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TALKING POLITICS
A new effort to tap Latino voting power
By Ian Donnis

For all the attention that Latino voters attracted as an increasingly influential voting bloc during 2002 political season, the fast-growing ranks of Latinos remain sorely underrepresented in elective offices in Rhode Island. Although this situation seems likely to change over time, it could get an immediate boost thanks to a new effort by the Puerto Rican government to increase voter registration among Puerto Ricans living in Rhode Island.

The registration drive — scheduled to be unveiled Thursday, May 8, at the State House, and entitled "Que nada nos detenga! ("Let nothing stop us!") — is part of a three-year, nonpartisan voter education campaign initiated by Puerto Rico’s governor Sila M. Calder—n. The campaign is meant to narrow the glaring disparity between voting participation by Puerto Ricans on the island (86 percent, according to the Puerto Rican Federal Affairs Administration) and the US mainland (40 percent).

Luis A. Aponte, a Puerto Rican native who became Providence’s first Latino city councilor when he was elected to the Ward 10 seat in 1998, attributes the gap to the high degree of attention paid by Puerto Ricans to local politics on the island, especially the perennial question of whether Puerto Rico should retain its current status as a self-governing US territory, become the 51st state, or strive for independence. "That struggle is one that permeates parties, and over the last 100 and something years has been an ongoing cause for political debate," he says.

Sandra Reyes of Providence, who will coordinate the voter registration campaign in Rhode Island for the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, plans to use door-to-door outreach and coalition-building efforts among nonprofit, business, labor, and faith-based groups to increase political participation. The message is simple, she says: "If you vote, you get heard."

Latinos have made steady political inroads in Rhode Island politics in recent years, emerging as widely courted voters in last year’s gubernatorial and Providence mayoral elections. Along with other successes, Miguel Luna, a native of the Dominican Republic, won a primary fight in Providence’s Ward Nine, going on to join Aponte as the second Latino on the city council. Still, it’s clear that electoral representation has yet to catch up with the state’s fast-growing Latino community, most of whose members come from Puerto Rico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala.

With Republicans like Karl Rove demonstrating a high degree of political mastery in confounding Democrats, some liberals hold out hope that the growing Latino population in the US could tip the balance in a different direction. As it happens, the rate of growth among Latinos in Rhode Island — who have more than quadrupled, to almost nine percent of the state’s population in 2000, up from two percent in 1980 — exceeds that of any other New England state.


Issue Date: May 9 -15, 2003
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