Arkansas Could Get A Latino State District
Word is that the Arkansas state legislature will have it’s first Latino-majority district in time for the next legislative session. That’s right, Arkansas, catty-corner to Texas, stuffed between Oklahoma, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana: where the Latino population grew 114% since 2000.
Just like they’ve done in many other states, Latinos have shifted the population balance. They have gone there lured by the prospect of jobs in the state’s poultry plants and have, as a consequence, forced dramatic changes in the redistricting process. According to an Associated Press report
Hispanic leaders in northwestern Arkansas hope to convince members of the Arkansas Board of Apportionment that the state should have a majority-Hispanic House seat in time for next year’s legislative session.
The governor, attorney general and secretary of state this summer will redraw boundaries for Arkansas’ 100 House and 35 Senate seats. Population shifts since 2000 mean Hispanic-heavy northwestern Arkansas will gain seats.
Mireya Reith of the Rogers-based Arkansas United Community Coalition says she and other northwestern Arkansas Hispanic leaders will meet with the Apportionment Board staff July 6.
When the piecemeal release of the 2010 Census began earlier this year News Taco spent a lot of time reporting on it. We knew, as did almost everyone else in the Latino community, that big changes were on the way.
But change is seldom easy.
The challenge for Mireya Reith, of the Arkansas Community Coalition and others like her, is huge. The preservation instinct of entrenched political interests doesn’t bend easily. We see it in Texas, where the growth of the Latino population has been large enough to produce four new congressional districts, but Latinos will be lucky to have one. In a very candid one-on-one conversation with me a prominent Latino politician characterized the sentiment in Texas and across the country in historical terms. He said he remembered when his father was a state senator during the civil rights era; the racism, he said, is as bad as it was then.
What can we do to help?
Be involved, of course. But primarily, be informed. And as Latinos grow in internet usage (another consequence of an increased population) we bear a responsibility to share what we know and what we witness. In this sense what happens in Arkansas, stuffed between Oklahoma and Mississippi, is happening at home, wherever home is.
What’s happening in Arkansas, although it looks like political baby steps, will have an effect across the U.S. And whether the Community Coalition there prevails or not is not the final outcome. What matters is that we understand that what happens in Arkansas is part of a larger struggle for political equity.
In Texas we know that the struggle started many decades ago, and those who struggled then knew that eventually it would spread.
Suddenly, but not surprisingly, eventually is upon us. The question for all of us is how will we respond?
Follow victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda
[Photo by taylorandayumi]
