Why the Latino Community's Political Clout Is Rising

Spanish-speaking Latino candidate Bill Richardson looked like he'd swallowed a big burrito when asked en Espanol, "Would you be willing to promote Spanish as the second official language of the United States?"

His fellow Presidential candidates, all of whom were thrown off by and joined him in dodging this and other questions unprecedented in the annals of US political history, also looked like nervous immigrants being interrogated by ICE agents. To watch both the audacity of the questioning and the role reversal it inspired was to watch the translation of power.

Joe Garcia summed up handily the significance of Univision's* broadcast of the first-ever Spanish language Presidential debate, which took place on Sunday. "The real winner this evening is Latino power," he told me in Cubano-inflected English in between interviews with big mainstream and big Spanish language media outlets that had descended on the debate (officially called a "foro" & "forum") held at the University of Miami campus.

Garcia, a Vice President at the New Democrat Network (NDN) and head of the Miami-Dade Democratic party, was instrumental in putting together Sunday's historic event, an event he calls "a super bowl of Latino participation."

While much of the evening was spent answering questions (not debating) around Latinos' top issues (Iraq, immigration, education, US Latin America policy and others), the most important outcome of the evening was what the very visibly nervous candidates said to the audience between the lines (and what Latinos are increasingly telling themselves): "you have power."

Still a mystery to even the most seasoned political consultants (just look at their meager Spanish language ad budgets and English language ads like Dem darling Harold Ford's anti-immigrant TV messaging in 06), the Latino power displayed alongside Senators Clinton, Obama, Edwards and other candidates moves along three separate but intertwined vectors on display this evening: media power, (swing) voting power and immigrant power.

This same confluence drove last year's massive immigrant rights marches and the Latino backlash against Republicans last November, when the GOP went from getting an unprecedented 40 to 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004 to less than 29 percent.

More than just symbolic pandering aimed at a single-issue voter block long-ignored in Presidential politics, the Univision debate marks a coming-of-age of the very-politically engaged (think millions marching in the largest simultaneous marches in US history) Latino community.

Far from being the monolithic group sold to advertisers by Univision ad reps and to candidates by political consultants, Sunday's debate marks another milestone in the understanding of Latinos as a group that's as varied and complex as any other.

With a growing split of the Cuban-American vote between its historically Republican and ascendant Democratic camps and with its large populations of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and other Democrat-leaning Latino subgroups, Miami provided the perfect venue from which to project and broadcast the ascent, dynamism and complexity of Latino power.

The reasons candidates exposed themselves to the discomfort of being asked by Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas "Why not build a wall at the (US) Canada border?" have as much to do with immigration politics as they do with the fact that Latinos are no longer that little-known 2.5 million person voter block concentrated largely in California and Texas in 1980.

Today, the more than 14 million Latinos expected to vote in 2008 are sought out by the candidates because of the unique position they occupy on key parts of the Electoral College map, a map that's also dotted with more than 18 full-power Univision TV stations and more than 1800 of its cable affiliates along with hundreds of radio stations.