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LATINO AND BLACK SUBURBANITES

Are the political parties planning ahead?

by Paul Cuadros

We witnessed two visions for a Republican Party at last summer's national convention in San Diego. One, a born-again party of multiracial and multicultural inclusiveness, controlled the stage — most notably in the powerful figures of former Gen. Colin Powell and Congressman J.C. Watts of Oklahoma. The other, visible when the cameras panned the delegates, was overwhelmingly white, a party that has managed to attract few blacks and few Hispanics to its ranks.

Indeed, the dilemma for Republicans is whether their party can begin moving beyond imagery to the serious work of appealing to minorities.

But they aren't alone. While the Democrats were able to present a more diverse delegation at their national convention in Chicago, some strains were clearly visible. The Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr. took pains during his high- profile speech to reassure disaffected minorities and progressives in his party's ranks following President Bill Clinton's decision to back away from 50 years of Democrat-supported social welfare policy.

In short, as we approach the new century, each of the two major political parties appears to be struggling to redefine itself: While Republicans weigh strategies for recruiting minority voters, some Democrats worry about losing their minority constituency.

Perhaps nowhere is that dynamic more to the point than in Illinois. Historically, this state's minority and immigrant citizens have gathered in urban areas, primarily Chicago — where, in recent decades, they have constituted part of the Democratic Party's more loyal troops.

But that may be changing. In the past few years, following a general demographic trend, Latinos and blacks increasingly have moved from Chicago into the city's collar counties, traditional Republican turf. The trend is certain to have a long-term political impact on the region and the state.

Going west

Over the past 16 years, the western suburbs of DuPage and Cook counties — the GOP's most secure base — have seen an increase in the number of Latinos who choose to make a home there. In some towns, Hispanics are now the majority population.

Overall, the Latino population has grown by 83.5 percent in the suburbs —from 158,531 in 1980 to 291,053 in 1990, according to the census bureau. In Cook County, Cicero was 37 percent Latino in 1990, up from 8.6 percent in 1980; Stone Park is 58 percent Latino. And in DuPage County, West Chicago grew from 17 percent in 1980 to 30 percent in 1990. Addison went from 6 percent Latino in 1980 to 13 percent 10 years later.

A high Latino birthrate and immigration, legal and illegal, has spurred the population increase in Metro Chicago. And that population's movement west could give Republicans a chance to recruit new supporters, many of whom already share some of the party's conservative values.

But as Latinos moved to the suburbs in search of a better life, they have encountered resistance. The U.S. Department of Justice filed housing discrimination suits against three towns: Cicero, Addison and Waukegan (to the north of Chicago) in the past three years. The department has

34 / November 1996 Illinois Issues

investigated two other towns for discrimination against Hispanics.

Many suburbs, including West Chicago and Lombard, also have passed English-only ordinances, mirroring the Republican national platform's call for an official language.

Latinos in DuPage and suburban Cook County are unlikely to forget such a reception.

"People are very shocked and offended and hurt," says Rita Gonzalez, executive director of Hispanics United of DuPage County, who led the fight against Addison's attempt in 1994 to bulldoze the majority of its Latino neighborhoods as a result of a redevelopment plan.

"Latinos are a valuable asset to these communities. And to see people attempting to wipe them out and attack -their community — I think that's offensive and unforgivable, and people will remember," she says.

"The Republicans have missed an opportunity here," says Juan R. Rangel, president and executive director of United Neighborhood Organization in Chicago. "I think Mexicans are more conservative and share many of the same values that Republicans have. If they keep advocating this anti-immigrant stance, they will alienate Latinos."

Political scientist Paul Kleppner agrees, "What the Republicans have essentially done is shoot themselves in the foot," says Kleppner, who directs the office of social policy research at Northern Illinois University. "They shot themselves in the foot by stimulating [Latinos] to naturalize and register, and then stimulating them to be anti- Republican."

Indeed, Republican support for restricted immigration has sparked a move to increase Latino naturalization and voter registration that may backfire on the Republicans.

"This year alone, 45,000 have been sworn in as citizens in mass ceremonies, the bulk of which have been Latinos and the bulk of those have been Mexican," says Rangel. Many of those new citizens live in the suburbs, he adds.

Photographs by Jon Randolph

Guillermina Solis from Guatemala is about to sign her citizenship application at Casa Central in Chicago. The United
Neighborhood Organization (UNO) helped applicants at such naturalization sessions.

"A couple of years ago I couldn't pay somebody to become a citizen, let alone register them to vote," says Gonzalez. "Now I have people calling me asking, 'How do I become a citizen? How do I register to vote?'"

The Republicans haven't been idle. They've sponsored their own citizen

Illinois Issues November 1996 / 35

ship and voter registration drives for Latinos. Armando A. Galvan, a Republican Latino trustee for Cicero, says the party has reached out to Latinos by appealing to their sense of family values.

Further, Republicans have put their own spin on the Democrats' traditional appeal to minority voters.

"The advantage we feel we have is that these communities feel like they've been taken for granted by the Democrats — who treat them as special interest groups — whereas we [see] everyone [as being on] the same playing field," says Karen Johnson, a spokeswoman with the Republican National Committee.

"Our message for women or men, African Americans or Hispanics, is a message of economic opportunity and personal freedom and personal responsibility."

In any event, the full potential of Latino voting power is still some years off. While the Latino population as a whole has increased in the suburbs, the voting age population is still small.

Despite this, Gonzalez believes ultimately there may be a change in the balance of power in DuPage County.

"An increasing number of Latinos are now understanding how necessary it is to vote and participate and run for different positions," she says.

"A few years ago, they didn't know what was going on, but now they know who Bob Dole is, they know who [state Senate President James] 'Pate' Philip is."

Moving south

While Latinos have moved to Chicago's western suburbs, African Americans have pushed southward out of the city.

Although some towns in the south suburbs were already predominantly black, others experienced tremendous growth in black residents during the last decade. In 1980, Riverdale had only 36 blacks, but by 1990 that number had grown to 5,557, or 40 percent of the population. Dolton went from 2 percent black in 1980 to 38 percent in 1990. The populations of Hazel Crest and Country Club Hills are now majority black. Carmen Trujillo (above left) from Mexico and Noel Guillen and Lilia Garcia-Guillen (Right), also from Mexico, apply for U.S. citizenship. UNO in Chicago helped organize naturalization sessions.

The south suburban area also is GOP turf, but the demographic shift gives Democrats reason for optimism over the long haul.

Many of the African Americans who have moved south retain their Democratic Party allegiance. But while they remain loyal to the Democrats, the national party's recent shift to the center has angered many blacks and made them feel as though they're being taken for granted.

"The Democratic Party is following the lead of the Republican Party and becoming more conservative, and it leaves a vacuum in terms of where African Americans should go," says Timuel Black, a visiting professor of African American Studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Yet Selwyn O. Carter, director of the voting rights program for the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, sees little reason for the Democrats to worry in the long run. "I think you're going to see an overwhelming African-American vote for the Democratic Party, even though there is clear concern that the president has moved to the right on a number of issues that are important to the black community," he says.

Nevertheless, some GOP analysts believe geography may well be destiny. "Regardless of who you are, when you move to the suburbs you automatically become a suburbanite, and you have different concerns from people who live the city," Mike Cys, a spokesman for House Speaker Lee Daniels, told Illinois Issues last March.

But Republican efforts to recruit African Americans have not been led by the central party, according to Manny Hoffman, chairman of the Cook County Republican Party. Instead, Hoffman says, the effort is up to each individual committeeman.

And as they try to appeal to blacks, Republicans have found they have some recent history to overcome.

"The Republican Party, despite its recent overtures, hasn't shown a record that makes the black community feel

36 / November 1996 Illinois Issues

comfortable, and the agenda the 104th Congress pursued has scared the living daylights out of the black community," Carter says.

"There's no programmatic effort that has substance that appeals to the black voters, and that is also true of the candidates they have put forward," adds Black. "They have to bring in African Americans that African-American people trust, who have a track record that would open up dialogue in the black community."

A numbers game

The small number of African-American votes the Republicans hope to get nationally in this election do not warrant a big effort in going after them, says David Bositis, a senior analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which has been tracking black elected officials since 1970.

In fact, nationally, African-American and Latino voting power is not strong enough by itself to sway the election in a race where one candidate significantly leads another in the polls.

"If the presidential election were two or three points difference, Hispanics would be more important," says Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza.

The same may not be true in the coming years in the Chicago suburbs, where the numbers of Latinos and blacks have increased dramatically. And next time out, minorities may not wait for the two major parties to come courting.

"I think [Latinos are] beginning to see the realities of what's going on and how politics affects them," says Rita Gonzalez, "how it affects their schools, their children and their future."

Yet, Raul Yzaguirre believes minorities need to develop political sophistication. "We have to go beyond voter registration and more into voter education," he says.

"I think we have some tactical decisions to make." 

Paul Cuadros is a free-lance writer living in Chicago.

Editor's choice

NOT SO GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Reinventing government for an age of limits

In Defense of Government: The Fall and Rise of Public Trust,
by Jacob Weisberg, 1996, Scribner.

No matter which political leaders win the opportunity to guide us into the next century, it's likely the debate about what they can and can't do for us won't be over anytime soon.

As we face the millennium, a number of political thinkers are searching for new ways of looking at the role of government — and the responsibilities of our officials in Washington, the State-house and City Hall.

Jacob Weisberg's analysis is one of the more recent contributions to that debate.

Do we, he asks, expect government to shield us from all risk? Do we expect it to be an endlessly giving benefactor? Weisberg argues that's precisely what we expect. He suggests we expect too much.

Though Weisberg places himself within the liberal tradition, he nevertheless traces the problem to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. Roosevelt, he writes, "perhaps unwittingly initiated a process by which all problems increasingly came to be seen as public responsibility."

Further, today's political leaders have acquired the habit of promising more than government can deliver. As an instance, Weisberg cites the "war" on poverty, which he concludes was an unmanageable and ultimately unrealizable program.

When politicians make promises that are unobtainable, Weisberg argues, government gets blamed — for matters beyond its control, as well as for its own faults. Government - not just our leaders - loses credibility. The depth of that distrust, he concludes, can be measured precisely by the gap between promise and performance.

And by the scale of reaction. Weisberg calls the so-called "revolution" of the 104th Congress "a kind of anti-New Deal," of abolition. "In a frenzy of unmaking," Weisberg writes, "Congress is dumping government that works, government that doesn't, and a great deal that falls somewhere in between. In 1995 the stale metaphor that making legislation is like making sausage took on a new poignancy. Taxes were chopped, farm programs diced, Medic-aid pureed .... The rapidity of the transformation has since slowed, and many specific changes have been blocked, but the direction is unlikely to change in the near future."

Weisberg believes the cure is worse than the illness. He prescribes, instead, a "liberalism with limits." Government should stick to the basics, which he defines as safeguarding the rights of citizens and providing for the common defense; maintaining public safety and administering the rule of law. At the next level, government can safeguard the environment and protect the public health; provide for our infrastructure and support a system of universal education. Further, it should make some provision for the destitute.

But, Weisberg warns, we should give thought to what government is really capable of accomplishing.

"Liberals lost the support of the nation not because of their ideals but as a result of the flawed way they put them into practice."

Illinois Issues November 1996 / 37