Latino Republicans in the sixties were among the first to point out that Latino loyalty allowed Democrats to take them for granted. Many Latinos hung a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt next to an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe because his New Deal had helped them find work and put food on the table, but what, those Republicans asked, had their loyalty got them? Democrats, they argued, sought their votes right before every election, only to ignore them until they needed their support again. When Richard Nixon first ran for President, in 1960, his campaign set up a job-recruitment and health center in a Latino area of Los Angeles. After his election in 1968, he hired several Latinos into his Administration, and, under the rubric of “brown capitalism,” he conceived of economic programs designed to uplift Latino communities. When he was reëlected, he became the first Republican in the postwar era to win about a third of the Latino vote, which became an expectation in the decades that followed. Eight years later, Ronald Reagan won a similar share of the Latino vote by appealing to their work ethic, anti-Communism, love of family, and faith. Thousands, like my grandfather, were convinced and became lifelong Republicans.
Political consultants, advocacy organizations, and journalists have helped to create this situation in which less Latino support for Democrats is read as failure by Latinos themselves. A Time magazine cover story in October, 1978, titled “It’s Your Turn in the Sun,” said that the growing number of Latinos guarantees that “they will play an increasingly important role in shaping the nation’s politics and policies.” It quotes Raul Yzaguirre, the director of the National Council of La Raza (now the nonprofit advocacy group UnidosUS), who declared, “The 1980s will be the decade of the Hispanics.” Around the same time, news articles started calling Latinos a “sleeping giant” that would transform American politics if they ever awakened. About two decades after the sleeping-giant cliché began circulating in the national press, the legendary Los Angeles Times journalist Frank del Olmo said it had to be slayed, in part because the Latino giant wasn’t an especially partisan one; it lumbered in different directions at once. Nevertheless, many Democrats clung to the idea that, so long as Latinos got out to vote, their increasing share of the population would overwhelmingly benefit the Party.