By Javier Rodríguez from La Plaza del Mariachi
Nov. 18, 2013
If you are not part of the 50% Facebook users who post and reveal their superficial concerns continuously and tirelessly (sounds like me, Jesús Garza ... Javi has got me pegged) - to the chagrined of the other half after reading this piece, you may or will probably begin to observe Massachusetts Junior Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s intrepid but profound leadership in the US Senate. Recently, in a move that’s totally out of the ordinary, she tested the waters in confronting the “AS USUAL PRO BIG BUSINESS MINDSET IN THE CAPITOL,” by questioning a trio of federal watch dogs who were providing a report to a Senate Committee that oversees corporate $million and $billion mal practice against the 99%, otherwise known as white collar crime.
According to reports, the Senator subtlety, from the side, asked the regulators, “what efforts were being conducted to uncover potential criminal activities in this case.” The question hit like a bucket of cold water. For a moment, you could hear a pin drop in the chamber. The bureaucrats froze, paused and stammered.
As the American people know quite well, with hardly any exceptions, these criminals never end up in prison, but rather, are always bailed out by “Agency Settlements” which are in real terms “diminutive fines” that do not correspond to the crimes committed. Usually in question, are funds stolen from society by sidetracking government regulations. Because of this and similar political moves, Warren is charmingly referred to as a “populist” in media circles, a label that sticks on the forehead of public opinion.
The magnitude of the corporate crimes has reached astronomical proportions. According to one source, there are over 300,000 such cases on file. We just witnessed a settlement of several billion dollars against JP Morgan. Recall that in the beginnings of the Iraq war, Halliburton defrauded us to the tune of $180 million and who knows how much more and what was given back. Then, the latest, the financial thieves that brought us the last and ongoing housing crisis from where we have yet to recover. This one is considered the largest transfer of wealth in American history, in the trillions, where Latinos lost 66% of their properties, African Americans about 50% and Whites 19%, and this, the grandest of all theft is well documented. To add molten volcano lava to the injury, incredibly, their businesses were bailed out by our social treasury. As with everything else since the advent of capitalism, this round of frauds and the profits were privatized but the resolution, to save the day, was socialized and paid for by the 99%. On top of it, they get $82 billion in annual government subsidies and as the 2012 presidential campaign reaffirmed, they pay less taxes than their secretaries.
The ruling class is legally armored by hundreds of years of accumulated capitalist law so as to never have to worry about going to prison or facing the death chamber for defrauding “tens and even hundreds of millions of people at a time, always causing impoverishment as a rule and death in many instances.”
In the ranks of conscientious radical trade unionists in America, the simplest and highly sarcastic way of defining the pro corporate mindset during union organizing campaigns is the fact that Senator Warren appears not to wear carpet layer kneecaps to properly kneel in front of the ruling class or their emissaries, nor does she use the injected silicone to enlarge the lips, to properly be able to practice corporate kissing.
Worldwide, the populist label is also a definite favorite of corporate media to disdainfully define the social and democratically elected governments and their leaders who dare challenge the powerful capitalist class, the classist judicial system and the bureaucrats, judges, politicians and the desk journalists behind it.
A good comparative involves the eight independent Latin American governments who do not adhere to the dogmatic doctrine of bowing to the global empire and the negotiated Free Trade Agreements, which of course are not free, but obscene profit oriented venues to submit the poorer countries into giving up their economic independence and solvency. One of the glaring examples of the negotiated Free Trade inequality are the prohibited subsidies to farmers of the third world, but not to those of the Western block, which reserve an inherent and unquestionable right, astonishingly, even in the written agreements, a la bravota pues, to help their farm corporations outbid the native farmers of Mexico -the historical and submissive el traspatio, the backyard of America-. Since the onset of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexican farmers and campesinos have been driven into miserable economic conditions, forcing them, by the millions, to sell their lands and to migrate to the north. Prior to the agreement, the Carlos Salinas de Gortari Administration predictably forced a constitutional amendment that restructured and privatized farm land ownership in Mexico.
In the case of the selling of NAFTA, the marketing campaign message pedaled by the Mexican government to convince public opinion in Canada, Mexico and the US, including the growing US Mexican Latino population, to support it, was a banger repeated hundreds of times by the corporate media, “NAFTA will elevate Mexico to the status of the first world,” and unabashedly, sin pelos en la lengua, affirmed, “Mexican immigration to the north will stop” forever and ever in fantasy land. which became effective on 1 January 1994,
Salinas and President Bill Clinton waged a successful campaign that recruited what I coined then in an Op-Ed column “the nascent Latino Political Class.” It was as I recalled, a short list made up then of NCLR, NALEO, MALDEF, LULAC, SWVREP, a host of Latino appointed and elected leaders led by LA Supervisor Gloria Molina, then considered the most powerful Latina politician in the country and finally the most prominent Latino Media Corporations, La Opinion, Univision, and Telemundo. Interestingly, because of its twelve year relationship with the PRI and the fact they has also served as advisors to the Mexican Government and the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, the now extinct One Stop Immigration of LA and its national network was also an integral member of the Latino Pro NAFTA Coalition. All this in the context of the 1988 mega electoral fraud with the infamous tree day computer meltdown, that installed Salinas in the presidency to preside over the continuity of Neo-Liberalism in Mexico, begun in 1982 with Miguel de la Madrid. On the American side George Bush began the first round of negotiations, but upon his defeat, the process continued with Democrat Bill Clinton.
The Harvard schooled Salinas understood the psychology of the Latino establishment and invested millions to bring them on aboard the NAFTA project. A Latino public relations firm headed by former Governor Anaya of New Mexico was hired to do the bidding on the air and on the ground. The chosen organization to promote the popular Latino support nationally was Southwest Voters Registration and Educational Project SWVREP and the key figure that lead the successful drive for the Mexican government was its director, Antonio Gonzalez, also founder of the Latino Congreso in 2006. However the ideologue on his side was Dr. Raul Hinojosa and his assistant Dr. Armando Vazquez Ramos. The Coalition organized three public conferences, presented as neutral gatherings in Los Angeles and San Antonio, but the die had been cast with a hidden agenda.
The debate around NAFTA in the US ensued and intensified in 1992-93 and on the side of the Mexican left opposing the agreement were two of Mexico’s most prominent speakers and columnists of the time, Jorge Castaneda and Adolfo Aguilar Zinzer. They toured the US, published several op-ed pieces in the national newspapers and also entered the national conversation talk shows.
Because of my lengthy involvement in the Mexico solidarity work since 1968 I wrote a scathing column against NAFTA that I published in February 1992 in the LA Times, La Opinion and other venues, which as I recall was titled, “Is Mexico Co-opting Latino Leaders?” Besides outlining the contradictions of inequality of the neo liberal tool, my angle primarily centered on the cooptation of the Latino leadership by the Mexican government. The topic had an extensive history which moved rapidly during the Luis Echeverria administration of 1970-76 and finally crystallized with Salinas. It was an aggressive campaign of dining and wining and national awards to Cesar Chavez, Gloria Molina, etc.
We debated on the pages of the mentioned newspapers and also on radio and TV, but to no avail, it was a battle of deafs/fue una Guerra de sordos. What was at stake for the Empire was the advancement of capitalist globalization and neo liberalism and the Free Trade Agreement were key components. For Mexico it was consolidating the nation as a regional leader and winning the coveted North American markets. For the Latino Establishment, NAFTA was a first step to wage a successful national political campaign with the nod of both the Mexican and US governments. Gonzalez for a time became a sort of Latino King Pin. As former Senator Art Torres put it back in the 90s, “Antonio has become quite important, he has access to President Clinton’s private line.”
Was the sacrifice worth it? Mexico’s province was corporatized, millions were torn from their lands, their jobs and their families. With the dogmatic and continued implementation of the economic model by successive Mexicans governments, assisted by the latest electoral mega frauds -which by the way were orchestrated by American and Spanish election engineers- against leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, poverty has grown spectacularly to the tune of 50 plus millions; 29% of the work force is employed in the informal economy(street vendors); the war has ravished the rule of law; We have yet to make it to the First World; immigration continues unabated and death by the thousands accompanies it; and the Republicans won’t let loose of reform with a path to citizenship.
I am hopeful that the future stock of DREAMers may come in the form of “Elizabeth” Rodriguez, Mateo, Sanchez, Romero, etc., etc. ZAZ
*Javier Rodriguez is a journalist, a blogger and a media and political strategist. A long time social activist, he is presently a co-founder of the Millions of Voices Coalition in LA that on Sept. 22 moved thousands of people in Downtown LA for Immigration Reform. He was also the initiator and directed the making of the 1.7 million historical immigration march in Los Angeles on March 25, 2006, as well as the May 1st 2006 Great American Boycott. Back in 1982-86, he directed the mass street mobilizations in LA that led up to the Amnesty Law IRCA of 1986; He recently traveled for 5 ½ months thru Mexico in 2012, observing and writing about the country’s political process, the aftermath of a highly questioned presidential election, the drug war and migrants. His blog is Larayueladejavier.wordpress.com and his email bajolamiradejavier@yahoo.com
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Performance, Art and Activism, a panel discussion on the legacy of El Centro Cultural de la Gente, will be held Sept. 25 at 6 pm at San José State University. The event is free and open to the public at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Room 225/229. A reception will follow in the Cultural Heritage Center (Fifth Floor).
In 1973, El Centro Cultural de la Gente came to life in an abandoned storefront near First and San Carlos Streets — where the Federal Building now stands. The cultural center became the epicenter for Chicana and Chicano artistic and political activism during the turbulent 1970s. The panelists will elaborate how “El Centro” informed arts production in San José and beyond.
The panel members include:
Teresa Castellanos - Moderator: Teresa currently serves as the coordinator of Immigrant Relations and Integration Services for Santa Clara County’s Office of Human Relations. She has a 25-year history of working on immigration issues through government, labor and community based organizations such as Justice for Janitors and the Health Workers Union and Catholic Charities.
Mary Jane Solis: Mary Jane has been involved in arts organizations that promote social justice and continues to support Latino art and artists in our community. She is a founding member of MACLA (Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americano) and is the former vice chair of the City of San José Arts Commission where she championed multicultural arts development.
Felipe Rodríguez: Felipe has performed for more than 50 years. Coming from an amazing family of activists and performers, it was natural for Felipe to sing and play his guitar in church, on stage and on the picket line.
Adrian Tepehua Vargas: Active in Silicon Valley’s artistic and cultural movement for over 35 years as a theatre and film director, playwright, actor, musician, and producer. For 10 years he directed San José’s former Teatro de la Gente and was co- founder of El Centro Cultural de la Gente.
Elisa Marina Alvarado: Elisa is the founding member and Artistic Director of the 29-year-old Teatro Visión. She has been active in the Chicano movement for over 40 years as an actress, director and community organizer. Elisa has taught theater for Teatro Visión, San José State University, San Francisco State University and many community organizations.
The panel discussion will take place in conjunction with Jesús Manuel Mena Garza’s exhibition, A Chicano Photographer’s Journey: 1970 to the Present. Garza will give a presentation at 3 pm of his documentary images in the same room.
Location and Time:
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, SJSU
Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2013, Room 225/229, Second Floor
150 East San Fernando Street, San José, CA 95112
6 to 7:30 pm with reception to follow
Free and open to the Public
Sponsored by the MLK Library; SJSU School of Journalism and Mass Communication; the Cesar E. Chavez Community Action Center – SJSU Associated Students; Department of Mexican American Studies; and SJSU’s Chicano/Latino Faculty & Staff Association
Why the success of Latino faculty and students is critical.
Article by Anne-Marie Nuñez and Elizabeth Murakami-Ramalho
Photo by Jesús Manuel Mena Garza
In 2010, Maria Hernandez Ferrier was inaugurated as the first president of the new Texas A&M University campus in San Antonio. To celebrate the inauguration of a Latina college president, one of the few in the nation, a group of Latinas, including many local professors, took part in the formal procession. This group of women received special recognition, both during the ceremony and in the media. The city’s main newspaper, the San Antonio Express News, noted, “About 60 local Latina women who hold doctorates attended the ceremony in full academic regalia to support Ferrier and to show their numbers in the academic community.”
Latina faculty are rarely visible in this way. Only 4 percent of tenured or tenure-track female faculty members in the United States are Latina (78 percent are white, 7 percent are African American, and 7 percent are Asian American), and only 3 percent of female full professors are Latina. The gathering of Latina faculty at Ferrier’s inauguration illustrated the potential for a critical mass of Latinas to come together in one place to support one another in the academy. Dressed in full academic regalia, they represented the possibility of access to privileged positions in the professoriate. Indeed, some wide-eyed passersby who saw them lining up in the procession asked, “So, are you all really professors?” They were proof that Latinas, and Latinos more generally, can and do make it to the academy, despite their generally limited access to higher education opportunities, particularly baccalaureate and postbaccalaureate degrees.
Demographic Transformation
Although Latino enrollment in higher education has increased as the US Latino population has grown (Latinos now outnumber African Americans), more often than not Latinos begin their college education in community colleges or less selective four-year institutions—institutional types with lower persistence and completion rates in general. Moreover, the broader political, economic, and social climate in the United States has become increasingly hostile for Latinos as new policies opposed to immigrant rights, affirmative action, and ethnic studies programs have emerged. After the Arizona legislature passed a law (currently being challenged by the federal government) to broaden the capacity of state personnel to detain and request identification from any person perceived to be an illegal immigrant, several more states, including Alabama, launched initiatives to increase surveillance of immigrants and deny them public services, including K–12 and higher education. Affirmative action policies have been banned in some key states where Latinos are concentrated, leading to drops in application and enrollment rates at flagship and selective public universities.
Even when they are accepted to a university, Latinos are often denied opportunities to connect with their cultural backgrounds and to communicate in Spanish. Ethnic studies programs and courses, including Chicano studies, sometimes struggle for support and legitimacy. Arizona’s legislature has gone so far as to ban the teaching of ethnic studies in K–12 schools. This challenge to ethnic studies has been particularly targeted at Chicano studies, despite evidence that Latino students who participate in these programs actually have higher educational achievement than those who do not and high school graduation rates on par with those of their white counterparts.
Although educational research suggests that dual-language K–12 programs are effective in helping English learner (EL) students—defined as students who do not speak English well enough yet to be considered proficient—to learn languages and to improve in broader content areas such as math, these programs have been effectively prohibited in Arizona, California, and Massachusetts. Even when Latino EL students enter college, they often must enroll in remedial courses and struggle to achieve full literacy and academic success.
It is not surprising, then, that according to a recent Pew Hispanic Center survey, two-thirds of Latinos report that discrimination against Latinos in schools is a major social problem. Latinos mention schools more often than workplaces or other public places as sites of discrimination. A Pew Research Center survey suggests that Americans from all racial and ethnic groups currently believe that Latinos are the group that experiences the most social discrimination. Unfortunately, much research has shown that, as it has for African Americans, such discrimination can negatively affect Latinos’ academic achievement, engagement, and sense of belonging in K–12 and higher education.
Demographic Dividend
Although the number of Latino students in US higher education has increased in recent decades, and Latinos have now surpassed African Americans as the largest minority group in US higher education (currently constituting 22 percent of total enrollment), Latinos as a group still have the lowest educational attainment of any racial or ethnic group. According to Pew Hispanic Center data, only about 13 percent of Latinos age twenty-five and over hold college degrees (compared with 18 percent of African Americans, 31 percent of whites, and 50 percent of Asian Americans). Latinos consequently tend to work in low-skill occupations. Pew data show that only about half as many Latinos (19 percent) as whites (39 percent) are employed in management, science, engineering, law, education, entertainment, the arts, and health care.
This is sobering news, considering that by 2050, Latinos will represent the main source of population growth and are projected to make up 30 percent of the US population. Moreover, Latinos are overrepresented in the youth population: about 17 percent of Latinos, compared with 10 percent of non-Latino whites, are under the age of eighteen. In California and Texas, Latinos represent half of all public K–12 students.
Sociologist Marta Tienda contends that the increasing Latino youth population could offer this country a “demographic dividend,” contributing to future economic productivity as the overall US population ages. President Obama, sensitive to this issue, highlighted the importance of supporting Latinos when he authorized funding for the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics in 2010: “This is not just a Latino problem, this is an American problem.”
Education scholars Patricia Gandara and Frances Contreras, in the title of their 2009 book, coined the term “Latino education crisis.” During the past two decades, they and other pioneering higher education researchers—including Estela Bensimon, Sylvia Hurtado, Amaury Nora, Michael Olivas, Laura Rendon, and Daniel Solorzano—have documented the many barriers to postsecondary educational attainment for Latinos: limited academic preparation, difficulty navigating the college environment, financial concerns, exclusionary college climates. Latino college students tend to come from high schools with few resources to prepare students for college. Many are the first in their families to attend college, so they are sometimes unfamiliar with strategies for managing college responsibilities. Latino students also often are reluctant to take on loans, in part because of the financial and familial responsibilities they already have during college. They are more likely than other students to be employed and to work full time to finance their college education, so they may have less time to devote to their studies.
The broader political climate can also make it difficult for Latino students to find a sense of belonging in their college communities. Vulnerability to stereotypes about Latinos, such as those that are increasingly depicted in the media, can have a negative effect on Latino students’ academic achievement in college as well as their college completion rates.
Improving the Campus Climate
Although Latinos constitute about one in six Americans and more than one-fifth of the undergraduate students enrolled in US higher education, they make up less than 5 percent of the professoriate. Latino college students tend to complete bachelor’s degrees at lower rates than members of other racial and ethnic groups, leading to lower rates of graduate degree enrollment, doctoral degree completion, and faculty employment. Latino faculty will continue to be largely invisible unless universities make concerted efforts to recruit and retain them. At least two decades of research on diversity in higher education indicate that increasing the presence of Latino faculty in higher education is critical to promoting Latino students’ educational attainment. Latino faculty understand the cultural backgrounds of Latino students and can serve as role models for them.
However, increasing the numbers of Latino faculty and students in the academy (as well as members of other historically underrepresented groups) is not enough to ensure their success or build a community. Intentional efforts must also be made to maximize the benefits of diversity. As Daryl Smith notes in her 2009 book Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education: Making It Work, efforts to build a diverse faculty often focus on the recruitment of faculty members from historically underrepresented groups but underemphasize the importance of retaining and promoting them.
The Dual Challenge for Latinas
The research of higher education scholar Caroline Turner and others explores the dual challenges of being women and being Latina in the academy. As Joya Misra, Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, Elissa Holmes, and Stephanie Agiomavritis documented in a recentAcademe article on service work, women often face institutionalized sexism and are expected to take on additional professional responsibilities, such as uncompensated university service, that impede their ability to advance from the junior to the senior faculty ranks. Because of their dual status as women and as members of an underrepresented group, Latinas are more likely to encounter racism, stereotyping, lack of mentoring, tokenism, uneven promotion, and inequitable salaries when entering the academy. Research has documented the stereotypes that Latina faculty often encounter: some are told by colleagues that they are particularly articulate, or that they speak English well, implying that this is atypical, while others have described instances where students, other faculty members, or staff members have assumed that they are service workers or anything but professors.
These experiences send the message that Latinas do not belong in the academy. Moreover, although crossgender and cross-race mentoring can be extremely beneficial, the dearth of senior Latina faculty means that junior faculty are less likely than others to find role models who can give them guidance about how to navigate these specific challenges.
Our Strategy for Supporting Latinas
When we began our first faculty positions in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio, a Hispanic-serving institution whose enrollment is 45 percent Latino, we found that only seven out of fifty-seven, or just 12 percent, of the female professors in our school of education were tenured Latinas. Similarly, while just under one-quarter of undergraduates in Texas’s public institutions are Latino, only 6 percent of tenured faculty members at these same institutions come from Latino backgrounds. Our school’s figures exceed the 2.8 percent national figure for Latina tenured faculty representation among female professors, but it is nonetheless a remarkably low figure, considering the racial and ethnic makeup of our university and our city, the latter of which has a majority (63 percent) Latino population.
Since beginning our faculty positions, we have been part of a group of junior Latina faculty in the school of education called Research for the Education and Advancement of Latinos (REAL). Members of REAL, which was established in 2005, share research interests in broadening opportunities for Latinos at all stages of education. Members come from different disciplines and study topics ranging from early childhood education to higher education. We meet regularly to discuss our experiences and to share strategies for managing our careers and other responsibilities, including how to assemble promotion and tenure files and how to choose service commitments. We also talk about gender roles and balancing familial caretaking responsibilities.
Sometimes we simply meet over lunch to catch up on one another’s personal and professional lives. Other times, we travel to a formal retreat center, a rented house, or a group member’s house to spend a weekend writing and socializing. At a typical retreat, REAL faculty members will scatter around the space, each taking up a room or a corner with her laptop, working on manuscripts until the late afternoon. Retreat evenings are spent socializing.
In addition to this peer mentoring, we have several senior Latina faculty members who are the organization’s madrinas (godmothers). They have helped clarify the requirements and expectations for promotion and tenure at our institution and have offered advice on how to handle our varied duties as faculty members.
As part of this effort, we now have subgroups that pursue common research agendas. The associated research and writing projects have resulted in the publication of peer-reviewed articles on a wide range of topics. For example, one pair in the group has edited a special issue of a journal that addresses P–20 (prekindergarten through graduate school) partnerships, bridging scholarship of two distinct sectors of education that typically are not coordinated. Another pair has advanced scholarship on how K–12 school leaders can target the needs of EL students through initiatives such as dual-language programs. These experiences have allowed us to work across disciplines and connect diverse bodies of scholarship.
We have also collected and analyzed data about our experiences in the group for journal articles and national conferences. Our articles address Latina faculty members’ experiences of belonging and marginalization in the academy, the development of a Chicana perspective on peer mentoring, pedagogical strategies in Hispanic-serving institutions, and other topics.
Our initiative offers a sense of community for Latina scholars. Moreover, several of us have received tenure while being part of this group; the majority of our group now consists of tenured faculty members who have navigated the tenure process together. All but one of our members have stayed at the institution, and the one who left eventually returned, saying she valued the supportive climate of our university and of REAL.
We have been asked many times about how we have built this supportive academic space. We would offer the following advice to faculty members interested in forming organizations like ours:
· Find a group of like-minded individuals and meet in ways that do not require extensive time commitments (such as brown-bag lunches).
· Identify lead organizers (having two or three individuals in this role may help distribute the efforts involved).
· Determine common research goals.
· Find an institutional home (for REAL, this was the university’s Women’s Studies Institute).
· Investigate the possibility of internal grant funding (we secured a university grant to conduct our first retreat).
· Find other creative ways to share or obtain resources to support the organization’s efforts (for example, we have sometimes shared our own homes as retreat spaces or have been given access to retreat spaces by senior faculty madrinas).
· Get the “buy-in” of senior faculty and administrators.
A Collective Responsibility
In her 2011 keynote speech at the annual meeting of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education, Rachel Moran, dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, described overhearing an elementary school teacher say about her as a young Mexican American child, “Such a bright girl. Too bad there’s no future for her.”
Moran’s success indicates that the future for Latinos in the academy is bright if and when they are afforded the appropriate opportunities. Echoing many other leading scholars and advocates for the educational advancement of Latinos, Moran emphasized the need for political will to advance Latino success in higher education in the face of significant economic, social, and political barriers.
In mobilizing this political will, Latino faculty cannot undertake the tasks of building more inclusive campus climates or promoting Latino postsecondary attainment alone. While we encourage Latino faculty and others from historically underrepresented groups to form support systems such as the one we have described, we recognize that Latinos at most other institutions do not have the significant presence they have at our university.
Efforts at recruiting Latino faculty and students must be coordinated with initiatives to involve college leadership. Because Latino faculty and administrators tend to be underrepresented in leadership roles, high-level administrators from all backgrounds must share the responsibility for creating institutional support systems for Latino faculty and students. As the work of Sylvia Hurtado, Daryl Smith, Caroline Turner, and others demonstrates, maximizing the benefits of a diverse faculty and student body must be a clearly articulated goal aligned with concrete strategies across different units. Institutional leaders can provide a variety of resources to support an active community of scholars of color. Developing and sustaining systems of senior faculty and peer mentoring can help make the promotion and tenure process, as well as the dynamics of institutional culture, more transparent for incoming junior faculty. In addition, as Sylvia Hurtado and Jessica Sharkness noted in their article in the September–October 2008 issue of Academe, implementing a reward system that recognizes faculty members’ service to the broader community can provide affirmation and incentives for this kind of work.
Several Hispanic-serving institutions, including our own, have been successful at graduating large numbers of Latino students, as well as large numbers of Latinos in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Scholars from the University of Southern California’s Center for Urban Education and other institutions currently are conducting research to identify what productive Hispanic-serving institutions are doing to promote Latino education in the sciences. Faculty members and administrators in other institutions can learn from what these institutions are doing to promote degree completion, particularly in the STEM fields.
A senior Latino professor who has been with our institution for more than thirty years recently said to us, “I wish I was going to be around to see what happens as Latinos continue to grow in the population. I won’t be around to see it, but you will. You are lucky that you will be able to.”
While concerns about Latino educational access may not be of interest to everyone in this anti-immigrant climate, the positive economic implications of promoting Latino educational advancement are clear. The Latino educational crisis can be transformed into an opportunity to make an investment in the educational fate of Latinos, which is inextricably tied with the future of this country. The academy can play an important role in this effort.
Anne-Marie Nuñez is assistant professor of higher education at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research explores the individual and institutional factors that affect college access and completion, particularly for students from Latino, first-generation, and migrant backgrounds. Her e-mail address is annemarienunez@utsa.edu.
Elizabeth Murakami-Ramalho is associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research agenda includes successful leadership for Latino populations and urban and international issues in educational leadership. Her e-mail address is elizabeth.murakami@utsa.edu.
The American Prospect
By Abby Rapoport
Progressive Texans just might lead a Democratic revival in the ultimate red state. Here's how.
Shortly before the Battleground Texas tour stopped in Austin’s old AFL-CIO building in early April, the sky opened up. Thunder and lightning raged, parts of the city flooded, and traffic came to a standstill. But Democrats kept arriving, some dripping wet, others clutching umbrellas rarely used in the city, and the meeting room soon filled with about 100 folks, some no doubt drawn by curiosity. Launched in February by two of Team Obama’s hotshot organizers, Battleground Texas was promising to inject into the nation’s biggest Republican stronghold the grassroots field tactics—the volunteer-organizing, the phone-banking and door-knocking, the digital savvy—that won the 2012 presidential election. After years of national Democrats seeing Texas as hopelessly red, what made this fledgling group think it could turn the state blue?
Jenn Brown, Battleground Texas’s executive director, was pleasantly surprised by the turnout. But the 31-year-old California native, who projects the energy and enthusiasm of a camp counselor, knew she had some convincing to do. As one attendee put it, “We’re suffering from battered-spouse syndrome. We believe it is impossible to win.” The situation for Texas Democrats has been as gloomy as the day’s weather. The party hasn’t won a single statewide race since 1996—a 100-campaign losing streak. Republicans dominate the state legislature. Mitt Romney carried the state by more than 1.2 million votes. For nearly two decades, the Texas Democratic Party has been the political equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters’ perennial patsies, the Washington Generals.
But the people leading Battleground Texas are proven winners. Brown headed up Barack Obama’s field operation in Ohio, which turned out 100,000 more African American voters in 2012 than in 2008. Battleground Texas founder and senior advisor Jeremy Bird, a 34-year-old Missouri native, is the wonky wunderkind who, as Obama’s national field director, oversaw the campaign’s state-of-the-art turnout operation. They’ve been joined by young, native Texan organizers such as Christina Gomez, formerly with the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, and Cliff Walker, who ran the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee. Bird and Brown got interested in Texas, they say, during the 2012 campaign. Bird was wowed by the enthusiasm of Texas volunteers, who made 400,000 calls to Florida voters in the last three days before the election. Brown says that wherever she went during the campaign, Obama staffers from Texas would talk excitedly about the potential for organizing the state, given its rapidly changing demographics.
Since their effort launched in February, they’ve seen more encouraging signs. Attendance was strong on Battleground Texas’s 14-city getting-to-know-you tour, which stopped in both Democrat-friendly places like Austin and San Antonio and Republican strongholds like Waco and Lubbock. By mid-April, Battleground Texas already had more Facebook friends—23,000—than the Texas GOP. Its organizers refuse to comment on the group’s funding sources, but the state’s biggest Democratic donor, Steve Mostyn, has agreed to help the group raise its estimated $10 million annual budget. As of April, there were ten paid staffers, more than the state Democratic Party employs, with additional hires on the way.
While Governor Rick Perry laughed off the effort to turn Texas blue as “the biggest pipe dream I have ever heard,” other Republican leaders are giving Battleground Texas free publicity by decrying it as a coven of dangerous outside agitators—“masters of the slimy dark arts of campaigning,” state Republican Party Chair Steve Munisteri wrote in a fundraising letter. Speaking at a lunch in Waco, Attorney General Greg Abbott called the arrival of Team Obama members “a new assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons. The threat that we’re getting is the threat from the Obama administration and his political machine.”
For a fledgling effort, Battleground Texas has already become a national media darling, prominently featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Bloomberg News. In February, Bird even had a guest turn on The Colbert Report, where the host described him as “the man behind Obama’s minority outreach-around.” It’s easy to see why there’s so much interest. If Texas were to become a competitive state, the impact on national politics would be enormous. Without the state’s 38 electoral votes, Republicans would find it virtually impossible to win presidential elections with the current national map. Even the threat of losing Texas would influence a presidential contest. If the GOP has to start fighting for votes in such an enormous state—with 20 media markets—it will drain resources the party could devote to other battlegrounds.
No state has greater potential for Democrats. Texas is already “majority-minority,” with Latinos making up 38 percent of the population and African Americans 12 percent. According to the state demographer, the number of Latinos will surpass the number of whites in the next decade; by 2040, 52 percent of the state will be Latino, and 27 percent will be white. Between just 2012 and 2016, about a million additional Latinos in Texas will become eligible to vote. But that’s been the trouble for Democrats: Latinos aren’t voting. Forty-seven percent of eligible Latinos have not even registered. In 2010, when Perry won re-election, the Latino turnout rate was an anemic 16 percent, about half the typical Latino turnout in New Mexico. An analysis by the Houston Chronicle shows that if Latinos voted at the same rate as whites, the state would already be a toss-up.
So while Battleground Texas aims to make inroads with other groups—including white women, who are overwhelmingly Republican in Texas, counter to national trends—driving up the Latino vote is the key to a Democratic turnaround. On paper, it looks straightforward, which is one reason Democrats outside of Texas tend to be more sanguine about a partisan flip than Democrats in the state. They don’t know what the folks in Austin know all too well: that Republicans have continued to gain congressional and legislative seats over the past decade, even as Texas’s Latino population has swelled.
One challenge is scale. Bird and Brown cite Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada as models for turning out Latinos. But none of those states has more than 516,000 Latino citizens total—which is fewer than the number of Latino citizens in Houston’s Harris County alone. “In those little states, you can just throw money and get all kinds of stuff done,” says Antonio Gonzalez, head of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. Not in Texas, where size is only one of the complicating factors.
Another wrinkle: Battleground Texas will have to tangle with a state Republican Party that has been far smarter about connecting with Latinos than the national Republican Party. The tone was set by Karl Rove and George W. Bush, who actively courted Latinos in the 1990s as they set about building the Texas GOP into a dominant force. Battleground Texas will also have to overcome deeply entrenched political disengagement among Latinos and other nonwhites, born in part from years of Democratic neglect.
Even given the rosiest of scenarios, Texas Democrats aren’t likely to elect a governor in 2014 or help to elevate a Democrat into the White House in 2016. But Battleground Texas’s leaders swear they’re committed for the long haul. As Brown said in Austin, “If 2020 is the year we turn this state around, that is OK with me.”
Republican supremacy in Texas is a relatively recent phenomenon. From Reconstruction until the 1960s, Democrats—mostly conservative, exclusively white—ran the state. The party always had a vocal progressive wing, and in the wake of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Latino leaders began to emerge. Most came from San Antonio, which had both a large Latino population and a strong activist tradition. Community organizer Willie C. Velasquez founded the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, which registered thousands of Latinos and filed more than 80 lawsuits to ensure their access to the ballot. In 1974, Ernie Cortés started San Antonio’s Communities Organized for Public Service, which helped Latino neighborhoods push their policy agendas. In 1981, Henry Cisneros was elected mayor, making him only the second Latino mayor in U.S. history.
While other Southern states were trending Republican, Democrats still looked like the party of the future in Texas. Houston, fast becoming one of the nation’s largest and most diverse cities, had elected Democrat Barbara Jordan, the state’s first African American legislator and, later, first African American member of Congress. In 1990, Dan Morales, a state legislator, became the first Latino elected statewide, as attorney general. A year later, Governor Ann Richards appointed Lena Guerrero to the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas industries, making her the first woman and person of color on the commission.
But white conservatives still made up most of the state’s electorate, and they backed Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984—the first time a Republican had carried the state since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. In 1978, Republicans elected their first Texas governor since Reconstruction, Bill Clements, after a bitterly contested Democratic primary divided the party. Suddenly, the GOP didn’t look completely hopeless in Texas, and conservative Anglos began to get accustomed to voting Republican after generations as yellow-dog Democrats. Karl Rove laid out a strategy for taking control of the state, systematically targeting vulnerable Democrats he could either unseat or convince to switch sides. “When there was a straggler in the pack, he would take them in the bushes and cut their throat,” says Cal Jillson, a political scientist and author of Texas Politics: Governing the Lone Star State.
The tipping point came in 1994, when Richards lost her re-election bid to Rove’s candidate, George W. Bush. Democrats still carried most statewide offices that year and maintained a sizable edge in the legislature. But the Republican tide was rising fast. In 1998, against weak opposition, Bush won re-election with 69 percent of the vote—including nearly 40 percent of the Latino vote—and Republicans swept statewide offices. Meanwhile, Democrats lost their most promising Latino candidate for higher office when Cisneros, who’d gone to Washington as President Bill Clinton’s housing secretary, was felled by a scandal involving hush money given to a former mistress. By then, Velasquez and Cortés had left the state as well.
In 2002, Democrats ran what they thought was a “dream team”—wealthy businessman Tony Sanchez for governor and Ron Kirk, an African American who’d been elected mayor in Dallas, for U.S. senator. “We had a really well-funded and sophisticated outreach to Hispanic voters,” says longtime Democratic consultant Glenn Smith, who ran the Sanchez campaign. “The problem was we were doing it all of a sudden in one campaign cycle. That’s just not enough time.” The dream team lost badly, and Republicans took control of the state legislature.
Texas Democrats went into a death spiral. Their bench of potential statewide candidates was empty. National leaders saw no upside to investing in the state and began using it as a cash machine for campaigns outside the state. As the Latino population continued to swell, Democrats failed to launch the type of sustained outreach needed to bring new voters into the system. Latinos still voted for Democrats, usually by about a 2-to-1 margin. But far too few were voting.
Texas Republican leaders wisely avoided the mistakes of their counterparts in California and Arizona, where anti-immigration laws turned Latinos into avid Democrats. As governor and president, Bush spoke Spanish at campaign events, appointed Latinos to key positions, and broke with most Republicans by championing comprehensive immigration reform. His successor as governor, Rick Perry, signed a state version of the DREAM Act into law and spoke out against measures like Arizona’s “papers, please” law. When Republican lawmakers tried to float such bills, Perry and other party leaders quashed their efforts before they became an embarrassment.
“Democrats think that if they just wait and the state becomes more Hispanic, they win,” says the current GOP chair, Munisteri. “That ignores the fact that we are doing Hispanic outreach.” Even as the Tea Party wave of 2010 drove the state legislature further to the right, Texas Republicans launched new efforts to attract nonwhite voters. The party used data analytics and cross-checks to identify conservative Latinos and get them involved; as a result, last year’s state GOP convention had 600 new Latino delegates. At that same convention, delegates changed the party platform to eliminate calls for mass deportation of undocumented Texans. (However, it still advocates rescinding citizenship for those born in the country to noncitizens.) A full-time Republican outreach coordinator now goes on Telemundo and Univision, the two major Spanish-language networks, as a regular commentator. On June 4, Munisteri said the national GOP would even start kicking in to help the state party hire nearly two dozen full-time field organizers and open five new outreach offices around the state.
The party’s efforts have been bolstered by Hispanic Republicans of Texas, a political action committee co-founded by George P. Bush (son of Jeb) and two Republican consultants with strong national connections. Hispanic Republicans recruits, trains, and backs candidates for local, state, and federal offices. The group built a lot of buzz in 2010, when seven Hispanic Republicans were elected to the state legislature and Congress. But in 2012, the results were decidedly mixed. Though Ted Cruz was elected to the U.S. Senate and two new Latinos won state House seats, only two of the winners from 2012 were re-elected, and a coveted congressional race was lost. Bush, who’s 37 and whose mother is Mexican-born, has announced that he will be running statewide in 2014 for Texas land commissioner—a launching pad to bigger things.
The party’s strategy is based on the belief that Latinos in Texas are more conservative than their counterparts in other states—and thus “persuadable” for Republicans without a wholesale change in policies. There’s a large bloc who are swing voters, says George Antuna Jr., who co-founded Hispanic Republicans of Texas with Bush. “Those voters are up for grabs.”
“They’re dreaming,” Jillson counters. With rare exceptions, Latinos have been voting 2 to 1 Democratic in Texas since the days of LBJ. In 2012, an election-eve poll by Latino Decisions found 53 percent of Texas Latinos identifying as Democrats; only 15 percent said they were Republicans. Polling data show why. Particularly on economic issues, Latino voters in Texas line up overwhelmingly with Democratic positions. Young Latinos, who will dominate Texas politics in the near future, are more liberal than their elders. Latino voters’ top priorities, aside from immigration reform, are improving education and health care—two issues that are not exactly strengths for Texas Republicans. In 2011, GOP lawmakers, cheered on by Perry, made the largest cuts in modern Texas history to public schools. Republicans are also responsible for policies that have left one-quarter of Texans—and a far larger slice of Latinos—without health insurance.
For a couple more election cycles, Republicans can continue to win Texas with overwhelming white support—it often reaches 70 percent in statewide races—combined with one-third of the Latino vote. But if enough Latinos start voting, the GOP will have to recalibrate its message while holding on to a right-wing base that has shown little taste for moderation. If anything, the party has moved rightward in recent years. Its most visible Latino champion, Senator Cruz, is a Tea Party stalwart. If Republicans were expecting Cruz, whose ancestry is Cuban American, to boost their Latino vote, it didn’t happen in 2012; he received about 35 percent, one point less than Senator John Cornyn received in 2008. “Republicans like Ted Cruz talk about how Republicans are different in Texas because they have a few Hispanic candidates,” Bird says. “But the first speech Cruz gave in the Senate was about his opposition to Obamacare, which an overwhelming majority of Hispanics support.”
Still, Republicans profess confidence that they’ll keep Texas red—and conservative—for decades to come. If Battleground Texas begins to pose a threat, Munisteri says, national Republicans will pour limitless money and resources into the state to keep from losing the party’s crown jewel. Battleground Texas, he claims, “may end up doing me a favor. We’ll have more resources than they would if they left it alone.” Since the group announced itself, Munisteri says he’s already raised $300,000 by sounding the alarm about a potential takeover by Team Obama. “When Texas begins to look competitive, there’s going to be an avalanche of Republican money coming home to protect the state,” Jillson says. But that would come with a cost: fewer resources for Republicans everywhere else.
How will Battleground Texas mount a challenge to Republican hegemony in the ultimate red state? Slowly but surely, as Jenn Brown told the Austin Democrats. “We know this is a long-term effort,” she said. “We know it will take time.” The initial focus will be to create a massive network of Democratic organizers and volunteers across the state. Imagine, Brown said, what could happen with 250 paid field organizers in Texas, each with five teams of volunteers; they could reach 500,000 potential voters if everyone just knocked on 50 doors.
At this point, the details are hypothetical: A full-scale plan for “getting that started” won’t be rolled out until this summer. But Jeremy Bird offers a few more details. In the next couple of election cycles, Battleground Texas will target “battleground zones”—races that organizers believe could either be winnable or could help Democrats build infrastructure by training new candidates and registering voters. A battleground zone could be a city council race with a promising young Latino candidate in Waco or a state House race in a heavily minority district in Houston. The idea is to seize every viable opportunity to build new Democratic networks around the state, creating new voters along the way.
For the time being, that’ll be done without backing candidates for statewide offices. Texas has a few rising Democratic stars—most notably San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro and his twin, Congressman Joaquin Castro—but running them for major offices too soon and losing risks diminishing their appeal. Democratic strategist James Aldrete says the Battleground Texas approach—build the base rather than expecting miracle results right away—is refreshing. For too long, Aldrete says, Texas Democrats tried the opposite approach: “waiting for the amazing candidate that’s gonna inspire everyone and solve all our problems.” Finally, Texas Democrats are attempting to replicate what has worked elsewhere. “The way I look at it,” Bird says, “Texas is our candidate.”
But Obama-style grassroots politics is brand-new for most Texas Democrats. While the national party was putting an increasing emphasis on door-knocking and turnout over the past decade, the party in Texas was falling behind. Battleground Texas will have to change fundamentally the way Texas Democrats think about politics, reorienting them from a campaign-to-campaign mentality to one of year-round organizing.
The leaders of Battleground Texas say there’s reason for optimism—partly because there is some recent history of grassroots politics working in Texas. During the 2010 midterm elections, Austin Democratic Party Chair Andy Brown selected 21 largely black and Latino precincts where turnout had traditionally been low and pledged to run the type of hardcore turnout campaigns usually reserved for the wealthier, whiter parts of town. With a paid field staff organizing volunteers, the Travis County Democrats knocked on every registered voter’s door in those precincts two or three times and called each one at least twice. The effort paid off: Although 2010 was the worst year in history for Texas Democrats, 18 percent more ballots were cast in Travis County and the number of straight-ticket Democratic voters went up 54 percent. “There was nothing fancy about it,” Brown says. “It was a really well-run field program.”
A similar strategy has also worked wonders in Dallas. In 2006, Democrats in Texas’s oldest Republican stronghold bucked convention by spending as much on phone-banking and door-to-door campaigning as on media ads and mailers. The results were stunning: Democrats swept all 47 local offices, including 40 judgeships that had previously belonged to Republicans.
But elsewhere, Texas Democrats have been slow to learn from Dallas’s example. The party’s most glaring failure has been in Harris County, home to Houston and the nation’s fourth-largest population. Harris County already looks like the Texas of the future; only 33 percent of its residents are white, while 41 percent are Latino, 19 percent are black, and 6 percent are Asian. Houston voters elected the first lesbian mayor of a major city, Democrat Annise Parker, in 2009. But in 2012, President Obama carried the county by a measly 971 votes, and Republicans remain competitive in local races. How is that possible? Because there’s a staggering number of voters who are eligible but unregistered—estimates run between 600,000 and 800,000.
Democrats can’t simply start knocking on doors in neighborhoods that have long been shunned, asking for votes and expecting results. The Latino Decisions election-eve poll showed the depths of Texas Democrats’ dysfunction: Only 25 percent of Texas Latinos had been contacted by a campaign, a political party, or a community organization of any kind—compared with 59 percent in Colorado, 51 percent in Nevada, and 48 percent in New Mexico.
Harris County Democrats and Battleground Texas volunteers will have to start making calls and venturing into minority neighborhoods for the first time in decades. The effort has, at least, belatedly begun. Houston elected a new Democratic chair in 2011, Lane Lewis, who is focusing the party for the first time on Dallas-style field organizing. Lewis estimates that if the party registers 120,000 new nonwhite voters, it will result in 80,000 more people going to the polls. “We’re already block-walking,” Lewis says. “We’ve already had phone banks this year.” But his field team is not just trying to woo new voters; Democratic staffers and volunteers are participating year-round in projects like building a community garden in the tough Independence Heights neighborhood, an effort to show that the party cares about more than winning votes.
If Democrats can galvanize Houston’s nonvoters, they will be well on their way to turning Texas blue. But all those years of ignoring minorities will make it a formidable task. “You’ve got to commit at least ten years,” Antonio Gonzalez says. “It takes at least ten years to undo twenty years of neglect.”
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My wife Ann Marie Leimer had a book signing and lecture in San Antonio this past weekend. We had an opportunity to see friends and also go...
