In wooing Latino voters, Hillary Clinton may have elevated the taco to political symbolism, which made a Mexican restaurant in Hollywood an ideal site for some old fashion arm-twisting and deal-cutting in the presidential campaign.
At a dimly table filled with margaritas and tortilla chips, a group of disappointed volunteers from the defunct Bill Richardson campaign debated whether they should shift allegiance to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama when one of them heard their cell phone ringing.
“I just got a call from Hilda Solis,” said longtime activist Ruben Treviso, who heads the politically connected Latino veterans group, the American G. I. Forum. “She read me the riot act. I’ve got to go with Clinton.”
But the influence of Solis, the powerful, four-term San Gabriel Valley congresswoman supporting Clinton, only went so far.
By the time the meeting ended, the group of Los Angeles activists who had campaigned for Richardson in the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire decided to split up evenly between Clinton and Obama and campaign among Latinos for both leading up to the Feb. 5 California primary where they account for about a quarter of likely Democratic voters.
“We decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to put all our eggs in one basket,” said Treviso. “It’s one thing to be a lawmaker in Washington. It’s another living out here.”
The incident dramatically underscores that the Latino vote is not as simplistic and monolithic as too often portrayed in the national news media: Latinos don’t necessarily accept the endorsements of elected officials as political gospel, and they aren’t automatically rejecting Obama because of historic racial-ethnic tensions.
For despite the endorsement of most of the country’s leading Latino leaders, Clinton has been getting only two in three Latino votes – only slightly better than what the Democratic nominees have received in recent presidential elections.
In last month's Nevada caucuses, Obama received 26 percent of the Latino votes to Clinton’s 64 percent. A California Field Poll released last week showed Clinton holding a 3-to-1 lead over Latino voters.
The endorsement of Obama by Democratic icon and Latino darling Ted Kennedy, who has been campaigning on his behalf in California and the Southwest, could well change the balance of power.
Obama himself continues to be confident that the numbers will increase in California.
“My history is excellent with Latino supporters back in Illinois, because they knew my record,” he said in his recent campaign stop in Van Nuys. “It’s important to get my record known in the Latino community, and our supporters in California like Maria Elena Durazo will help accomplish that.”
Durazo is the popular and influential head of the heavily Latino Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, who last week took a leave from her position to endorse Obama and join his campaign organization in California.
The challenge facing Obama in wooing Latino voters, both the Obama campaign and Latino insiders say, is not the racial tensions between the two groups but a more sophisticated and subtle issue: The fears that a black president could jeopardize the political and economic gains Latinos have made in the last generation as they have outnumbered African Americans in the population.
“They say things like, ‘If Obama is elected, Latinos will start losing all the gains they’ve made in recent years,” says Lucy Casado, owner of the Hollywood restaurant where the former Richardson activists met and a founder of the Mexican American Political Association in California.
In fact, a growing number of Latinos and African Americans believe that the historic racial divide separating the two groups is no longer what it once was, though it continues to be the focus of many outsiders.
“The media in general have been too anxious to portray that side as if it is always a case of troublesome conflict,” says Jaime Regalado, executive director or the Pat Brown Institute at California State University, Los Angeles. “The truth is that they are building a history of cooperation, living and working side by side.”
Underscoring that point is a new study by three University of California at Irvine criminologists concluding that Los Angeles is not on the brink of a major interracial crime wave that they blame on the news media’s increasing fixation on the specter of black-versus-brown violence.
According to scholars John R. Hipp, George E. Tita and Lindsay N. Boggess, street violence (in Los Angeles) has been overwhelmingly intra-racial rather than interracial.
"Blacks are about 500 percent more likely to assault a fellow black than a Latino and about 650 percent more likely to murder a fellow black,” the student contends. For their part, Latino offenders are also much more likely to assault or murder another Latino than an African American.
Activists of both sides say the media obsession with ethnic-racial conflict has overshadowed significant but far less glamorous progress made in race relations in America’s most diverse city.
Those strides, in evidence at Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. parade in South Los Angeles, includes such bridge building as the Latino and African-American Leadership Alliance, a new coalition chaired by South L.A. activist Najee Ali and Christine Chavez, the granddaughter of farm worker legend and Mexican American icon Cesar Chavez.
Symbolic of that bridge-building was the selection of this year’s parade grand marshal – Mildred Garcia, president of California State University, Dominguez Hills.
“Like Dr. King, she is breaking down barriers for women and minorities while continuously striving towards the best in education,” says parade founder Larry Grant.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa built his historic election in 2005 on a multi-racial coalition, but other politicians have found duplicating his success rough-going.
“Latinos have had more difficulty in general supporting Obama than African Americans have had,” says Regalado. “It’s an uphill struggle in the Golden State here for Obama because the (Latino) base is supporting Hillary, and he will need the independent vote to offset that.”
For the record, few Latino voters will publicly admit they will not vote for Obama because he is black.
“Hillary gives them an out,” says Latino political activist Alex Jacinto. “Of course, there’s an undercurrent (of racism), but no one is going to go there.”
The issue, say sociologists and racial experts, is also deep-rooted among Latinos: Though Obama and other African Americans often include Latinos when talking about “people of color,” few Latinos identify themselves as such. According to the 2004 Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 58.5 percent of Latinos identified themselves as “white,” 35.2 percent claimed “some other race,” 3.6 percent checked “two or more races” an only 1.6 percent self-identified as “black.”
Other Latinos like San Fernando Valley activist Joe Lozano of Mission Hills are quick to reject Obama, if not for his race for what they believe his faith to be.
“Our great country is not ready to be run by a Muslim as I am told he is,” says Lozano, who admits having believed the untrue blog and email rumors circulating about Obama on the Internet.
Still, Obama’s campaign boasts of several recent developments that they say dispel the notion that Latinos will not support the Illinois senator: The endorsement of Durazo, the who has deep roots in the Los Angeles labor and Latino movements; the backing of several elected Democratic officials, among them Rep. Linda Sanchez of California, Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero of Los Angeles and State Senator Gil Cedillo of the Los Angeles Eastside; and the recent economic roundtable discussion in Van Nuys that included two Latino supporters among the four participants.
They also point to grassroots organizers like Leila Linford, 27, of Long Beach, the University California at Riverside graduate and daughter of a Cuban mother and American father – both Republicans – who has been working in Latino communities on behalf of Obama for months. Or 17-year-old Gustavo Delgado, a Cypress College student from Orange County, who has been averaging over 20 hours a week volunteering in the campaign.
“I think he is not afraid to deal with countries that don’t agree with or align with the American status quo,” says Delgado, who was first drawn to Obama when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, “and that he will bring the country back to its previous status in the world, where we are respected in the world and where we learn to put our priorities in order and care for the people and issues at home.”
Adds Linford:
“I consider myself an idealist, and (Obama) speaks to me in that sense. I also know he can also get things done. He has an excellent track record. I have done my research and I believe he is working on the people’s behalf. I love that he doesn’t accept any lobbyist’s money -- it all comes from us. He wants to bring the power back to the people; he wants to change things and lead our world into a new direction. He was against the war from the beginning, when the war was popular.”
Obama supporters have also been buoyed by the CNN and Opinion Research Corp. survey released Monday showing that a growing number of Americans can now accept an African American president.
Obama himself confidently refuses to accept the notions that Latinos reject him. As he as leaving his recent Van Nuys backyard appearance, Obama took one last question from a Spanish television network reporter: Did he believe there was a pattern of Latinos voting against black candidates?
“No, in Illinois – they all voted for me,” he said. “Yes, there have been historical patterns. But there are places like California where those patterns are going to be broken.”
