Yesterday, Los Angeles elected Antonio Villaraigosa as its first Latino mayor since 1872. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, this election in America's second-largest city "heralds a future of increasing Latino influence both in California and the wider United States." Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, says that the election "symbolizes the arrival of Latinos in the political arena." In the United States today, there are around 39 million Latinos/Hispanics, accounting for 13% of the U.S. population and now ranking as the nation's largest minority group - just ahead of African-Americans. Even more significantly, the Hispanic population is growing rapidly, as is its economic and political clout. The election results in Los Angeles yesterday demonstrate this extremely well.
[Update: They also represent, as an astute reader points out, the potential for bringing African Americans and Hispanics together, "that there is no need for animosity or distrust between those communities, and that the Democratic Party can learn to incorporate any emergent group while still remaining faithful to its historical commitments to equality and justice."]
Meanwhile, here in Virginia, Hispanics make up a relatively small share of the population, at 5%. Still, as in the rest of the country, that share is growing rapidly, meaning that Hispanics will play an increasingly important role in the political life of our state.
This year, of course, there are no Hispanics running state-wide on either the Republican or Democratic tickets, but this doesn't mean that the Hispanic vote can be taken for granted. As recent national elections have shown, Latinos/Hispanics are up for grabs politically, not solidly entrenched in either political party. Which means, of course, that each party must court the Latino/Hispanic community -- a diverse one with many different interests, both economically and culturally. This will not be easy, and it won't be a one-shot endeavor. But it's critical that it be done.
It appears that the Democratic Party has finally, perhaps belatedly, begun to recognize this fact. Yesterday, it issued a statement -- in both English and Spanish -- congratulating Villaraigosa on his victory. This follows a Cinco de Mayo statement by the DNC which asserted:
Hispanics in general, have seen economic opportunity crumble under the Bush administration, and more and more Hispanics do not have access to health insurance. Hispanics would see thousands of dollars per year slashed from their hard-earned Social Security benefit checks if the President?s privatization scheme were in place today. And rather than promoting immigration reform to bring millions of hard-working undocumented workers out of the shadows, President Bush has sided with extremist anti-immigrant Republicans by supporting such extreme measures as Real ID.
In other words, the political battle for the hearts and minds of Latinos/Hispanics is on -- in California, across the nation, and right here in Virginia. Because Democrats and Republican both realize that the saying, "As California goes, so goes the nation," is more often than not an accurate one.