Kansas Latinos up their political visibility

Back in the 1960s, when he was a child migrant worker picking peas for 50 cents per 100-pound sack and living in fear that his Mexican-born parents would be deported, Elías García never imagined that one day he would be a leader of Latinos. And he never foresaw a time when the Latino culture would enter mainstream America with white teenage girls shrieking over Puerto Rican pop star Ricky Martin and Anglo presidential hopefuls greeting crowds on the political stump in halting Spanish. But that's what has happened.

As chairman of the Kansas Democratic Hispanic Caucus, serving his second two-year term, García finds himself in a year in which candidates are wooing Latinos as the new swing voters, portrayed in the media as "the soccer moms of the 2000 elections." The sheer numbers of a burgeoning population -- Latinos are expected to represent one-fourth of the American populace by 2050 -- command attention and respect. "Demography, in good measure, is political destiny in the United States," states a Latino voting report put out by the Chicago-based United States Hispanic Leadership Institute (USHLI). And García is hanging his hopes for the future of the country's Latino community not on the traditional Latino enclaves of Florida, California, and along the Mexican border but instead on the heartland.

"I think we (the Midwest's Latinos) are gonna be the savior of this country. We're gonna learn by other people's mistakes, like California, like Texas, like those places that all this negativeness and all this social upheaval has happened in the last 10 years, in the '90s, with this anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, anti-Latino drama that has somehow embraced their whole states. I think we have learned from those lessons," García says, sitting in his office at city hall in Topeka, where he handles civil rights complaints as executive director of the city's Human Relations Commission.

If García speaks passionately about anti-Hispanic attitudes, it is because he knows what it's like to be the target of racism and bigotry. He thinks back to his childhood and the shoddy way white Americans treated his family. "I was a kid, and kids know what's right and what's wrong. And you know it's wrong when somebody's cheating you in a store, calling you names, or when the Mexican seating is upstairs on the balcony as opposed to the main floor, when you see signs about Mexicans and dogs, and that sort of thing," García says.

But that racism was not the worst of it. Nor were the backbreaking 18-hour days he spent hoeing tomato fields in Colorado as a teenager, hunched over the plants because bosses would not provide long-handle hoes. His darkest childhood moments were watching his undocumented parents be so distraught about their legal status that they were afraid to look anyone in the eye, García says. "That, more than anything, led me to where I am today in terms of my fighting for the rights of others so other people won't have to go through that ever again." Such memories pushed Garcia to succeed. He assembled mobile homes in a factory to put himself through college at Wichita State University, and now he has a master's degree in education.

García's quest to help other Latinos centers on state government. He points to a recent victory against what he calls anti-Hispanic legislation, the defeat of an "English-only" bill in Kansas. Twenty-five states, including Missouri and the heavily Latino states of Florida and California, have declared English their states' "official language." Latinos were able to defeat the Kansas bill, under García's leadership, by building coalitions with other groups, like the deaf, who would also be affected by such a law, and military veterans who viewed the law as an infringement on basic rights. Now García is promoting a state bill sponsored by state Rep. David Haley, a Kansas City, Kan., Democrat, that calls for an independent study to determine whether police officers stop Hispanic and African-American motorists in disproportionate numbers. The bill dealing with racial profiling passed the House in late February.

García calls Kansas and surrounding states "the new seaports," places that are drawing diverse groups of Latino immigrants -- Argentines, Colombians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, Mexicans -- who work as executives for American companies, attend universities, own small businesses, or work construction and labor in fields or meat processing plants. Some are documented. Some are not.

A state-by-state compilation of Latino voter information, The Almanac of Latino Politics 2000, recently released by USHLI, shows that Kansas' Hispanic population, now more than 130,000, is expected to increase more than 100 percent in the next 25 years. (For Missouri, the current Hispanic population is approximately 82,000 with an expected 109 percent increase in the next 25 years.) The number of Kansas Hispanics of voting age is 90,900, or 4 percent of the total voting-age population, and the number who are American citizens is 54,500, or 3 percent, according to USHLI's almanac, which USHLI leaders tout as the most comprehensive compilation of Latino political data to date. The challenge for García and other Hispanic leaders is knitting these diverse Latino groups together in support of common causes. García says "blood and roots" are the intangibles that link, for example, a fourth-generation, middle-class Mexican-American who doesn't speak Spanish with a black immigrant from the Dominican Republic with a cosmopolitan Argentine who speaks Spanish with Italian rhythms that reveal that country's ties to Europe.