UC Merced

In the Spring of 2006, cities across America were rocked by a sudden wave of large-scale, Latino-led protests demonstrating against the recent passage of H.R. 4437 in the United States House of Representatives. H.R. 4437, represented a significant, racialized political threat to the Latino community due to its criminalization of undocumented immigrants and their allies. In response, Latino community organizations across the U.S. amassed the resources and people needed to stage over 250 protests across 100 cities that spring. Yet, the expected surge in Latino voter turnout expected in the midterm elections that fall failed to materialize. How do contextual factors, such as political threats and community organizations, interact to shape Latino political participation, in particular voting?In this dissertation, I argue that political threats, in the form of immigration enforcement, can have a demobilizing effect on Latino participation in elections through its targeting of Latino individuals, regardless of citizenship status, based on phenotypical features. Yet, I also argue that Latino serving organizations (LSOs); descriptively representative, community-level organizations engaged in advocacy and service-providing activities can counter the demobilizing effects of immigration enforcement. They do so by building civic capacity and psychological capital in the communities they operate in. I test this argument by conducting a cross-sectional analysis of rates of Latino voter registration and turnout in the 2016 general presidential election in Texas. In gathering data for this project, I draw from several sources. My data include two novel datasets on the presence of Latino-serving organizations constructed using the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File and a newspaper search of chapters of the Viva Kennedy campaign in 1960. I also gather immigration enforcement data from the Secure Communities program accessed via the Transactional Record Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. I construct measures of Latino electoral participation generated using precinct-level election results from the 2016 election in Texas accessed via the Redistricting Hub. In Chapter 2 I show that the increasing presence of LSOs in some counties, but not others, is associated with increasing rates of Latino voter registration and turnout in 2016 Texas. In Chapter 3, I show that while increased immigration enforcement negatively impacts both Latino voter registration and turnout, the presence of Viva Kennedy LSOs, but not tax-exempt LSOs, increase Latino voter turnout. In Chapter 4, I show that the presence of LSOs increased the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton’s, vote share among Latino voters. Chapter 5 discusses future avenues of research.