National political campaigns have a long and checkered history when it comes to understanding and engaging Latino voters—ranging from not thinking about them at all, to making symbolic overtures, to actively disenfranchising them. It can be tempting to talk about a single entity called the “Latino vote,” but that idea simplifies a rather complex polity of communities whose historical linkages to the United States and ties to Latin America are manifold. Latinos defied (and defy) any notion of monolithic political behavior. And yet, as historically marginalized peoples, they share with Black, Asian, and Indigenous people an equally complicated history of fighting for recognition and securing some semblance of political power.
Simultaneously, the major political parties have struggled to understand what ignites Latino communities at the polls. From donning sombreros in East Los Angeles to the jibaro pava hat in East Harlem, “cultural” strategies focused on the three main groups (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans) predominated the playbooks of both parties’ committees and their respective presidential campaigns, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. From Kennedy to Nixon, party strategists wrote a flurry of memos and reports on the “Spanish-speaking voter.” Kennedy’s strategists emphasized Catholic identity, while Nixon’s team tried to water down the Mexican American and Puerto Rican Democratic support by covertly promoting leftist Latino third-party groups.
Both parties were trying to understand a monolithic “Latino vote” that does not actually exist. But where did this conceptualization come from? Before 1960, regional, state, and municipal races drew from local organizers’ strategies to appeal to, say, Mexican Americans in Los Angeles or Puerto Ricans in the Bronx. But in national races, the “Spanish-speaking” American eluded political understandings, even as their importance increased alongside the Latino population. Realizing this, the Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson campaigns all had “Latino whisperers” among their advisors who could help parse the distinctions and inclinations among Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans. But the problem was one of language. Governments, news outlets, and corporations alike deployed catchall terms like “Spanish-speaking,” “Hispanic,” and “Latino”—to say nothing of the political ideological origins of each term—that helped congeal these diverse communities into one group. Political theorist Cristina Beltrán reminds us that part of the problem of these collective identities is that they imply “unity” when there might be none at all.
Political campaigns’ misguided efforts did not extinguish Latino voters’ desire for electoral power, with grassroots registration drives springing up within communities. Historian Max Krochmal has detailed how political currents in Texas led to the formation of an important 1974 drive to create the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. In 1976, Mario Vizcaino, chairman of the Cuban National Planning Council, spoke to the many Cuban refugees who lacked a political voice due to the lengthy red tape to attain citizenship when he told the Miami Herald, “We have taxation without representation.” In 1970s New York City, Puerto Ricans increased their electoral power, according to historian Sonia Lee, through a “leadership that conceptualized bilingual education [and bilingualism] as the base of a Puerto Rican–specific civil rights agenda and paved the way for its construction as an exclusively Hispanic program.” A decade’s worth of tactical collaborations and of civil suits by Puerto Rican and Mexican American legal defense organizations to challenge the discriminatory exclusions of English-only ballots led to the historic 1975 amendment to the Voting Rights Act, mandating the availability of bilingual voting materials.
Gains made to increase the Latino electorate in the 1970s did not translate to political power in the decades that followed. A well-funded nativist movement arose that promoted anti-Latino policies in the form of antibilingualism, draconian border enforcement, denial of federal and state services, fearmongering about “overpopulation,” and criminalization of undocumented immigrants. This movement tried to sway both parties by donating money to candidates all too willing to accept it. The Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, to varying degrees, kept company with nativist groups while simultaneously trying to increase Latino support. In 1984, Ronald Reagan ran a national Hispanic campaign in his reelection bid that, as historian Geraldo Cadava explained, “combined his aggressive foreign policy with appeals to their religious traditionalism and belief in free-market capitalism.” Yet Reagan’s foreign policy led to increased immigration by new groups, who not only changed the face of Latino communities but impacted local and global politics.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, voter drive canvassers had to become highly conversant in local and global matters of concern to Latinos. No perfect calibration of positions on taxes, immigration, affirmative action, and foreign policy guaranteed a person’s vote. Demographic shifts deepened this challenge as new immigration altered the makeup of Latino communities. Central Americans, mainly Salvadorans and Guatemalans, began settling in San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Midwest, and DC. Latino political culture was further altered by Dominicans arriving in New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, as well as indigenous Mexicans and Black Caribbeans. Canvassers working in distinct locales from El Paso, Texas, to Jackson Heights in Queens, New York, in the 1980s noted the fluidity of local and global politics in the living rooms of this diverse polity of peoples.
In a 1984 resolution, the Washington-based League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) identified some of what canvassers were seeing with respect to US foreign policy in the barrios of Latino USA. “The political and economic stability of Central American countries has direct implications for every American, but most importantly for the Hispanic community.” This mattered, they argued, because “they are fellow Hispanics who have suffered overwhelmingly for decades from the lack of political rights and economic opportunity. While their struggle is much more intense and difficult to overcome, it is one which we Hispanics share in the United States.” LULAC authored a resolution to denounce Reagan’s foreign policy in Central America and promote humane migratory pathways to those fleeing its violence.
In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, officials in both parties finally realized that “costume politics” was no substitute for substantial grassroots voter outreach and soon hired proven and experienced canvassers for Latino outreach efforts. The Democrats hired Andy Hernandez, an organizer who had cut his teeth with the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. The Republicans empowered Cuban American lawyer Alberto Cardenas to craft a voter outreach plan that would expand beyond the power base of South Florida to reach Latinos in Louisiana, Colorado, and California, particularly on issues related to Reagan’s hawkish position on fighting communism in Central America. As historian Benjamin Francis-Fallon has recounted, Cardenas argued his messaging, which looked beyond the Mexican American majority, could potentially turn out Latino Republican voters in Democratic strongholds like Illinois, New Jersey, and New York.
Yet engaging the diversifying distinct groups within Latino USA continued to confound the two parties. During the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as convention goers danced the “Macarena,” immigrant rights activists protested Bill Clinton’s punitive policies against undocumented immigrants. They were inspired by a wave of immigrant-led rebellions and marches that had arisen in the 1980s and early 1990s. One such flash point came in May 1991, when the Salvadoran community in Washington, DC, rebelled violently against police brutality, forcing the city to confront the systemic disenfranchisement of poor and working-class Latin American immigrants with no ability to vote.
It’s against this backdrop that conversations around the so-called “Latino vote” should be situated. These conversations are not new but have taken on renewed significance since the 2016 election. Pundits have been playing catch-up on measuring the impact and direction of the Latino vote: that year, prognosticators evoked either shock or predictability in learning of the significant outpouring of Latino support for Donald Trump, a candidate who delivered a more bombastic version of the very playbook that anti-Latino nativists crafted back in the 1980s.
Historians are not in the business of predictions, but some very recent and simple analysis of national campaigns show that the costume politics of yesteryear remain with us today. In the 2024 campaign, both parties have dusted off old playbooks: tour the candidate through X and Y barrios; make buttons that say “Viva” this and “Adelante” that; be seen with popular Latino performer here and there; and teach the candidate a few choice words in Spanish that can be uttered during a rally. Anti-immigrant fervor remains a central thread of our 21st-century politics, shaping the discourse on the left, center, and right. But with each election, questions remain: Can campaigns raise policy issues separate from immigration that animate the very different constituencies that compose the “Latino vote”? How will they address the differing viewpoints on the economy, health care, housing, affordability, the military, and foreign policy that concern the vast polity of Latino voters? And lastly, for historians of US politics, what clarity might we glean on the enigma of the “Latino vote” across history, a group composed of aspiring citizens whose political behavior—and potential linkages across diverse Latino ethnic politics—deserves exploration? Easy answers are hard to come by, but the significance of these questions grows only larger, and more perplexing, with each passing election cycle.