Mobilizing the Latino Vote

Since Latino voting in California soared in the late 1990’s, researchers have been asking why. The importance of this inquiry is obvious: with millions of Latinos either already or soon to be eligible to vote, figuring out how to motivate this community to cast ballots could well decide future state and national elections.

Rather than provide a statistical analysis of Latino voting, Lisa Garcia Bedolla analyzed attitudes toward voting and civic engagement among residents of two Latino communities: the working-class, strongly Latino identified community of East Los Angeles, and the Southern California city of Montebello, which at the time of the study in the mid-1990’s was one of the few middle-class Latino majority communities in the United States.

Standard assumptions about voting behavior lead to the assumption that the poorer East Los Angeles residents were more disenfranchised, less “vested” in the American political system, and hence less likely to vote or be involved in civic struggles. But Bedolla finds quite the opposite. Her interviews with over 100 residents during 1996-97 found that East Los Angeles residents had a greater sense of community identity, a deeper sense of Latino pride, and had social networks that were more highly politicized than the middle-class Latinos of Montebello. As a result, voter participation and civic engagement among East Los Angeles Latinos was much greater.

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