Does Anyone Even Want Latinos to Vote?

Carolina González (CG): A record number of Latinos were elected to Congress in 2022, but across the country many Latinos say they feel alienated from politics.

Daniel Garza Clip: I think the parties have done a terrible woeful job of reaching out and engaging specifically the Latino community. The Republican party, for example, for decades ignored the Latino community for whatever reasons. I would also say that the Democrat party, when they do have a stronghold in a community will shut out Republican Latinos, will make it very difficult for them to vote. 

CG: This is A Better Life? from Feet in 2 Worlds. I’m Carolina González, On this special edition of A Better Life? we are focusing on the role that Latinos play in U.S. politics as voting patterns shift, harden, and crack.

In addition to my work with Feet in 2 Worlds, I’m also the Director of Communications for the civil rights organization LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. 

On Thursday January 5, 2023, Feet in 2 Worlds hosted a live virtual round-table discussion on Latino voters and the electoral system in the U.S. 

Today there are more eligible Latino voters in the U.S. than ever before.  There’s nearly 35 million, making up 14% of the total U.S. electorate. And our share of the electorate is growing fast. 

Every election cycle, both major parties tout the importance of the Latino vote. But many Latinos say that they don’t see this talking point translate into attention to the issues that they care about or any meaningful outreach.

For decades, analysts have struggled to understand why this is the case and what can be done to get more Latinos involved in the democratic process. But maybe this is the wrong question to be asking. Maybe we need to start the conversation in a different place.  Maybe it’s time to ask: Does anyone even want Latinos to vote? So we’re gonna dig into what all that means for Latino communities and for U.S. democracy. 

Joining us today are Maritza Félix, Daniel Garza, Leo Murrieta, and Gabriel Sanchez. 

Maritza Lizeth Félix is in Arizona. She’s a freelance journalist, producer and writer who also leads Conecta Arizona, a Spanish language news service on WhatsApp. Hey, Maritza. Great to be with you.

Maritza Félix (MF): My pleasure. Good morning. 

CG: Daniel Garza is in Texas. He’s the founder and president of the Libre Initiative, an organization he started with the Charles Koch Institute that engages and mobilizes Hispanic and Latino conservatives. Welcome Daniel.

Daniel Garza (DG): Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to join everybody today.

CG: Leo Murrieta is next. He is joining us from Nevada. He is the state director there for Make the Road Action, an organization that builds political power among working class Latinx communities through grassroots progressive organizing. Great to have you with us, Leo.

Leo Murrieta (LM): Buenas tardes, thanks for having me.

CG:  Last but not least is Gabriel Sanchez, who is in New Mexico. He’s a political science professor at the University of New Mexico, and is also the director of research at BSP Research, a polling firm that conducted the Latino portions of the larger 2022 Midterm Election Voter Poll by the African American Research Collaborative. Welcome, Gabriel.

Gabriel Sanchez (GS): Thanks for having me.  It’s a pleasure to be on this rockstar panel. I’m really looking forward it.

CG: So, the popular narrative every election cycle is that you have these built-in barriers to voting in Latino communities, whether it’s the history in folks’ home countries, whether it’s a language access issue, which is something that we work a lot on at Latino Justice, and the fact that so many Latinos are young, and young people traditionally don’t have this very strong record of voting. My first question for everybody is, do we need to stop blaming the voters and look more at the structure of the political establishment instead? When Latinos say that they feel alienated, is it partially the result of efforts by the political establishment to keep them from voting? We’re gonna start with you, Leo.

LM: I have a lot of feelings about this. So I live here in Las Vegas. In Nevada, we have very open progressive voting laws that allow folks to participate with more ease than a lot of other places, but every single election cycle, the story remains the same.

In East Las Vegas or in the neighborhoods where our gente lives, Spanish speakers, immigrants, if they are the majority in that side of town, then that side of town is going to have long lines on Election Day. It’s going to have long lines throughout early voting, and there’ll be very limited individuals in those polling sites who speak Spanish or are able to help folks in their native language to be able to access their rights to vote.

And in Nevada, politicians and community organizations, everybody, progressives, they tout how wonderful our voting laws are and how we’re an example for the rest of the country to look towards to expand access. But every single election cycle, our organization is out there recruiting our members to have to go out and do the job that government should be doing. Making sure that language access is available to every single person. That doesn’t always happen and it really needs to change all across the country.

CG: Thank you, Leo. I would love to hear your perspective on all of this Daniel.

DG: Yeah. well, I think the parties have done a terrible, woeful job of reaching out and engaging specifically the Latino community. The Republican party, for example, for decades ignored the Latino community for whatever reasons. They didn’t make the investments, they didn’t recruit from the Latino community, didn’t hire from the Latino community, didn’t message directly.

And I think because of that they suffered electoral losses, or at least significant, I’m gonna say disparities in the Latino vote. It’s just now I think that we’re starting to see that the Republicans are starting to value more the Latino voter, are making investments, are starting to hire from, you know, the Latino community are starting to message directly to them. But even now I would also say that the Democrat party, when they do have a stronghold in a community, will shut out Republican Latinos, will make it very difficult for them, to vote. These things are deliberate, and what they do, of course is turn off a lot of Latinos from voting, and it works on both sides. So it’s a bipartisan issue that we need to deal with, that us as observers should be on top of and call out.

CG: Yeah. Gabriel, so is it, is are we all kind of reaching a consensus that it’s a pox on both houses? What do you think?

GS:  Yeah, I would echo all the comments that have already been made, and it’s important, right, that we start the conversation noting that we’re talking about structural racism, right? Systems-level injustice directed at our people. And I think that’s an important place to start because if you don’t recognize that the system itself has problems, we get into this, “it’s party X or party Y”, or blame the victim. And all of us that are old enough to remember the sleeping giant narrative about the Latino vote, the Hispanic vote, all of that was aimed at this blame-the-victim dynamic, right? And so if we shift the conversation and say, “wait a minute, all polling is suggesting that Latinos value voting, understand the importance of voting to our democracy, et cetera, then what are the obstacles that are in the way?”

And a couple of the data points to emphasize what has already been noted. Our poll was of confirmed voters, right? So these are the people that should be on everybody’s contact list, right? As many Latinos in that sample, which was a large sample of Latinos, the largest of any survey that I’ve seen conducted in the last election cycle, just as many Latino voters, again, confirmed voters, said nobody contacted them, as those that actually had outreach, whether it was from a party, a candidate, a nonprofit, you name it. That’s an indicator that the system needs reform, and backs up what’s already been said about our people not being reached.

And the other is, unfortunately, we’ve seen an escalation of misinformation intended to confuse. Who is most likely to receive misinformation? Spanish-speaking Latinos, for the most part, Latino immigrants. And anytime, political science 101 tells you, anytime you make things more confusing or more complex, turn-out decreases. So we know these things matter. 

CG: Now, let’s talk a little bit more about some of the kinds of things that we’ve been able to observe on the ground.  Ahead of the midterm elections that just happened, Feet in 2 Worlds covered efforts to engage Latino voters in Florida and Arizona, two states that went in very different directions. The Republican sweep we saw in Florida was one of the most solid ones in the country. And the Democratic sweep in Arizona, was perhaps a little less expected for some people. 

Ok, so, for this section, I want to ask our editorial fellow Virginia Lora to join us. She reported on Latino voter engagement efforts in Miami. This question is also directed to Maritza, who did similar coverage in Arizona.

Maritza, in Arizona the Democrats won all statewide races. What do you think this says about this supposed red-wave? What did you see on the ground in this cycle?

MF: Everybody takes us for granted. The government, the elected officials, the parties, everybody’s taking the Latino vote for granted, and they’re treating us as a monolith, even though they say we’re not. They’re aware we’re not, but they’re still doing the same. The outreach for Latino communities is the same one they have been using for decades.

They don’t understand that we are now in WhatsApp, we’re mobilized, and in TikTok. We’re not using Facebook anymore. The new generations of voters in Arizona are different and they don’t take in consideration the border states like mine, like Arizona, that we do have a big migrant population. 

Some of them are dual citizens and they vote in Mexico, they vote in the U.S. and the systems are completely different. I get asked from my community on Conecta Arizona is like, “how come everything needs to be so complicated in the U.S.?” 

So what we did during the primaries and then the general election here in Arizona is working in a lot of very, very informal but informative guides, very basic information in Spanish, answering all the questions, debunking the misinformation on social media and Facebook and everything. And that helped because there was a lack of outreach from the candidates to the population.

Most of the hard work, the heavy lifting was being done with the Dreamers, for example. They had a big proposition on the ballot this year, and they were doing all the canvassing. They were calling, they were promoting, they were putting people out to vote just because they really believe in that proposition and those voters. Otherwise they wouldn’t have cared about these elections at all. Arizona is blue this time, but that can change very rapidly.

CG: Yeah, I definitely agree with you on the shifting ground that we see in a lot of places. And Florida, I don’t know that this red wave that we saw in Florida can be ascribed to either of the parties doing so much better in terms of education and outreach. But, Virginia, you reported on Latino voter engagement efforts in South Florida. Why don’t you tell us what you heard, and it would be interesting, these are two interesting cases to compare and contrast. 

Virginia Lora (VL): It’s interesting because it’s almost like the absence of efforts that seems to have really impacted the outcome. And so a big part of my reporting focused on this group of mostly young Miami-born and raised folks who came from, themselves, from immigrant families, many of them were Cuban Americans or Venezuelan Americans. But unlike the communities that they come from––we often think of as Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans to be more conservative or Republicans––  they themselves, identified more with more progressive values. And so many of them, they had been involved in past years supporting Democratic candidates. And the feeling that they had was that there was a big disconnect between the way the political establishment, the Democratic establishment, was speaking to them that didn’t resonate with the communities that they themselves knew. 

 I was going to many of the events that they were doing or these community and cultural events, and they were aware that this was an uphill battle…It almost felt like a DIY effort, that they were looking around and thinking the candidates aren’t investing here, they’re not spending significant time, but like, ‘we are, and this is how we’re going to try to do it the best we can.’ And then we had the results that we did. Governor DeSantis won 58% of the Latino vote in Florida and also 59% of the general electorate. So the numbers were almost on par this time around. 

MF: And actually if I can interrupt and whatever Virginia is saying, it reflects in Arizona as well. The Republican Party did a very hardcore campaign in Spanish on the radio, and they were saying it’s like if you want your kid to change genders when there are little ones, it’s vote Democrat. If you want to protect the real American dream, vote Republican and the Democrats did nothing.

LM: So I wanted to jump in here. I think. Thank you so much, Virginia for and Maritza tambien. Daniel also mentioned earlier investments, right? Like in Arizona, what did the investments look like in Arizona and also in Nevada? Republican and conservative investments really looked like, well, maybe in Nevada a little different.  They opened up Hispanic outreach centers, and they spent a lot of money on Spanish language radio and TV, unfortunately with divisive messaging like Maritza was mentioning. So there was some outreach, but a lot of the money, if you follow it, it was spent on conservative values-based messaging, trying to convince folks that their values are different or trying to pull people by their values. Pero,  if you do look at Florida, what did DeSantis and his Republican regime do? They expanded access to Spanish language voting information….

CG: Uh, I’m actually gonna, I’m gonna, I’m actually

LM: Is that wrong?

CG: I don’t think it’s consistently correct. One of the things that we observed in central Florida, Seminole County, for example, there were still Latino communities where you’re still having language access issues, and something that we have witnesses that when folks try to provide assistance, there’s some obstacles placed in their way. I actually wanna flip it over to Gabriel, because I would love to hear from you about what your sense is of whether, again, yet another cycle that has brought lessons for both parties. Do you see any takeaways that the parties are taking seriously from what they saw in Florida or Arizona? And then I’m also gonna toss it to Daniel.

GS: Yeah,  I appreciate the opportunity to jump in and get some data points, to what’s already been discussed. Like when we look at Latino vote share, let’s say Democratic vote share across the two election cycles, not surprisingly, Florida had the lowest of any of the states that we had over samples and at 44%. 

I’ll give you some context, overall, nationally, we had Latinos at 64% voting Democratic. Arizona was basically right there, I think it’s 63%. So it gives you an idea that Florida and Arizona, right, are two microcosms that make the obvious point that all politics is local. And so the local nuances of what resonated with voters, what outreach looked like, obviously varied pretty dramatically in the context of Arizona and Florida.

A couple things to add to the conversation: In my opinion, the story of Arizona is not one we can isolate in terms of 2022. I mean outreach and investment, particularly on the nonprofit side, not even talking about parties trying to shift which way Latinos vote, but just the resources necessary to mobilize and engage Latino voters, that money started pouring into Arizona way back in 2012, 2016. 

And that’s key and paramount as a lesson learned for both parties because Latinos are not a community that you can just show up three months before an election and hope to gain trust and value in, primarily because a larger segment of Latinos are first time voters than any other racial ethnic group in the country.

Our data suggested that in 2022, 11% of Latinos voted for the very first time, and another 15% had voted in 2020 for the first time. You put that together, that’s basically one fourth of all Latinos are very, very new to the system, so you gotta start early. And Arizona, in my opinion, is an example of how that outreach and the resources invested, not just by parties, but by nonprofits on the ground, has translated into turnout not only among Latinos, but Native Americans. Very similar story in the context of Arizona and Nevada. 

Florida,  couple of things that are really interesting to me, at least, when you stare at the data. Kind of a surprise to many people when we look at vote shift, let’s say Cuban vote from 2020 to 2022. Cuban Americans in Florida were one of the very few groups that actually increased their Democratic vote share relative to 2020. Almost everybody else went in the other direction, even if it was small, right? So there’s something unique about Florida that’s more nuanced than just thinking about the Cuban vote. 

And that’s if we look at, let’s say Puerto Ricans, in Florida, there’s about a 20% gap in Democratic vote share for Puerto Ricans nationally to those that live in Florida, right? Obviously, Puerto Ricans in Florida would be more likely to vote Republican. So a lot of it is really paying close attention to the underlying demographics. We have the data, let’s do a bit better in terms of micro-targeting and speaking to our people the way that they want to be reached.

CG: Mmhmm, those are all excellent points. Daniel, I feel like we’re kind of in a consensus on the importance of structural factors. Can you talk about what lessons we’ve learned and, and maybe take into account things like the fact that these elections happened after a very contentious redistricting process in a lot of places, and a period in which we’ve had a lot of legislative change to voter laws?

DG: Yeah, I understand that, but there’s other things at play. You know, Latino voters proved to be very politically curious in 2022. They’re persuadable, they’re not baked in, maybe like, as much as Black voters are. And I think their interests and priorities mirror a lot of the working class, the blue collar folks. And so their concerns were about inflation;  what they see as government expanding more and more and heaping  a bigger tax burden, a regulatory burden; limiting energy production. All these things matter to Latinos, right?  All issues are Latino issues,  I like to say.

The bright spot in Arizona that I’ll speak to really quick was Juan Ciscomani in Arizona 6, a 20% Latino district. He wins it by a few thousand votes, just scratches the win. But the point here is that the candidate matters, the candidate quality, the style and the substance, right? I think two of the things that you have to express over and over and maybe more so to the Latino community is one, that you care about them. That you are considerate of their priorities and the barriers that they face in America. And to express that over and over. And second, that your ideas are superior to the opposition. They have to show a heart as well as intellect.

With Ron DeSantis in Florida, for example, I think one of the reasons why he got such a huge vote is because, you know, where he stood. He was very expressive about his ideas and, you know, rejecting inflation and, and, through, you know, reduced spending, rejecting this sort of racial activism that he felt was too violent. I don’t know where everybody here stands on those issues. It doesn’t matter. Where do millions of Latino voters stand on the issues? And he was able to strike at the heart of that.

CG: So let me follow that up with, for candidates that don’t necessarily pay attention to or target, or really kind of think about how do Latinos want to be spoken to and put effort into that, are there any political consequences for them, or can they just afford to ignore this audience? Either because it’s “baked in” in one direction or the other, or because in the end the numbers work out in such a way that you can win without them? First to you, Daniel and then to Leo.

DG:Yeah. I think there’s a consequence. I think that if you come with your own agenda and you don’t come to listen to us, and you’re not taking into consideration what the priorities are of the folks in the region that you’re speaking to, you don’t really care about our needs. You just care about us as a voter, right? And what we can do for you instead of the other way around. You’re here to serve us. And sometimes they forget that calculus. 

And look, I, I think that’s one of the reasons why Maria Elvira Salazar, Tony Gonzalez, Alex Mooney, who’s also a Colombian in West Virginia, strengthened their positioning in their districts because they were able to tap into that and to connect with the Latino community because they are Latinos.

The fact that we have five, congressional now new members who are Latino Republicans who flipped blue seats, it’s because they understand the community and they can speak to the hard issues and the policy issues that matter to us. So there’s a benefit to listening to us and considering our priorities, not just come to impose, you know, what your political agenda or your ideology.

CG: You know, you’re bringing up the new Congress and new congressional candidates, I really wanna get to polling, but we’ve gotta talk about George Santos, Congressman-elect – because at the moment that we’re recording, we do not have a new Congress that has been sworn in.  Can you talk about where he fits in? So, he was presented to the public as this fresh face of Republican politics, up and coming, young, gay, etc, etc, etc. To what extent did his ethnicity play a role in how both parties ignored questions about his biography? And what does it say about our political systems and how candidates are chosen and run through the cycle in the name of diversity?

DG: Yeah, I mean, I would say look, uh, on, on the one hand, uh, I’m glad that there’s a grace that is  being offered to him. Maybe because he is a minority. For the longest time, I think, you know, they take us out quickly. They just try to find an excuse to try to cancel us. And, now there seems to be a grace. But, having said that, um,

CG: Grace about a liar?

DG: Well

CG: I mean, he gets a lot more grace than a lot of other people.

DG: El otro lado de la moneda, is that he’s a liar. He lied. He fabricated a lot of his resume, there’s no question that this has to be dealt with because it cannot happen again, right? And there needs to be a consequence to this. And I don’t care if he’s a Republican or a Democrat, there’s a price to pay. 

LM: And also I wanna weigh in here. I don’t want us to think, or anyone to be under the impression that like ‘oh, this could only happen to Republicans.’ No, it happened this time to Republicans, but it speaks to the larger question about who is actually looking at the pipeline of Latinx talent. Like who’s looking at our gente and our barrios for the next leaders, for the next congress-people, the next senators, and the truth is, neither party does a great job of really, I don’t know, doing a background check, talking to people, investigating who are the best folks, who are the best gente, to put forward. 

This time it was the Republicans. But it was really a systemic problem with how the white elitist consultant class runs politics in this country. Right? Maritza mentioned it earlier. There’s this playbook that they have been playing for now 40 plus year, decades. And in that playbook, we don’t exist. We have to invest in who’s going to lead next.

GS: Yeah, I’ll jump in, just to note, the thing I’m most worried about in this whole context is the implications that we’ll have for Latinos’ trust in the system, trust in democracy, which by the way, are at all time lows. Not just among Latinos, but among everybody. And so when folks see like, “oh, this candidate, he just fabricated his whole biography,” what does it do to their likelihood of saying, “I should invest the energy to figure out how to vote next cycle,” right? That’s the biggest worry that I have, independent of the nuances of this specific candidate. 

Now, unfortunately, going back to your original question, Carolina, I don’t think the consequences are as high as they should be. And unfortunately the reason for that is what you already brought up, the redistricting process. Most people don’t realize that the game is played politically before we even have far too many of our congressional districts and much more at the state and local level are non-competitive seats, meaning incumbents can do dang near anything, but get involved in a scandal, and are gonna get reelected simply because of the math that broke out of the redistricting process.

Now, why is that paramount for our conversation about Latinos? We all know the 2020 census had a huge undercount of Latino population for a number of structural reasons, and those are the numbers that we start the process with. So we need structural reform in a major way that goes all the way back to thinking about the redistricting process.

CG: Yeah, I really appreciate that, Gabe. I wanna go back to your area of expertise here, which is polling. I think  most people can agree now that polling has become, if it wasn’t from the get-go, notoriously inaccurate. So what do you think that polls of Latinos in this cycle got right? What did they get wrong and, what do we know about how polls of Latinos should go, and what we can actually get from them?

GS: Yeah, and not to nerd-out on the nuances of the science of polling. I’ll toot my own firm’s horn on this, ‘cause our polling, we were pretty dang. And one of the reasons for this is a lot of people don’t understand where a lot of polls get things wrong is not so much on the question wording and those other things, but the sample.

And one of the fundamental questions you have to ask yourself is like,  what percentage of first time voters are you gonna include into your sample? And one of the challenges for pollsters in an off-year election, typically we like to look only at quote unquote, highly likely voters, which typically are defined on voting and prior elections. We let in a much higher percentage of brand new people who have never voted before into our samples, because we know our population’s gonna have a much greater segment of young voters who simply by definition of being young, haven’t had the opportunity to vote in the past. So that’s one of the biggest things that I see other polling firms don’t do the same way that we do. So that’s one of the nuances in terms of how things get right or wrong in polling. 

The other is substantive issues, and probably the major take-home message that a lot of people were surprised with was how well abortion played for a larger segment of our population than typically it would in other election cycles. And there’s an antiquated notion as it pertains to the Latino vote that says something to the effect of Latinos are a liberal overall voting bloc when it comes to substantive domestic policy issues, but are morally conservative. 

And that doesn’t necessarily hold these days, and the main finding I’ll leave with you as it pertains to what a lot of other folks got wrong as it pertained to abortion policy was there’s a lot of Latinos in our sample, in our polls that tell us at the end of the day, ‘I don’t want to impose my values on others. Yes, I’m conservative on abortion, but I’m not actually gonna be voting on abortion this election cycle. I care more about inflation or jobs.’

CG: Thank you Gabriel, and I’m gonna do the last question as a bit of a lightning round just to make sure that we get everybody’s voice into the mix. What do you see as the road to Latinos taking actual political power for themselves, regardless of what the parties want, regardless of what campaigns do or don’t do? Daniel, I’m gonna hit you first.

DG: Well, we do have much more power than we’ve had in the past. We used to be on the outside looking in, and so we had to do marches and protests and school walkouts and a lot of stuff that was uncouth. That’s no longer the case. You know, our kids now roam the halls of Congress as staffers, as senators, congresswomen and congressmen. We do hold political power and we should be able to yield it right in a way that is effective and in a way that’s much more united, which I really appreciate this panel. 

But  I was gonna say one of the consequences of neglect from the Republican party, for example, is that we conservative Latinos like myself, are at a major disadvantage is the ability to engage and drive policy conversations. The platforms, the places where you can do that are dominated by left of center institutions. Let me explain. In Nevada, for example, unions are very powerful, they have a lot of money. Spanish language television tends to be center-left. Media platforms tend to be center-left, Hollywood influencers, uh, universities, uh, professors, formidable institutions that are controlling the conversations within the Latino community and the center-left has a major advantage there. And so, there’s a big road ahead and a lot to do to reach parity in the battle of ideas.

CG: Okay. Thank you so much. Maritza, what do you think? What’s the road to Latino political power? What do we do? 

MF: Yeah. Well, Arizona is a very good example. Remember 2010 when SB 1070 was signed? And how the pendulum was on one side of the spectrum and now it shifts completely to the other side? Now it can be anybody’s game. Something that I realized is, Dreamers, those kids, are voting, because they are the only ones in their mixed families that are able to vote, they’re gonna drive the change. And they’re growing up and they don’t wanna…they already have a voice, they just need an echo in the government. And that’s something that the politicians and the parties they need to understand, I need to achieve the way that they do politics and campaigns around it.

CG: Thank you. Virginia, same question.

VL: Visibility really matters.  I think wins are important and changing people’s minds and those one-on-one conversations, but we need to see Latinos advocating and active and changing things for their communities. But that needs to be known and seen by the community that surrounds them so that these ideas can start percolating, opening up people to different ideas and engagement in their community in different ways.

CG: Great. Thank you. Leo, your thoughts

LM: I wanna start off uplifting something that Maritza had said. Our gente are not a monolith, right? It actually is our strength. Our gente need to come first, before parties, before ideologies. We need to push our gente forward and all of our gente, regardless of who they voted for, if they’re ineligible to vote or if they’re not going to vote. They need to be prioritized because we as a people have the solutions that we need for our futures because that is what we do as immigrants who come to this country with little to nothing. That’s a lot of our family’s stories. Like, we have to make things happen and that’s what we need out of our politicians, out of our government. We need to improve the quality of life for our gente, and quite frankly, the answer is not going to be with a D or an R, it’s gonna be with our gente.

CG: Thank you. And last but not least, Gabriel. Parting thoughts?

GS: A couple quick points. One is, how do we actualize our power as Latinos and, and actualize our demographic strengths? Remove all the obstacles and make it an equal playing field, right? So whether we’re talking about redistricting, which we referenced earlier, or photo ID laws. Those types of barriers that on their face don’t seem like they’re discriminatory in nature, but when you look at the data, our people are being disproportionately impacted, right? So remove the barriers and obstacles that’ll allow us to make their numbers, our natural strength, part of the political power that we all desire and wish for.

Now, I’ll leave you with this: when you think of any state that probably has more political power as it pertains to Latinos or Hispanics, it’s my home state of New Mexico. We’ve had the greatest percentage of Hispanics in our legislature forever. Three Latino governors in a row, including two Latinas in a row, across parties where no other state has elected a Latina yet. Yet, in my home state, we have the greatest income inequality between Latinas and white males of anywhere in the United States and some of the greatest overall inequalities facing Latinos anywhere.

So we have to be thinking broader than just political representation as our mechanism to try to achieve true economic power, right? We shouldn’t have a New Mexico where I can tout all our great political feats and how awesome our descriptive representation is, but in the same breath have to point out, unfortunately, all the inequalities our people face here.

CG: Alright, so break down the barriers and power to the people. Thank you Gabriel, and thank you to all our panelists, this has been very informative. I’ve gone through a few election cycles, I’ve had several conversations around the Latino vote, but I have learned a lot today from each of you. 

We heard today from Gabriel Sanchez in New Mexico, Daniel Garza in Texas, Leo Murrieta in Nevada. Maritza Feliz in Phoenix, Arizona, and Virginia Lora in Miami, Florida. Thank you so much to all of you.

To listen to earlier episodes of A Better Life?, visit abetterlifepodcast.com. That’s abetterlifepodcast.com.

This episode was produced for A Better Life? by John Rudolph and Virginia Lora, who is also the editorial fellow at Feet in 2 Worlds. Quincy Surasmith is our managing editor. Jocelyn Gonzales is our technical director. Alejandro Salazar Dyer is our director of marketing. Isabela Rocha is our intern. Our theme music and original score are by Fareed Sajan. I’m Carolina González, in New York. Thank you for listening. Gracias por escuchar.

 John Rudolph: A Better Life? and Feet Into Worlds are supported by the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the David and Katherine Moore Family Foundation, the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation, an anonymous donor, and readers, and listeners like you. Support our work that brings immigrant voices and award-winning journalism to public radio podcasts and digital news sites. Make a tax-deductible contribution today at abetterlifepodcast.com. That’s abetterlifepodcast.com.