Mobilizing the U.S. Latinx Vote

Media, Identity, and Politics

Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000047363
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Lingue e linguistica
• Categoría: Studi sulla comunicazione

This book examines the politics involved in the mobilization of the Latinx vote in America. Delving into the questions of race and identity formation in conjunction with the role of communication media, the author discusses the implications for Latinx voters and their place in the American political and racial system.

Utilizing an in-depth study of the mobilizing efforts of national Latinx groups, along with a rigorous analysis of online media, news media, and electoral results, this book discusses:

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• How the old notions of white and black America clash with the growing focus on Latinos

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• How political organizers develop and use messages of racial solidarity to motivate people, what technologies are at their disposal, and what their use means

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• How the study of new media is vital to exploring race in the 21st century, and why communication cannot ignore the racial legacies of the 20th century

Theoretically located in between the fields of communication and racial/ethnic studies, this book will be of great relevance to scholars and students working in the field of communication studies, political communication, Latinx studies, and sociology.

1 Introduction

Dreams of a united Latinx polity

Leading up to the 2016 election, there was a hope among Democrats that the inflammatory rhetoric toward immigrants of the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, would inspire Latinx voters to the polls and deliver victory. While the election outcome they hoped for did not happen, Latinx voters began to show their power at the polls. Even in Texas, a GOP stronghold since the 1980s, Hillary Clinton improved on Barack Obama’s vote total by eight million votes—an accomplishment credited to increased Latinx participation.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, there was also a small but important controversy over the purported 20% or so of Latinxs who, according to exit polls, voted for Trump. A similar pattern emerged in exit polls from Texas in the 2018 midterms. This flummoxed the national press and others: how could this many Latinxs vote for someone so oppositional to immigrants? More recent electoral studies have complicated those exit poll results, but nonetheless the controversy demonstrates the challenges in analyzing the Latinx electorate as a singular, fixed political entity.

The intense focus on Latinx voters is part of a surge of attention among political leaders, researchers, media organizations, and countless pundits regarding the changing demographics of the nation and the emergence of Latinxs (Taylor, Gonzalez-Barrera, Passel, Lopez, 2012). As a demographic category, Latinxs have grown as a proportion of the populace dramatically in recent history. The political discourse of demographic change deserves much more critical attention. Both major political parties in the United States, Democrats and Republicans, have devoted significant time and energy to capturing and engaging Latinxs in their coalitions. Following the 2012 elections, party documents from the GOP highlighted the need to pursue certain policy reforms, such as immigration reform and reducing the volume of nativist rhetoric among the party’s most conservative members to appeal to Latinxs. Following the 2014 elections, party documents from the Democrats revealed a similar strategy of further appealing to Latinxs, especially Latinas, to expand their multiethnic coalition. The 2016 and 2018 elections showed continued outreach toward Latinx communities by multiple campaigns. The last two decades have also seen a rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric and anti-Latinx racism (Chavez, 2013), yet some feel a budding optimism that Latinxs will rejuvenate and transform U.S. politics (Barreto, Segura, 2014). This omnipresent demographic optimism has been repeated continually in national Latinx conferences since at least 2014. A version of the phrase “once Latinx begin to show up to the polls, everything will be okay” has been a common refrain at conferences I’ve attended since at least 2012.

In this book, I argue that this surge of attention holds a key implication for how we think about race, communication, media, and politics. The process of organizing and mobilizing Latinxs into voting constituencies taps into powerful racial scripts and produces a new Latinx identity. This Latinx identity is highly commodified and acts more like a brand than a racial identity. I argue that this is symptomatic of the political and cultural times we live in, the people behind Latinx political organizing, and the digital tools used to communicate to Latinx audiences.

Cultural and political change meets Latinxs

Corporations and other commercial interests have taken notice of the emerging Hispanic market in the United States and seek to capture the potentially immense buying power of over 50 million people. For marketers, Latinx attention and consumption are hot commodities waiting to be captured. As a result, a $5-billion marketing industry has emerged, with growth outpacing general audience marketing (Dávila, 2012). Media organizations are also becoming more aware of the commercial implications of a growing Latinx audience. Univision launched a new bilingual channel aimed at the millennial demographic called Fusion, and multiple online media platforms, such as Flama, MiTú, and Pero Like, began gaining prominence in the late 2010s. Marketing and bilingual media are targeted toward the emerging concept of the “new Latinx,” a cosmopolitan, educated, and Americanized Latinx (Chavez, 2013)—a concept I’ll return to later in the book.

The Latinx population in the United States is also a young one. The average age of a white person in the United States is 56. The median age of a Latinx person is 19 years (Patten, 2016). The youth of the U.S. Latinx population inspires many groups to organize and turn out their vote. It also excites sponsoring advertisers who see potential in Latinx purchasing power and the chance to capture young consumers in their prime habit-forming years.

The rhetorical construction of U.S. Latinxs as a new and growing population obfuscates the long and complicated history Latinxs have had with the nation state. Latinxs of many different origins have lived and democratically participated in the United States for decades. Mexicans living in the Southwest suddenly became U.S. citizens following the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 after the United States invaded Mexico. Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens for most of the 20th century after previously being colonial subjects. However, neither enjoyed full citizenship in practice. Immigrant groups from the Caribbean, Central America, and beyond settled throughout the country many years before the post-NAFTA wave of immigration.

Despite the long history of Latinxs in the United States, the recent increase in interest is especially noteworthy. It deserves attention not because “Latinxs have arrived” but because of the political and economic capital that now is at stake. U.S. Latinxs are being viewed as both a viable electoral community and a powerful marketable entity. This attention can be exciting, but it also needs serious critical engagement and unpacking. The effort to mobilize Latinx voters in the United States has been a decades-long project, intensifying in scale and urgency in the 2010s. One of the factors that led to the intensification was the recognition based on demographic data that Latinxs were becoming a larger portion of the population. There was also a recognition of political constituencies shifting toward ethnic party identification in the 2008 election, with Republicans representing the interests of whites (especially men) and the Democrats representing those of everyone else, but especially ethnic minorities and women (Abramowitz, 2010).

Multiple stakeholders from civic organizations, advocacy groups, political parties, and media organizations have launched various efforts to mobilize Latinxs. Latinx youth mobilization, voter registration, and promulgating voting information have been some of the specific campaigns, yet a common thread has been a heavy focus on digital and online organization. Using digital platforms such as websites, social media, mobile applications, and digitally mediated meetups, organizations are, as a byproduct, making claims about the U.S. Latinx community.

U.S. Latinx advocacy groups used to generally be legacy intuitions, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the National Council of La Raza (now called UnidosUS), which advocated for civil rights in Latinx communities. Newer, digital-first groups such as Voto Latino and United We Dream are now in this group of organizations. I use the term “digital first” to delineate a difference between groups founded in the pre-Internet era, and those founded after that primarily organize their constituencies online. As Karpf (2012) argues in The MoveOn Effect, we can roughly draw a line between how advocacy organizations in the United States related to their audiences before and after 2008. The line is the transition from mail- or phone-based membership-sustaining organizations to short-term contingent, Internet-based memberships. I use the term hybrid media environment (Chadwick, 2013) in my research questions to refer to this process which mixes old and new media.

We also must recognize that in the 2010s, especially the latter half of the decade, we have seen racial difference and strife bubble up into mainstream issues. Perhaps the first incident in my own memory was the failed immigration reforms of 2007. I was a freshman in high school in El Paso, Texas. I really did not understand the full details of the proposed policy, but I did feel that what was happening was an attack on my personhood. I ended up participating in a walkout to protest the policy. Afterward, the election of Barack Obama potentially represented a break from racial politics and a post-racial era for some. This was quickly proven unrealistic with various controversies, such as the birther movement and the reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement. For Latinxs, issues around immigration persisted; activists I talked to were always quick to point out that President Obama deported more undocumented immigrants than any other president. All of this is to say that the communications process studied in this book occurred in a highly racialized time.

These trends led to the current moment. The United States is in the midst of a demographic change unseen since the late 19th century. The racial system was designed for a black/white population in the pre-industrial era. So, what will be the racial order of our current economic system? Our post-industrial, information-based economy is highly mediated and hybridic. From that perspective, what role does the Internet and digital media play in shaping Latinx identity? And to that point, who are the organizations and actors in the U.S. Latinx project, and what role do they play? It is clear that this new market of voters and consumers is attractive to political and corporate interests. These larger questions, debates, and tensions set the stage for this book’s focus on identity building in the current political and technological moment.

Introducing the mediation of U.S. Latinx identity

In Soto-Vásquez (2018), I analyzed how U.S. presidents since the Kennedy administration have used different terms to address Latinx subjects. The results of the research suggest that presidents use the practice of naming Latinx subjects to further their own political agendas and reinforce economic and foreign policy goals. For example, the administration of John F. Kennedy used expressions such as “Americans of Mexican extraction” to describe successful Latinxs in society. Kennedy did this to demonstrate the superiority of the American way of life, democracy, and market capitalism compared to Soviet-styled communism. The Kennedy administration used terminology about Latinxs, and eventually nominated the first Mexican American ambassador, to prevent Soviet ideology from gaining a foothold in Latin America. It is less useful to treat Latinx identity as a fixed category where someone either is or is not Latinx. Instead, this book, following the lead of many prominent Latinx scholars, makes the argument that Latinx identity is closer to a black box of abstraction. The flexibility of the term lends itself to use by political actors pursuing vastly divergent political agendas.

Introducing digital technologies into the mix also complicates Latinx identity. On the Internet, there is the tendency to both entrench racial and ethnic identity and deconstruct it. For example, in late 2017, two immigration-related events occurred. First, there was the campaign to advocate legislative action on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)¹ after the Trump administration ended the regulation. Second, the Trump administration also ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS)² for immigrants of several nationalities, including many Central Americans. The second event was much less prominent in the mainstream news.

Upon closer examination, the response to these two events demonstrated the tendency of the Internet to entrench and complicate Latinx identity. Most of the organizations I study in this book heavily pushed for Congress to act on DACA in late 2017 and early 2018. They often used rhetoric aimed to galvanize all Latinxs, not just those affected by the repeal, to become involved by calling their congressional representatives. In effect, the message was “all Latinxs need to stand up to protect Dreamers.” Here was the tendency for organizations online to reinforce a broad notion of Latinx identity to advance a specific goal.

The ending of TPS was emphasized less among the organizations I studied. I did find a small but prominent group of Central American activists online arguing that the relative erasure of TPS compared to DACA was a serious oversight by national Latinx figures. In thei...