THIS IS THE SECOND OF TWO REPORTS ON Latin American and Caribbean life in the United States. In our first report, "Coming North," we focused on the process of immigration. Here, we look at the development of Latino communities in the United States, with a special focus on Latino cultures and politics in three metropolitan areas: New York, Miami and Los Angeles, which collectively contain about 40% of all those who identified themselves as "Hispanic" in the 1990 Census. (Four states-California, Texas, New York and Florida-- contain over 70% of U.S. Latinos.) The following pages provide some background for the discussion, this election year, of the prospects for Latino political unity and a more powerful "Hispanic vote." There is some question, of course, whether such a vote, on a national level, has ever existed as anything other than a statistical artifact. The candidates seem ambivalent. The Bush and Clinton campaigns apparently think they can get more mileage from issues that transcend ethnicity-issues of culture and class. As late as September, when both campaigns were rolling into high gear, New York City's Spanish-language newspaper El Diario ran the headline: "It's Time To Pay Attention to Latinos: Bush and Clinton Have Hardly Looked At The Community." AS ANNETTE FUENTES TELLS US IN "NEW York: Elusive Unity in La Gran Manzana," "diverse cultures, class backgrounds and aspirations weigh heavily against the much assumed unity of Latinos." Are the candidates ambivalent, then, because the politics of culture, class and aspiration outweigh the politics of language and common experience? Or does the breakdown of ethnicity into sub-groups of national origin-- Mexican-American, Cuban-American, Puerto Rican, etc.- make courting the "Hispanic vote" an impossibility? Or are the candidates ambivalent because there is a "Hispanic vote," but it doesn't fit neatly into the current categories of U.S. two-party politics. The conventional wisdom-articulated recently by Texas voting-rights organizer Andrew Hernindez in an interview in Miami's El Nuevo Herald-seems to be that the typical Latino voter is conservative when it comes to "family values," the death penalty, gun control and abortion, and liberal on issues such as social programs for the disadvantaged, national health insurance andjob creation. How does such a person vote? LATINOS ARE PREDOMINANTLY REGIStered as Democrats, and more than 90% of Latino elected officials are Democratic. But they tend to spread their votes more evenly. In 1984, for example, an estimated 44% of Latino voters supported Ronald Reagan, though only 35% supported George Bush in 1988. As of this writing (in September), it's too early to predict how the vote will go this year. Clinton has a number of Latino staffers, many of whom are campaigning on his behalf in the Latino community. He named Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina his campaign co-chair, and gave her a prominent speaking slot at the Democratic convention. Yet Clinton rarely discusses Latino issues before a general audience, which has left a number of Latinos feeling taken for granted. Latino Republicans are out in the electoral trenches, hoping to lure these disenchanted members of the community away from the Democratic Party. More Latino delegates and alternates than ever before-238-attended the Republican convention in Houston, and they are pushing hard on the cultural issues. El Nuevo Herald reports that along with an emphasis on "free enterprise," Republicans are reaching out to Latino voters with their package of conservative "lifestyle" issues. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of Latinos are falling below the poverty line, and the number of single-parent households is steadily growing. The March 1990 Current Population Survey of the U.S. Census reported 23.4% of all Latino families live below the poverty line, and 23.1% have a "female householder, no husband present." Thus, class and poverty, not ethnic identity or conservative social values, could be the overriding issue this November. What does all this portend for an elusive Latino unity? As this report makes clear, there is a rich diversity of Latino cultures and politics in the United States. Perhaps, as Fuentes suggests, the first step toward unity is a recognition of that diversity.
