By JOSE de la ISLA, Hispanic Link News Service
Fifty-seven years ago, the election of Dwight Eisenhower marked the first mainstream recognition of Hispanics as a constituency in presidential elections.
The 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, when Mexican Americans played a major role in turning Texas, demonstrated the pivotal role some Latino groups could play in presidential contests.
In 1975, President Gerald Ford allowed an amended Civil Rights Act to cross his desk. It included the Southwestern states, where widespread voter abuse, intimidation and disenfranchisement were legendary.
In 1976, Latinos were major contributors to the election of Jimmy Carter in Texas and in Ohio.
During the decades since the 1950s, the Latino population was changing — by age, education, ethnicities, national origin, geographical spread and religious affiliations. Individual issues segmented the Hispanic identity but not the understanding of itself as a community, a constituency, and a source for leadership.
Yet in 2006, when Republicans in Congress unleashed a brutal anti-immigrant bill intending to criminalize individuals and to split families apart by place of birth and punish people who rendered aid to those in distress, more than immigration was on the line.
It was a fundamental challenge to U.S. values, as much as torture had been. The pogrom-like proposal — officially encouraging persecution — will fill future textbooks about the reckless abandon of the early 2000s.
Some of the pogrom’s enthusiasm was curbed by the fledgling election successes of Latinos in municipalities, state government and Congress, much of which was made possible by the Civil Rights Act.
During this time, middle-class Hispanics, who were forgetting old grievances about ethnic and social-status prejudices, were jolted back to reality. They saw how discriminatory practices were expressed through licensing drivers, renting homes, liability insurance, schooling, profiling and job applications to further disadvantage immigrants, documented as well as undocumented.
Sanctions intended for the poor and the downtrodden affected how most all Latinos were perceived. The Latino middle class had to rethink its standing in the community. It was not immune from anachronistic stereotyping and just plain ignorance by many fellow citizens who seemed to have autistic trouble perceiving outside their own narrow habitats. The prejudice their parents and grandparents had talked about was back.
That was the great eye-opener after the election of 2004. Latino constituencies decided not to give their vote away to double-crossing political parties.
This is a different country now. Today 5,129 Latinos hold elective or appointive public office. They have many thousands of colleagues with whom to form political alliances. Things went too far in the first decade of the 2000s.
That was the tension when Barack Obama swept into office in 2008 with the highest Latino voter participation yet. It carried with it several pivotal states. Although Latinos had helped elect presidents before, this was the first time many in the media noticed.
The 2009 nomination and confirmation of Sonya Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court completed some unfinished business at the highest level.
For more than five decades, a bedrock community goal has been about having its values and perspectives represented in adequate proportions in the chambers of government. The concept is as fundamental as democracy itself.
Now that the precedent for a representative foundation has been laid, it’s time to begin.
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Desire alone won’t cut it.
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