anything more than talk to Rove's Latino strategy, I suspect it involves a very careful segmenation of the Hispanic population. He's not going after Hispanic votes in New York City or LA, where the population is large and already holds political power through the Democratic Party. Getting 20% more of those votes wouldn't matter for either congressional or presidential politics. But what about the growing number of Hispanics in states that don't already have established Latino political institutions, where the population is more dispersed and more suburban or rural? North Carolina and Virginia come to mind, perhaps also Colorado, and states in the upper Midwest as well. I suspect the Republicans know a lot more about those voters and where the pockets are of people who are more religious, more conservative, more likely to start voting like white ethnics.

It is now generally understood that the Democratic Party made a hash of its outreach to Hispanic voters in 2004, with Simon Rosenberg's New Democrat Network the best effort to try to salvage something. But I worry that Democrats often look at "Hispanics" as if they are as cohesive and unified a group of voters as African-Americans. I suspect that's not true, but I don't know. Anyone have a better answer?

Comments

[Jaango]

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[theorajones]

This makes me think about the way white people were talked about in the 1920's and how they're talked about today. Back in the day, newspapers would talk of the "irish race," etc.

But those distinctions among whites don't exist nearly as much anymore--many native borns of European descent have been generically folded into "white." For example, Italians don't really worry about not getting the Irish vote b/c of their ethnicity. Lots of white people don't have a categorical and unchangeable cultural identity beyond "white" (one exception I'm familiar with being American Jews, and I think the Minnesotans are still all into being Swedish or Norwegian, but maybe I've just listened to too much Kelior).

The same thing seems to have happened with black Americans hundreds of years ago. Africans came involuntarily from different cultures in Africa, from the Carribbean islands, etc. Obviously it's not an apples to apples comparison, because there was a deliberate and sustained effort to destroy the cultural traditions and ethnic identity of these involuntary immigrants and give Yoruba and Wolof into a identity, "black," which meant slave.

That said, a bigger definition definitely has an upside--if 100,000 people consider themselves black instead of 50,000, they're a much more powerful voting bloc. On the downside, the cultural definition of black by design makes everything in life much harder when you're black than when you're anything else, so if you're out to exploit an social group you're immeasurably aided by a broad definition of the word "black."

Anyway, I think this process of ethnicities turning into "races" has happened before, and it's not clear to me if what's going on is an effort to destroy existing cultures in an attempt to keep a population marginalized, or if it's a sociologically neutral process that seems to happen in the US when a culture lacks a critical density, or if it's an attempt to forge a new identity to get more social power (which is what I think most white ethnicities have done). Or if it's all of the above simultaneously.

Anyway, it's an interesting phenomenon, and one that America has a lot of experience with.

[Publius]

Actually, the idea of an Hispanic "race" is a ludicrous one. I live in New York, and I can tell you that Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Mexicans all hate one another. So Rove's segmentation strategy makes some sense - he can go after certain ethnic groups within the broader Hispanic population. The problem with this approach is that the biggest Latino group, Mexicans, are the most Democratic. The third biggest (after Cubans), the Puerto Ricans, are very Democratic as well. There just isn't much for Rove to play with here.

[Latino Pundit]

Hispanics/Latinos are definetly not a homogeneous group. They are as diverse as tacos to tamales. To further complicate there are new Latinos who have immigrated here and then there are 2nd and 3rd generation Latinos who have been here. These groups hold different politcal groups as well. For any political campaign to be successful they must have all these factors considered.

[Nilda]

Snort. From working on some grass-roots organizing in various campaigns, the absolute hardest thing is to get Latinos to vote. Not to vote Democratic, or Republican, but just to vote. With the possible exception of Cubans, but they're quite fragmented generationally. Everyone's too busy working to pay that much attention to political battles. And most Latinos are not that well-informed about the countries they don't come from. So to look at Latinos as a cohesive voting bloc simply because they share a language (more or less) is about as valid as looking at the Arabic-speaking world as cohesive.

What I've seen in NYC though is rumor-mongering about Kerry and other Dems on Spanish-language radio just before the election, on religious/lifestyle issues. And nothing in response from Dems. There's your segmentation.

[Andre Pineda]

First, off, let me say I believe that there is no such thing as a Latino political identity.

My mother was born in Nicaragua, my father in Costa Rica. My wife was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States with her parents. My brother married a Puerto Rican; one of my Nicaraguan-born cousins married a Miami-based Cuban immigrant. As much as our cultural heritages overlap – the value we place on family, our Catholic upbringings – we nonetheless do not share a common political identity. For example, my in-laws and my parents live within 10 miles of each other in suburban Los Angeles yet do not think in terms of a collective “we” when it comes to politics. My parents’ Mexican-American next-door neighbors view the new mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, as one of their own. My parents do not. Just because Villaraigosa speaks recently acquired Spanish does not make my parents identify with him. Meanwhile, the fact that Spanish was the first language to both my sister-in-law and cousin-in-law does not overcome the ideological predispositions that are typical of their different islands of origin. Getting them to talk politics would be a disaster.

All the focus on Latinos as an ethnic category of burgeoning importance has the effect of obscuring the fact that being Latino is not like being white or being black. To the extent that a white political sensibility exists, it derives almost entirely from never having to face discrimination from the majority on the basis of skin color. Much of the black political identity comes from being ineluctably defined as a minority by virtue of skin color. With Latinos, skin color is not an obvious marker of ethnic identification. Some Latinos are recognized as Latinos only if they choose to be. Other Latinos are categorized as a minority simply by their appearance. This is only one of the factors that conspires against a shared Latino political identity.

Latinos’ level of political participation and their vote differ widely as a result of their nativity, their country of origin, the area in which they live, their affluence and their religion, to name only a few factors. For example, 68 percent of Latinos in Colorado voted for Kerry; only 44 percent in Florida went with Kerry. Fifty-six percent of Protestant Latinos voted for Bush, while only 33 percent of Catholic Latinos supported the president. Not only does a first-generation Mexican factory worker in Ohio have little in common with a first-generation Cuban doctor in Florida, but he also has little in common with a sixth-generation Mexican-American business owner in New Mexico. Democrats need to do a better job of speaking separately to all the diverse subgroups that make up the ethnic category that is Latinos.

Did I help answer your question at all? I'm always on a soapbox regarding the issue and I talk about it a bit on my own website.

[Si Se Puede]

Si Se Puede!