Latino Electoral Campaigns In Massachusetts

This collection of original essays explores the major challenges to Latino political representation in cities where Latino populations do not make up the majority of the population and therefore cannot rely on sheer numbers to gain representation.

This collection of original essays explores the major challenges to Latino political representation in cities where Latino populations do not make up the majority of the population and therefore cannot rely on sheer numbers to gain representation.

More than one million Latinos now live in New England. This is the first book to examine their impact on the region's culture, politics, and economics. At the same time, it investigates the effects of the locale on Latino residents' lives, traditions, and institutions.Employing methodologies from a variety of disciplines, twenty-one contributors explore topics in three broad areas: demographic trends, migration and community formation, and identity and politics. They utilize a wide range of approaches, including oral histories, case studies, ethnographic inquiries, focus group research, surveys, and statistical analyses. From the "Dominicanization" of the Latino community in Waterbury, Connecticut, to the immigration experiences of Brazilians in Massachusetts, from the influence of Latino Catholics on New England's Catholic churches to the growth of a Latino community in Providence, Rhode Island, the essays included here contribute to a new and multifaceted view of the growing Pan-Latino presence in the birthplace of the United States.

This book provides the first in-depth look at male and female elected officials of color using survey and other empirical data.

As the voting public continues to diversify across the United States, political candidates, and particularly white candidates, increasingly recognize the importance of making appeals to voters who do not look like themselves. As history has shown, this has been accomplished with varying degrees of success. During the 2016 election, for example, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigned vociferously among Latino voters in Nevada's early primary, where nineteen percent of the Democratic caucus consisted of Latinos. Clinton released a campaign message to these voters stating that she was just like their abuela (or grandmother). The message, widely panned, came across as insincere, and Clinton, who otherwise performed well among Latinos nationally, lost by a wide margin to Sanders. On the other hand, in 2013, Bill de Blasio, campaigning for mayor of New York City, appeared with his black son in a commercial aimed against stop and frisk policies. His appeal came across as authentic, and he received a high level of support among black voters. In Campaigning in a Racially Diversifying America, Loren Collingwood develops a theory of Cross-Racial Electoral Mobilization (CRM) to explain why, when, and how candidates of one race or ethnicity act to mobilize voters of another race or ethnicity. Specifically, Collingwood examines how and when white candidates mobilize Latino voters, and why some candidates are more succesful than others. He argues that candidates strategize by weighing the potential costs and benefits of conducting CRM based on the size of the minority electorate (the benefit) and the overall level of white racial hostility (the cost). Extensive cross-racial mobilization is most likely to occur when elections are competitive, institutional barriers to the vote are low, candidates have previously developed a welcoming racial reputation with target voters, whites' attitudes are racially liberal, and the Latino electorate is large and growing. Moreover, candidates who can demonstrate cultural competence and do so repeatedly are much more likely to be successful at making such appeals. The book looks at CRM trends and case studies over the past seventy years to gauge how politics in various places have changed as the American electorate has diversified. It draws on the author's research in over thirty archives in nine states, candidate and survey data, and experimental approaches to assess causality in voter responses to candidate behavior.

The challenges that women face as political candidates can be compounded by race. In the case of Latinas, stereotypes as well as national media coverage and labeling of “Latino” issues potentially creates an electoral burden for Latina candidates at the local, state, and national level. The intersection of race and gender is complicated and often creates more questions than it answers. How are Latinas elected? Are they served by this complex identity or hindered by it? Latinas in American Politics: Embracing and Changing Political Tradition begins addressing the issues by examining the stereotypes Latinas face while running for political office. More specifically, the perception of voters on ideological standings of Latinas provides insight as to what party Latinas are identified with and how they can use this to their advantage. In addition to establishing the role stereotypes play in the electability of Latinas, the way they use and diffuse these stereotypes via campaigns is examined. The images that Latinas present and how they interact with voters via social media establishes a new dynamic in campaigning and allows for theory building in the area of race, gender, and campaigns. Aside from campaigning, party identification for a Latina creates a different barrier. How do Latinas bridge this? Case studies of prominent Latina officials are examined to understand within which contexts and under what conditions Latinas as candidates and as elected officials will experience intersectionality as advantage and disadvantage. Finally, the examination of Latina congressional members shows whether and how the intersection of gender and ethnicity in descriptive representation contributes uniquely to patterns of substantive representation. Ultimately, this volume demonstrates how the intersection of race and gender creates unique situations for representation and electability of candidates.

"Thoughtful, fair-minded, and learned, Cadava's eye-opening book will teach experts on American politics things they didn't even know they didn't know." — Rick Perlstein, bestselling author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge “Geraldo Cadava’s history...provides a unique vantage point on US politics; on the shifting terrains of foreign policy, labor, and religion; and on the changing nature of specific states, as well as on deeper ideological fights over the soul of the country: is it to be an inclusive nation of immigrants, or, as the nativists today say, a country founded on white supremacy? An excellent, insightful study.” — Greg Grandin, professor of history at Yale University and author of The End of the Myth “Geraldo Cadava offers a fascinating examination of the socioeconomic interests and foreign policy concerns that have drawn Hispanics/Latinos into a rapidly changing Republican Party. If readers harbor the mistaken idea that Hispanics are a monolithic voting bloc, this book should dispel this idea once and for all. Though the work is written for a general audience, even experts on Hispanic politics and voting behavior will find much that is new and surprising in these chapters.” — María Cristina García, author of The Refugee Challenge in Post–Cold War America