Center for Latino Policy Research

Three major legal and public policy arguments are made to justify a rollback in the application of federal civil rights remedies to electoral under-representation of African American and Latino voters: 1) political exclusion by race and ethnicity is now the exception; 2) existing barriers to minority political participation are internal to the populations and therefore not susceptible to external remedy; 3) external intervention will not change anything, because electoral inequality is not based on discrimination. If race and ethnicity no longer represent a major barrier to political participation, the argument goes, then federal intervention in state and local electoral affairs is no longer necessary.

To examine these claims, I analyze a legal challenge to at-large elections waged by Latinos in Watsonville, California, in the late 1980s, and found each of them wanting. Although Watsonville is a relatively small community of 33,000, it is symbolic of Latino political struggle and empowerment in several respects, including minority voting rights. Latinos had become almost half the population by 1980, but none could get elected to the city council in an at-large election system. Gomez vs. The city of Watsonville overturned at-large elections in 1988 an se a legal precedent for similar challenges throughout California. Events in Watsonville demonstrate the role race and ethnicity can play in U.S. elections, and the impact of minority and majority power relations under conditions of rapid demographic change fueled by New Mexican immigration.

Although some may argue that Latinos should not have been brought under the protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1975, the history of discrimination and resistance to Latino empowerment by mainstream Watsonville leads to the conclusion that judicial intervention in the form of district elections was necessary to bring about minority political incorporation. Implementation of district elections resulted in increased minority voter turnout in the 1989 Watsonville elections, and the election of more-representative city council members, including the Latino.