Will The Year of Trump Propel Latinas to U.S. Senate?

*This is where declaring presumptive winners matters. There are important down ballot races that could be decided because of voters who don’t go to the polls when winners are presumptively declared. Loretta Sanchez has a good chance of making a U.S. Senate runoff in California, but folks need to vote. VL

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By Luisita Lopez Torregoza, NBC News (4 minute read)

In every election cycle in the last two decades Latinos have offered enticing promises of voting power that could transform the nation’s political landscape, and in every cycle Democrats and Republicans and allied activists go after the Hispanic base with alacrity, flaunting electoral and policy advances and visions of greater political muscle. [tweet_dis]Despite all the drum beating, Latino turnout at the ballot box consistently falls behind expectations.[/tweet_dis]

This year could be different.

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This is the year of Trump. For nearly 12 months Trump has knocked Latinos around, calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug traffickers and threatening to build a fortress wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and deport some 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally, about half of whom are Mexican. Most recently, he has been under fire for calling the U.S. federal judge presiding over the Trump University case “Mexican” and . . . READ MORE 

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[Photo by Erik (HASH) Hersman/Flickir]

Suggested reading

Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement is the most comprehensive account of the arduous struggle by Mexican Americans to secure and protect their civil rights. It is also a companion volume to the critically acclaimed, four-part documentary series of the same title. This volume is a testament to the Mexican American community’s hard-fought battle for social and legal equality as well as political and cultural identity.

Since the United States-Mexico War in 1846-1848, Mexican Americans have striven to achieve full rights as citizens. From peaceful resistance and violent demonstrations, when their rights were ignored or abused, to the establishment of support organizations to carry on the struggle and the formation of labor unions to provide a united voice, the movement grew in strength and numbers. However, it was during the 1960s and 1970s that the campaign exploded into a nationwide groundswell of Mexican Americans laying claim, once and for all, to their civil rights and asserting their cultural heritage. They took a name that had been used disparagingly against them for years—Chicano—and fashioned it into a battle cry, a term of pride, affirmation and struggle.

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