Forty years ago in November, Cesar Chavez spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, and it was as much a promise as it was a warning.
The main topic of his 25-minute talk was the lessons he learned from his career organizing campesinos in California and beyond, in the face of fierce opposition.
“All my life, I have been driven by one dream, one goal, one vision,” Chavez told the devout crowd. “To break down this country’s farm labor system that treats farm workers like they’re not important.”
The United Farm Workers leader praised the accomplishments his union was able to accomplish. But he felt big rewards for Latinos were still ahead. They were increasing their economic, political, and demographic influence—and Chávez argued that memories of past misdeeds influenced how they wielded power once they had it. I felt that it would have an impact on people.
“There will come a day when politicians will do what is right for the people, not out of charity or idealism, but out of political necessity,” Chavez said in a recorded speech, as if it were a matter of course. “That day may not come this year. That day may not come this decade. But it will come someday.”
Chavez’s Commonwealth Club speech is little known outside of academic and activist circles, but I have long considered it a prophetic masterpiece. He said that’s about right. Latinos currently make up the majority of California’s residents and are the largest minority group in the country. Researchers at California Lutheran University and the University of California, Los Angeles, found earlier this year that if U.S. Latinos were their own country, their $3.7 trillion gross domestic product would rank second only to Germany and second to India. It has been discovered that it has surpassed the ranking and is ranked 5th in the world.
Meanwhile, the number of Latinos elected to office, from school boards to state legislatures to both houses of Congress, is increasing every year. The political rise has long been facilitated by the liberal formula pioneered by Chávez’s mobimiento. That means running as a Democrat, aligning with labor unions and social justice groups, and capitalizing on the plight of the lowest quintiles of Latinos, like the farmworkers of Chávez’s era and undocumented immigrants of past generations. It is something. As a moral issue to force Latinos into the ballot box and reject everything Republican.
This winning template created concerns among conservatives that Latinos, especially Mexican Americans, were involved in a conspiracy to relegate whites to second-class status, and among Democrats a permanent majority. Expectations for the group were born. It follows Chavez’s boast that Latinos will create a new, more just path for this country, embodying Jesus’ teaching that the latter came first and the first last. It looked like.
“And on that day, our country will fulfill its creed. And its fulfillment will enrich us all,” Chavez said in his speech.
But as 2024 winds down, Chavez’s dream of a Latino power is not progressing as he expected.
Boo Boo (left) and Gil Tejada laugh while recording an episode of their podcast “American Cholo” in a North Hollywood studio. Tejada, a former Hillary Clinton supporter, voted for Donald Trump this year and has voted for his supporters to do the same.
(Michael Blacksher/Los Angeles Times)
Donald Trump has criticized Latinos throughout, from his 2015 speech announcing his first presidential bid to his recent social media posts in which he hinted he would take back the Panama Canal. , improved its performance with Latino voters in each campaign.
In Los Angeles County, a Times map of November election results shows that the biggest flows to Trump were not in Republican strongholds, but in purple, middle-class Latino cities like Downey and Whittier. The incident occurred in a predominantly blue-collar district run by the Democratic Party. immigrant communities such as Bell Gardens and Maywood;
Studies show that this year’s Latino voters don’t care about anyone but themselves. Issues like the economy and housing were their top concerns, and securing borders was more important than securing amnesty for undocumented people. In fact, the percentage of Latinos who think illegal immigration is a problem is lower than the one in California, where voters overwhelmingly passed the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, with hundreds of thousands of Latinos marching against it. It’s almost the same as the white people who did it 30 years ago.
Kamala Harris continues to win the U.S. Latino vote, but Trump’s Latino cumbia is gaining attention as he outperforms previous Republican presidential candidates among Latinos. It’s not just that. The distrust and soul-searching of Latino activists and the condemnation by Democrats will continue into 2025, based on the idea that Latinos who supported Trump voted against their own interests. In other words, Latinos didn’t act the way Latinos should, whatever that means.
That’s why I say 2024 is the year that Latinos finally become Americans.
As patronizing and foolish as it may sound, there is no historical precedent for this moment. Despite the fact that Spanish was spoken in what is now the United States decades before Jamestown, Americans have long considered Latin Americans to be the more spicy they are in the proverbial melting pot. I have always thought of them as a different kind of giving people. For more than a century, Latino activists have kept this in mind in their pursuit of equal rights, seeking to protect the people they fought against as helpless and eternally victimized people who could best gain strength through ethnic solidarity. It has been positioned as a group that
Rather, it appears that Latinos have abandoned movement politics in this election and intend to do the same in the future. We’re now in a politically strange world where Republicans think Latinos are a winnable group, but Democrats no longer think they’ll automatically save us. Both parties will fight for our votes by de-emphasizing appeals to ethnicity and instead focusing on meat-and-potatoes issues – as you know, they usually , that’s how it works with “ordinary” voters.
Latinos are no longer the sleeping giants of American politics. we are giants Where we go is determined by where this country goes. We joined the figurative first group. And like the previous groups, we now spit on the last group and want nothing to do with them.
This mainstreaming is something I have been advocating for throughout the 25 years I have covered Latino politics. This year, I saw it play out in real time.
In the spring, I wrote a four-part series about the history of Latino politics in Los Angeles. In August, I spent seven days traveling through the American Southwest ahead of the Democratic National Convention to gauge the political temperature of Latinos. Throughout the fall, I spoke with Latino Trump supporters, some of whom admitted they were once liberal-leaning but felt abandoned by Democrats and began riding shotgun on the Trump train. There were too.
The thread that tied my story together was that change is inevitable and relying on Latinos to remain in Democratic amber is electoral suicide.
UCLA professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez (right) walks down Main Street in downtown Los Angeles while giving a historical tour to Los Angeles City Council members Eunice Hernandez and Hugo Sotomartinez in 2022.
(Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times)
Wokoso factions and conservatives alike took advantage of the slumber of the Democratic Party, which had finally woken up to the desmadre in front of it. On Los Angeles’ East Side, the birthplace of Latino politics, Democratic Socialist City Council candidates have swept away a political machine that has dominated elections for decades. On the other end of the political spectrum, the California Latino Legislative Caucus is talking about lifting a long-standing ban on Republicans, because so many Latino Republicans now reside in Sacramento.
Latinos have not yet reached a position of power in American life commensurate with their numbers. There are still too many challenges we must address, from educational attainment to cost of living to health and housing inequalities.
However, the 2024 election showed that many Latinos are willing to abandon the left-leaning politics of the past. The party that exploits this gap can win.
This makes me think again about Chávez’s Commonwealth Club speech. What inspired him most was the idea that the descendants of farm workers would “rule” California, that they would change things for the better, and that even after many generations they would never forget where they came from.
“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed,” he said. “You cannot not educate those who have learned to read. You cannot shame those who feel pride. You cannot oppress those who are no longer afraid.”
In 2024, Latinos have shown that we are not afraid to think about a post-Latino future, at least at the ballot box. We are now ready for politicians to treat us as Americans, for better or for worse. And wasn’t that the goal all along?
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