Temporal Politics of the Future: National Latino Civil Rights Advocacy, Demographic Statistics, and the “Browning” of America

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TEMPORAL POLITICS OF THE FUTURE: NATIONAL LATINO CIVIL RIGHTS ADVOCACY, DEMOGRAPHIC STATISTICS, AND THE “BROWNING” OF AMERICA

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz

BA, Northeastern Illinois University, 2003

MA, University of Illinois-Chicago, 2008

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of Sociology at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2015

Dedicated to Nellie B. Muñiz

For your lessons of love, resilience, and justice

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz

Department of Sociology Brown University Maxcy Hall, 112 George Street, Providence, RI 02912

EDUCATION

PhD BROWN UNIVERSITY Sociology, 2015 Dissertation Committee: José Itzigsohn (Co-Chair) and Gianpaolo Baiocchi (Co- Chair, New York University), Michael Kennedy, and Ann Morning (New York University)

MA UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO Sociology, 2008 Thesis: “Grappling with Latinidad: Puerto Rican Activism in Chicago’s Immigrant Rights Movement”

BA NORTHEASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY Political Science (Major), History (Minor) and Mexican-Caribbean Studies (Minor), 2003

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS

Sociology of Knowledge and Culture; Race and Ethnicity with an emphasis on Latino/a panethnicity; Political Sociology; Science and Technology Studies; Philosophy and History of Science; Materiality, Visualization, and Affect; Social and Political Theory; Ethnography and Qualitative Methodologies

PUBLICATIONS

Journal Articles

2015 Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. 2015. “Intellectual Inheritances: Cultural Diagnostics and the State of Poverty Knowledge.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3: 89-122.

2013 Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, Diana Graizbord, and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz. “Actor- Network Theory and the Ethnographic Imagination: An Exercise in Translation.” Qualitative Sociology 36: 323-341.

Edited Editions 2013 Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, Diana Graizbord, and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz (Guest Editors). “Special Issue: Reassembling Ethnography: Actor-Network Theory and Sociology,” Qualitative Sociology 36 (4).

Book Chapters 2014 Flores-González, Nilda and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz. “Latino Solidarity, Citizenship, and Puerto Rican Youth in the Immigrant Rights Movement” in Diaspora Studies in Education: Towards a Framework for Understanding the Experiences of Transnational Communities, edited by R. Rolon-Dow and J. G. Irizarry. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

2011 Flores-González, Nilda, and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz. “Youth Culture, Identity, and Resistance: Participatory Action Research in a Puerto Rican Barrio.” Pp. 64- 69 in Sociologists in Action: Sociology, Social Change, Social Justice, edited by Kathleen Odell Korgen, Jonathan M. White, and Shelley K. White. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press.

2010 Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. “Grappling with Latinidad: Puerto Rican Activism in Chicago's Immigrant Rights Movement.” Pp. 237-258 in ¡Marcha!: Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement, edited by N. Flores-González and A. Pallares. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

2008 Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. “Ejercicios en la Auto-determinación Puertorriqueña: La democracia participativa en el Barrio Humboldt Park.” Pp. 223-42 in Orbis/Urbis Latino: Los “Hispanos” en las ciudades de USA, edited by Cardenio Bedoya, Flavia Belpoliti, and Marc Zimmerman. Houston: LACASA Publications.

2006 Flores-González, Nilda, Matthew Rodríguez, and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz. “From Hip-Hop to Humanization: Batey Urbano as a Space for Latino Youth Culture and Community Action.” Pp. 175-96 in Beyond Resistance! Youth Activism and Community Change: New Democratic Possibilities for Practice and Policy for America's Youth, edited by Shawn Ginwright, Pedro Noguera, and Julio Cammarota. New York: Routledge.

Reprinted in: Latinos and Education: A Critical Reader. 2013. Second Edition, edited by Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres. New York: Routledge.

Book Reviews Forth. Book Review of Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American by G. Cristina Mora. Latino Studies.

v 2014 Book review of Andreas Glaeser’s Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, The Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism in Perspectives, Newsletter of the ASA Theory Section, Volume 36, Issue 1.

Other Writings 2014 Article reviews of Elizabeth Popp Berman and Laura M. Milanes-Reyes’ “The Politicization of Knowledge Claims: The ‘Laffer Curve’ in the U.S. Congress” and Isaac Ariail Reed’s “Charismatic Performance: A Study of Bacon’s Rebellion” in ASA Sociology of Culture Newsletter, Volume 27, Issue 1.

2013 Article review of Geneviève Zubrzycki’s “Aesthetic revolt and the remaking of national identity in Québec, 1960–1969” in ASA Sociology of Culture Newsletter, Volume 26, Issue 3.

2012 “Update on ‘Hispanic’ Categorization and the Census” in Newsletter for the ASA Section on Latino/a Sociology, Summer Issue.

2007 “The Immigrant Mobilization Research Project at UIC” in Footnotes: Newsletter of the American Sociological Association, Volume 35, Issue 8.

2005 “Exercises in Puerto Rican Self-Determination: The Humboldt Park Participatory Democracy Project” in Diálogo, Volume 9.

AWARDS

2014 Cristina Maria Riegos Graduate Student Paper Award from the ASA Section on the Sociology of Latinas/os

2014 Selected for the Young Scholar Symposium, Institute for Latino Studies, Notre Dame

GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS

2014 Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Brown University

2014 Honorable Mention, Ford Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship

2013 National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant

2013 Dissertation Fellowship, Brown University

2011 Beatrice and Joseph Feinberg Memorial Fund

2011 Mellon Graduate Student Workshop

2010 Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellowship (Three years of funding)

2009 Graduate Fellowship, Brown University

vi 2008 Abraham Lincoln Fellowship, University of Illinois-Chicago

2007 Abraham Lincoln Fellowship, University of Illinois-Chicago

PRESENTATIONS

Invited Speaker 2014 “Figures of the Future: Temporal Politics and Latino Demographic Demonstrations in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election” Department of Sociology, Indiana University-Bloomington (December) Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, GA (December) Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, Illinois (November) Department of Sociology, New York University, NY (November) Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean and Latin American Studies, University of Connecticut, CT (November)

2013 “Speaking for the Future: Statistics, Electoral Demonstrations, and Latino Sleeping Giants,” Latin American and Latino Studies Program, University of Illinois-Chicago, Chicago, IL (November)

2011 “The Law of Large Numbers: Latino Demography and Democracy in the 21st Century,” Latina/o Studies Program, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (September)

Conference Presentations (Selected) 2014 “Politics, Polls, and Potentialities: Demographic Understandings and Electoral Demonstrations,” Social Science and History Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada (November)

2014 “Demonstrating the Future: Statistical Representations and National Latino Advocacy in the 2012 Election,” American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (August)

2014 “Expert for a Day: The Ethnography of Experts, Elites, and other non-Subalterns,” co-authored with Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Diana Graizbord, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (August)

2014 “A Darker Horizon: Demographic Narratives, Racial Affects, and the Cultural Politics of the Future,” Media Sociology Preconference, Mills College, (August)

2014 “Demographic Knowledge, Latino/a Growth, and the Politics of the “Browning of America,” Population Association of America, Boston, MA (May)

2014 “Awakening the Sleeping Giant: The “Latino Vote,” Electoral Demonstrations, and the Politics of Statistics,” Young Scholars Symposium, Notre Dame (April)

2013 “Polls and the Polis: The Latino Vote and the Politics of Knowledge,” Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, Mexico City, Mexico (December 2013).

vii 2013 “Inscriptions-in-Action: Materiality, Politics, and Knowledge,” co-authored with Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Diana Graizbord, Social Science and History Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL (November)

2013 “Democracy’s Devices: Circulation, Publics, and the Participatory Imagination,” co-authored with Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Diana Graizbord, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, New York City, NY (August)

2013 “Awakening the ‘Sleeping Giant’: The Latino Vote, Statistical Knowledge, and the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election,” Latin American Studies Association, Washington D.C. (May)

2013 “Imagined Futures, Affect, and the Political Horizon,” Eastern Sociological Society, Boston, MA (March)

2013 “Making the ‘Sleeping Giant’: Latino Stakeholders and Census Promotional Politics,” The Location of Meaning, The Meaning of Location, The Center for Comparative Research Graduate Student Conference, Yale University, New Haven, CO (January)

2012 “The Culture of Poverty Research: A Critical Appraisal of the New Cultural Sociology of Poverty,” American Sociological Association, Denver, CO (August)

2011 “Census Infrastructures: Local Promotion, State Imaginaries, and the Politics of Participation,” Society for Social Studies of Science, Cleveland, OH (November)

2011 “The Stakes and States of Participation: Census 2010, Consent and the Political,” American Sociological Association, Las Vegas, NV (August)

2011 Imaginings of the State: Census 2010, Local Latino Stakeholders, and the Politics of Participation,” Inter-Ivy Sociology Graduate Student and Sorensen Memorial Conference, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (April)

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Course Instructor 2011 Political Ethnography and Qualitative Methodologies, Brown University Co-designed and co-taught with Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Diana Graizbord

2008- The Sociology of Latinos, University of Illinois at Chicago 2009

Graduate Workshop 2013 Summer Ethnographic Research Clinic, University of Nevada-Las Vegas Co-designed and taught with Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Diana Graizbord, and Johnnie Lotesta.

2011- Mellon Workshop: Politics, Knowledge, and Identity 2012

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Teaching Assistant 2014 Sociology of Gender, Brown University

2007- Social Problems, University of Illinois-Chicago 2008

2006- Race and Ethnic Groups, University of Illinois-Chicago 2007

2005- Intro to Latin American and Latino Studies, University of Illinois-Chicago 2006

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

2015- Article Reviewer for Qualitative Sociology, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, El Centro Journal for Puerto Rican Studies

2014-2015 Student Representative, ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Council

2014- Book reviewer for Latino Studies journal

2013-14 Graduate Student Editor, ASA Sociology of Culture Newsletter

2011-12 Professional Development Committee, Department of Sociology, Brown University

2010-11 Colloquium Committee, Department of Sociology, Brown University

MEMBERSHIP IN PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS

American Sociological Association Social Science and History Association Eastern Sociological Association American Anthropological Association Latin American Studies Association International Latino Studies Association Puerto Rican Studies Association

REFERENCES

José Itzigsohn Professor of Sociology Brown University

ix Michael Kennedy Professor of Sociology and International Studies Brown University

Gianpaolo Baiocchi Associate Professor of Individualized Studies and Sociology New York University

Ann Morning Associate Professor of Sociology New York University

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Nearly six years ago, I left behind my family and community in Chicago to begin my doctorate at Brown University. I found it immensely difficult to be far from home, especially from the world of Paseo Boricua, Humboldt Park. Some of the challenges I have faced are more or less universal to graduate school, and others I share with many first generation students from historically excluded communities. The fact that I have completed my dissertation is not a testament to my will or intelligence, but to the profound and enveloping embrace—emotional, physical, intellectual, and political—of more people than I could ever adequately or appropriately acknowledge in the pages to come. I am filled with overflowing gratitude for all of the contributions that have made this document and other accomplishments possible.

I cannot imagine a more wonderful dissertation committee, and I only hope I have made their investment in me worth their time and energy. José Itzigsohn has shaped this dissertation in many ways, but perhaps most importantly—as he would insist—in seeing it to completion. José has provided unwavering support and impeccable guidance, and has been an exemplary mentor to me ever since he offered to sing Puerto Rico’s national anthem in attempts to convince me to accept Brown’s acceptance offer. Long before we

xi met, I had already learned a great deal from Gianpaolo Baiocchi. Perhaps as an example that some connections are bound to happen, by fate or happenstance, I read Gianpaolo’s first book, Militants and Citizens, as I was working with a group of Humboldt Park activists on a participatory democracy project. His intellectual influence is evident in this dissertation, and I am happy our relationship has blossomed into a close friendship. I thank Michael Kennedy for his enthusiastic insistence on engaged and reflexive sociological research. I recall fondly our first meeting, where he encouraged me to view my political experiences as resources for knowledge production. Ann Morning has been a major inspiration. A critical part of every phase of this project, she is as generous with her encouragements as with her scholarly provocations. I know this dissertation would have looked quite different—in substance and tone—without her deep involvement.

I am also blessed to have lived, endured, and shared with many friends and colleagues in my department. I thank my cohort—Aisalkyn Botoeva, David Ciplet, Diana

Graizbord, and Yara Jarallah—for their friendship. Each of you holds a place in my heart.

I owe a special and immense debt of gratitude to Diana for helping to keep me sane during our kindred journey. I treasure all of our conversations and commiserations over these past six years. Tatiana Andia and Marcelo Bohrt have been great interlocutors, but even greater friends—the mega trip to South America is on the horizon. Karida Brown continues to inspire me with her heart and vision for research. I thank Peter Klein and

Stephanie Savell for their ongoing support and warmth. Trina Vithayathil deserves much credit for this dissertation. Many of the ideas found herein were born in our conversations about censuses, and her friendship has also meant a great deal to me. I also want to thank

Sinem Adar, Orly Clerge, Ricarda Hammer, Johnnie Lotesta, Jamie McPike, Michael

xii Murphy, Tina Park, and Gayatri Singh for their advice, feedback, and uplift. I am particularly proud of the courageous and principled sociology graduate students that have fought to make our department more inclusive and egalitarian—keep up the fight!

While at Brown, I have also counted on the intellectual and professional support of several other sociology professors: Nitsan Chorev, Patrick Heller, Paget Henry, Dennis

Hogan, Margo Jackson, Josh Pacewicz, Andrew Schrank, Mark Suchman, and Leah

Vanwey. This process was also much smoother thanks to the helping hands of Joan

Picard, Amanda Figgins, Shane Martin, and Karl Dominey.

Before I came to Brown, I spent several years at the University of Illinois-

Chicago, where I received my first exposure to sociology. I cherish the friendships I made with fellow graduate students, especially with Pallavi Banerjee and Marco Roc. I want to thank professors Barbara Risman, Lorena García, Andy Clarno, Sharon Collins, as well as Tyrone Forman, who, I must thank, offered me incredible advice as I entered the job market. To Nilda Flores-González I owe more than I could ever repay. Without her, I would have never become a sociologist. Her belief in me has made a huge difference in all my pursuits. She is family. At Nilda’s behest, Amalia Pallares, a political scientist, convinced me that sociology rather than political science best suited my interests, and she has since invested in my scholarly development. I am also forever grateful to Amanda Lewis. I recall with gratitude the many times she urged me to speak up in class. Noticing my lack of confidence, Amanda insisted I had important contributions to make. In the years since, she has continued to support me. Claire

Decoteau taught one of the most impactful graduate courses I had the privilege of taking.

She has been a great mentor and friend, and is an inspiring voice of a new generation of

xiii sociological theorists. I also want to thank her for introducing me to one of my best friends, Cedric de Leon, who has made my time in Providence less cold than it otherwise would have been. Cedric, along with Aisalkyn, Diana, and Trina, have commented and helped improve many parts of this dissertation—our time together has been one of the highlights of dissertating.

I also want to thank David Leaman, who was my primary undergraduate professor at Northeastern Illinois University. David was the first person in the academy to encourage me to attend graduate school.

In the broader scholarly community, I want to recognize other friends and colleagues I’ve made in this journey: Elif Alp, Hillary Angelo, Brian Connor, Shai Dromi,

Paul Gutierrez, Tony Jack, Everaldo Lamprea, David Levy, Anila Rehman, Diana

Rodríguez-Franco, and Oscar “El Bane” Sosa, who, in particular, has helped make this final year much more memorable.

Many professors outside of the graduate programs I have inhabited have also contributed to my research. Victoria-Maria MacDonald opened up her home to me while

I was conducting fieldwork in Washington, D.C. As if this was not enough, she also kindly added me to her long list of mentees and pushed me to reach my potential. I thank her for her friendship and for talking through many parts of this study. Claudio Benzecry has been a constant source of encouragement, and I am so glad we will soon be colleagues. As she has done for so many students of color, Arlene Dávila has been a big supporter, most recently allowing me to use her office to write parts of this dissertation.

Kimberly Hoang has shared her experiences and advice with me at numerous critical junctures. I thank Andreas Glaeser for several impactful conversations and for supporting

xiv my progress. I would also like to thank Gabriel Abend, Julia Adams, Frances Aparicio,

Cristina Beltrán, Patrick Carroll, Héctor Cordero-Guzmán, Bruce Curtis, Steve Epstein,

Ron Jacobs, Caroline Lee, Mara Loveman, Steven Lukes, Matthew Mahler, Cristina

Mora, Stephanie Mudge, Dina Okamoto, Jan-Hendrik Passoth, Ricardo Ramírez, Isaac

Reed, Nicholas Rowland, Bhrigupati Singh, Nicholas Wilson, and Alford Young. I am grateful to Timothy Matovina and Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies for including me in their inaugural Young Scholars symposium last year. I thank Daisy Reyes, Hernan

Ramírez, and Leisy Abrego for selecting me for the 2014 Cristina Maria Riegos Graduate

Student Paper Award from the ASA Section on the Sociology of Latinas/os. The content of this dissertation was also strengthened by feedback I received at Indiana University,

New York University, Northwestern University, the University of Connecticut, the

University of Illinois-Chicago, and the University of Georgia.

I would like to recognize the financial support that enabled me to conduct research over the past several years, including the National Science Foundation, the Ford

Foundation, Brown University, and the Beatrice and Joseph Feinberg Memorial Fund.

All the resources in the world, however, would have not mattered without the many individuals and organizations that granted me the opportunity to study their efforts.

People shared time and stories with me, gave me access to their aspirations and their colleagues, and on numerous occasions revived me with their interest in my research. In

Rhode Island, I want to especially thank Anna Cano-Morales, Marta Martínez, and Pablo

Rodríguez. Although I did not know it at the time, the research I conducted in Rhode

Island sparked many of the issues and questions taken up in this dissertation.

xv From Orlando, Florida, I would like to acknowledge Yulissa Arce, Denise Díaz,

Soraya Marquez, Víctor José Sánchez, Denise Velázquez, Yanidsi Vélez, and Marcos

Vilar, who I have had the pleasure of knowing for years. While I conducted fieldwork, I also got to know and was embraced by a local Puerto Rican and Latino/a activist community. Zoraida Rios-Andino, a fierce fighter for the city’s Puerto Rican community, opened her home to me during my first visit, and later put me in touch with Doña Fela, at whose house I stayed during my extended stay. Zoraida’s strength and passion remains a huge inspiration. I also shared with and learned from Rico Piccard, a Vietnam veteran, journalist, and activist. While Rico is no longer physically with us, his example of struggle remains alive for us to emulate—“¡Arriba los de Abajo!” I enjoyed my time with

Rosario Martínez, collecting signatures for the Free Oscar López-Rivera campaign and engaging in political debate. I thank each of these individuals and their compañeros/as for making a space for me in their lives and work.

In Washington, D.C., I especially want to thank Luis Campillo, Patricia Foxen,

Gabriela Lemus, Clarissa Martínez, Eliseo Medina, Ben Monterroso, Héctor Sanchez,

Arturo Vargas, and Brent Wilkes for making time to speak with me. Thankfully, Sindy

Benavides immediately expressed interest in my research and took critical steps to support my efforts. She has impressed me with her joyful commitment and relentless work ethic, and I am blessed to count her as a close friend. I also want to thank Leni

González, Jossie Sapunar, and other LULAC activists. Juliana Cardona was an extremely helpful research assistant.

Prior to returning to Providence to complete the dissertation, I spent six months in

New York City. Friends like Gabriela Alvarez, Camilo Matos, Marisol Rodríguez and

xvi others made it a wonderful experience. José Candelario graciously shared his home and immense knowledge with me. Conversations with Yarimar Bonilla, a friend I met years ago while she completed her dissertation, helped me get in the right headspace before I dove into the job market.

As all my friends know, however, all roads for me lead to Chicago, or, to be more precise, Paseo Boricua, Humboldt Park. My original impetus to attend graduate school was born out of my growing frustration with the social conditions confronting the city’s

Puerto Rican community. Although my research interests expanded beyond concerns with gentrification, which had occupied much of my political life up until that point, it was the political lessons and relationships I developed there that have anchored me over the years. To the activists—past and present—of the Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rican

Cultural Center (PRCC), I thank you for your comradeship and example of struggle. It is among you that I have learned the meaning of self-determination. From the time I met him as an undergraduate student in his course, “Colonial Systems,” José E. López, the visionary executive director of the PRCC, has been a major part of my life. Beyond our political relationship, José has shown endless generosity to my family in difficult times.

Alejandro Luis Molina has been an incredible mentor, despite me testing his patience for decades. I have greatly missed Matt and Judy Rodríguez-Díaz, my best friends on the block, and I cannot wait to reconnect with them. I am honored that former Puerto Rican political prisoner Ricardo Jimenez has become family. I am thankful to Janeida Rivera for the laughter that inevitably came with her phone calls, and I have much love for her family. Jonathan Rosa has been, although he is a few years younger, an intellectual role model and friend. As he worked on his doctorate and began life as a junior faculty, he

xvii made time to counsel me throughout my long tenure as a graduate student. Without Steve

Whitman’s tutoring I would have failed graduate school statistics. But Steve did not only teach me statistics, he taught lessons of solidarity. Sadly, Steve is no longer with us.

Few people have witnessed my ups and downs while in graduate school as closely as Diana Castillo. Her many expressions of kindness, patience, and understanding have been important pillars for me. I thank her from the deepest.

I stand on a foundation created by my family. I have missed too many years of my niece and nephew’s young lives. I am extremely proud of Mia and Alex; they have been beacons that have guided me home. My brother-in-law, Pablo is one of my best friends.

In his own typically quiet way, he has shown me tremendous support. I have two great tiós, Tony and Albert. I want to especially thank Tony for calling me regularly to ask if I needed anything. It has meant a lot.

I have missed my sisters, Yvette and Cindy, greatly. They have kept me connected when I’ve felt far and distant. In their own ways, they have urged me along.

Cindy’s humor has lifted my spirits on many occasions and Yvette’s thoughtfulness has warmed my heart, although don’t acknowledge it enough. I love them and thank them for more than I can share here.

This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Nellie B. Muñiz. She passed away, far too young, and I am saddened beyond words that I cannot relish this accomplishment with her. She taught me how to read and challenged me when I became disenchanted in high school and wanted to dropout. She taught me to never be satisfied and to face the world with integrity and pride. This dissertation is for you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi List of Illustrations xxi Introduction 1 Temporal Politics of the Demographic Future 1 The Social Fact of Demographic Change 4 A Sociological Debate: The Transformation of the U.S. Ethnoracial Order? 6 Aims and Arguments 9 National Latino Civil Rights Advocacy 14 Data Collection and Methods 27 Chapter Overview 32 Chapter One 37 Conceptual and Theoretical Infrastructure 37 Introduction 37 Ontological Foundations 38 Racial Projects 43 Statistical Effects 49 Temporal Politics 54 Chapter Two 59 The Demographic Problem-Space 59 Introduction 59 Demographic Knowledge and the Racial Politics of Population 60 The Statisticalization of “Hispanics” 70 The Contemporary Horizon 75 Chapter Three 81 Desire for Data: Consent-Building and the Construction of Population 81 Introduction 81 Census-Making and Politics of Consent 85 Census Promotions in 2010: An Overview 86

xix National Latino Promotional Campaigns 90 Local Promotions: The Rhode Island Latino Complete Count Committee 94 Enrolling the Enrollers: “If They Don’t Count Us, We Don’t Count” 97 The Problem of Indifference: Motivational Rhetorics and Resources 102 The Problem of Identification: Ethnoracial Categories, Confusions, and Commensurations 106 The Problem of Mistrust: Noncitizens and the Fear of Deportation 113 The Problem of Dissent: Boundary-Work and the Science/Politics Divide 117 Conclusion 124 Chapter Four 126 A Darker Horizon: Media Discourse and White Demographobia 126 Introduction 126 Making the Census Public 133 Frames of Gravity 138 Racial Juxtapositions 141 Demographic Visualizations 148 Latino Boon and the Management of White Anxiety 168 Conclusion 179 Chapter Five 183 Demonstrations of Power: Statistical Awakenings in the 2012 Election 183 Introduction 183 Public Demonstrations 186 Mobilizing the “Latino Vote” 189 Projections and Potentials 193 Growth and Groupness 203 Get-Out-The-Vote Interlude 211 A “Giant” Awakens? 216 Conclusion 224 Conclusion 226 Temporal Tensions 226 Revisiting the Scholarly Debate on Demographic Change 231 Affect, Futures, and the Political Horizon 233 Towards a Sociology of Temporal Politics 238 References 241

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: NALEO Census Promotional Poster 122 Figure 2: Reuters, March 24, 2011 150 Figure 3: The Washington Post, May 17, 2012 152 Figure 4: NBC News, June 13, 2013 153 Figure 5: USA Today, August 9, 2014 154 Figure 6: “Minority Majority,” Mike Luckovich, 2013 155 Figure 7: “White Babies Outnumbered,” Matt Bors, 2012 156 Figure 8: Latino Demographics, El Machete Illustrated, 2011 157 Figure 9: Lalo Alcaraz, 2013 158 Figure 10: “The New America,” The Economist, March 31, 2011 160 Figure 11: “Hispanics in the U.S.,” The Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2011 161 Figure 12: “Minority Report,” The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2012 162 Figure 13: “Mapping the Census,” The Washington Post, July 21, 2011 166 Figure 14: “Mapping the USA’s Diversity, USA Today, October 21, 2011 167 Figure 15: “The changing face of America,” New Scientist, September 9, 2012 168 Figure 16: “Mi Familia” Comic Book, Mi Familia Vota, November 2012 200 Figure 17: “Yo Decido,” TIME, March 5, 2012 202 Figure 18: “Fact: 50,000,” Voto Latino, 2012 206 Figure 19: “The Latino Electorate,” Presente.org, 2012 222

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INTRODUCTION

Temporal Politics of the Demographic Future

There is no human science of the future. There is only faith in the future; and among the forces which combine to bring this future into being, the faith in its coming is one of the most effective. –Hendrik De Man (1928)

Janet Murguía took the podium to give her presidential address, as she has done since replacing the venerable Raul Yzaguirre as the President and CEO of the National

Council of La Raza in 2005. Murguía, who served as a deputy assistant to former

President Bill Clinton, was born and raised in Kansas City. Now a longstanding resident of the Washington, D.C. political field, she leads, arguably, the most influential national

Latino civil rights organization.

On this day in July 2011, Murguía stood before NCLR affiliates from around the country, DC-based political operatives, philanthropists, and corporate funders attending

NCLR’s annual conference. Her speech was given during a tumultuous period still very much with us. The country was reeling from an economic recession. The Democratic

Party had recently lost the U.S. House of Representatives and relinquished some of its

1 hold on the Senate. Tea Party insurgencies had erupted throughout the country, and

Republican state governments were aggressively passing (or attempting to pass) highly controversial anti-immigrant laws like Arizona’s S.B. 1070. At the executive level, the

Obama administration had failed to pass immigration reform, a chief campaign promise and the major policy demand of Latino civil rights advocacy. Adding insult to injury, this period also witnessed an increase in deportation rates. This eventually led Murguía— echoing immigrant rights activists—to publicly label President Obama the “deporter-in- chief,” a pronouncement that seems to have temporarily iced NCLR’s relationship with his administration.

In her speech, Murguía addressed, directly and obliquely, many of these present political dynamics and other challenges, such as poverty and educational needs. And yet notwithstanding, her presidential address was pervaded by a sense of optimism about the future.

I know as sure as I am standing before you today that the future of the Latino community is bright. I know that as a community we will be stronger and that our voices will be heard and that our potential will be realized. I know that one day soon, we will be treated as full American citizens, our presence in communities will be welcomed and our contributions to this great country at every level of society will be acknowledged. I know this because that future is reflected in America’s history. It is reflected in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. And most recently, it is reflected in the U.S census. The numbers in the current census speak for themselves and they speak volumes.

Slowing her pace to emphasize each word, she continued: “One—out—of—every—six—

Americans—is—Latino.” Murguía followed this ratio, produced by the 2010 census, with a string of similarly enunciated words: “Put simply, we—are—America’s—future.” After a slight pause, she continued. “That’s not a brag; it’s a fact. Yet, how that future unfolds,

2 how quickly it is realized is in a large way up to us. We can no longer look to politicians in either party to produce it for us.” Applause rumbled throughout the hall as she raised her voice to state: “It is ours to achieve!”

Murguía not only characterized the demographic future as a source of hope, she also mobilized it as a call to action in the present. “It’s our work to finish. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to wait two or three generations to see that future. I don’t want to wait for the inevitable demographic tide to bring our community to shore. I want to embrace that future now. And I need your help in achieving that!”

* * *

With a focus on national “Latino” civil rights organizations and leaders, this dissertation investigates the current politics of ethnoracial demographic change in the

United States.1 I draw on eighteen months of qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork to track the politicized and affectively charged construction, circulation, and consumption of demographic projections. In the wake of the historic 2008 presidential election, national

Latino advocates have deployed such statistical knowledge in attempts to achieve political recognition within an increasingly precarious and polarized social context. I argue that this effort to publicly demonstrate and politically capitalize on projected demographic futures represents an example of what I describe below as “temporal politics.” The temporal politics at the heart of this research, however, reveals deep tensions rooted in the relationship between Latino spokespersons and populations and the

1 A note of clarification: In this dissertation, I primarily use the term “Latino” and “Latina” rather than “Hispanic,” as a personal preference. While these labels have been sites of scholarly debate (e.g. Calderon, 1992; Gimenez, 1989; Oboler, 1992), they are often used interchangeably within the political context I investigate in this dissertation. Although I will generally abstain from placing this category in scare quotes, I neither consider the meaning of the category self-evident nor assume an unproblematic correspondence between it and the population it purportedly names.

3 relationship between demographic growth and political power. Ultimately, this dissertation provides a timely case study of the ways in which ethnoracial futures—often treated as immutable and inevitable—are brought to bear on the political present.

The Social Fact of Demographic Change

For several decades now, the year 2050 has been on the horizon of the present.

While still, technically speaking, thirty-five years away, the mass circulation and deployment of demographic projections has made the future year feel much closer. That future, so we are told by numbers and narratives, holds that Latinos, African Americans,

Asian Americans, and other putatively “nonwhite” populations will together numerically surpass the white “majority” by mid-century, if not sooner. As described below, political controversy and racial anxieties about demographics has been a fixture of U.S. public discourse and politics since the inception of the country. These anxieties have flared up at various historical junctures, such as anti-Asian immigration politics in the 1870s, nativist opposition to Eastern European migration in the 1920s, and the current reaction to the growth of Latin American immigrants and their descendants. Indeed, since the late 1960s, discussion and debate about ethnoracial demographic trends have been ubiquitous in public life.

Over just the past two decades, the media, think tanks, political pundits, and data analysts have produced a steady tide of data and polemic on the so-called “Browning of

America.”2 TIME magazine, for instance, has dedicated considerable visual and textual

2 While it is beyond the scope of this dissertation to provide a full genealogy, this phrase seems to have first appeared in scholarly works between the 1970s and early 1980s (e.g. Fagen, 1979; Lucas, 1981; Lux, 1973). This timing is not surprising in light of the historical account presented in Chapter Two. To my knowledge, the first media use of the “Browning of America” was the April 9, 1990 issue of TIME magazine. I describe the front cover of this issue above.

4 space to this topic. In 1990, it published an issue with a front cover that posed the question, “What will the U.S. be like when whites are no longer the majority?” The issue’s headline, “America’s Changing Colors,” was given visual form by an artistic rendering of the American flag. The flag’s blue rectangle was entirely absent of its stars and its white stripes were painted with a racial palette of black, brown, and yellow. Each of the flag’s elements was jagged and uneven, suggesting a less than unified future. Three years later, TIME (1993) used a computer-generated image of a “multiracial” woman to depict the “new face of America.” Just after the release of data from the 2000 census,

TIME (2001) submitted another demographically themed cover for public consumption.

Over a photograph of two presumably Mexican children, the cover read: “Welcome to

Amexica,” blending the words America and Mexico.3 Most recently, The Economist

(2015) generated some umbrage over the cover of its “special report on America’s

Latinos.” Carrying the headline “Firing up America,” the issue’s front cover featured a digital design of the American flag made of blue denim and chili peppers. Debate ensued about the use of stereotypical images and the lack of Latinos on the magazine’s editorial board.

The topic of demographic change has also been taken up in monographs from across the political spectrum, such as nativist organizer and VDare founder Peter

3 Anthropologist Leo Chávez (2008) analyzed the Time cover as follows: “Although the image of the children might have evoked a sense of pleasantness, the text raised an alarm about Mexican immigration: ‘Welcome to Amexica: The Border is vanishing before our eyes, creating a new world for us all.’ Because the term Amexica, made up by blending parts of the word American and Mexico, was framed by the ‘vanishing border’ statement, it was Mexico that was intruding on America, slowly taking it over or obliterating it. Colors were used to reinforce the message; the letters are in red, white, and blue except the C, which is in green, a key color of the Mexican flag. Suddenly the rather pleasant-looking children were revealed as part of a reconquest of America, which was occurring because the ‘vanishing border’ was letting them, and others like them, into the country, thereby creating a ‘new world” (p. 35-36, emphasis in original).

5 Brimelow’s (1996) national bestseller, Alien Nation, right wing pundit Pat Buchanan’s

(2006) State of Emergency (among several other books), conservative Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s (2004b), Univision reporter Jorge Ramos’ (2005) The

Latino Wave, Latino Decisions founders and liberal political scientists Matt Barreto and

Gary Segura’s (2014) Latino America, and Brookings Institute senior fellow William H.

Frey’s (2015) Diversity Explosion. Often employing the same demographic statistics, these monographs articulate profoundly different visions of the future, from what Andreu

Domingo (2008) described as “demodystopias” to the demographic hopefulness communicated by NCLR’s Janet Murguía. Notwithstanding the diverse and competing political valences given to demographic trends, there is widespread, near universal consensus that the country is undergoing a dramatic, unprecedented, and seemingly inevitable demographic and cultural transformation. In short, “demographic change” has become a kind of “social fact” in contemporary U.S. society.

A Sociological Debate: The Transformation of the U.S. Ethnoracial Order?

Within the broader sociological and social scientific field, demographic trends have provoked significant debate about the future of the U.S. ethnoracial order. Scholars have variously posed the questions: Will the historically instituted “black-white” binary survive the ethnoracial diversification of U.S. society? Or will another configuration emerge in its place? The scholarly record reveals three major responses to these questions.

First, some scholars argue that the U.S. is headed, however slowly and turbulently, towards a “post-racial” future (e.g., Alba, 2009; Hollinger, 2011; Prewitt, 2013).

Hollinger (2011, p. 176) defines “post-ethnic” (a term he prefers to “cosmopolitanism”

6 and “post-racial”) as a society in which individuals are not obligated to “make common cause with others of the same skin color, morphological traits, and kinship system.” In a sense, the post-racial or post-ethnic position portends what Herbert Gans (1979) described as “symbolic ethnicity.” While serious proponents recognize the persistence of ethnoracial stratification and exclusion, they tend to emphasize signs of progress, what

Kenneth Prewitt (2013, p. 166) has endorsed as a glass “half-full” perspective.

The remaining two accounts find little evidence that the country is moving towards a post-racial future. They depart from the post-racial thesis and suggest that race will continue to be (for the foreseeable future) an organizing principle of social relations, identities, and life chances. The second perspective argues that the traditional black-white binary will remain, as the boundaries of “whiteness” expand to incorporate most Latinos and Asian Americans (e.g, J. Lee & Bean, 2012; Warren & Twine, 1997; Yancey, 2003).

Scholars advancing this claim often draw support from the incorporation of south and eastern Europeans migrants in the early 20th century (Jacobson, 1998). In a recent essay,

Lee and Bean (2012) highlight the paradoxical inclusion of Asians and Latinos, particularly among lighter skinned and multiracial individuals, and the formation of a

“Black-non-Black color line” that attests to the persistence of an anti-black animus even in a rapidly diversifying landscape.

Other scholars reject this view, charging instead that the U.S. ethnoracial order will shift from a binary to a tripartite system. Scholars working in this third position have advanced several formulations. O’Brien (2008), for instance, posits that Latinos and

Asians will comprise an intermediary category between whites and blacks. Bonilla-

Silva’s (2004) “Latin Americanization” thesis introduces a somewhat different typology:

7 whites, honorary whites, and the collective black. In his view, individuals will be sorted by skin color. Lighter skinned Latinos and most Asian Americans will become “honorary whites,” while the remaining will become part of a subaltern “collective black.”

These competing sociological accounts, which I have only sketched here, have illuminated dynamics that complicate popular understandings about demographic change.

Importantly, they challenge the tendency to reify race in public discussions of the demographic future. By showing how racial boundaries could expand or contract, brighten or blur in the future, these works denaturalize essentialist conceptions of race.

Notwithstanding these and other insights, the extant scholarship theorizes the racial future without addressing the contemporary politics and knowledge of demographic change.

Scholars have instead focused on factors and variables, such as segregation indices, cohort effects, intermarriage rates, skin color, and discrimination. For instance, Yancey

(2003) concludes that the boundaries of whiteness are once more expanding based on increased intermarriage rates and decreased segregation between whites and non-black groups. Some scholars have focused on skin color and experiences and perceptions of discrimination (Frank, Redstone Akresh, & Lu, 2010; Golash-Boza & Darity Jr., 2008).

Others believe that generational change will ultimately change the racial order (Alba &

Nee, 2004). Bonilla-Silva (2004) notes politics are needed to challenge the emergent U.S.

“pigmentocracy,” but does not address its role in constituting it. These claims underestimate or fail to recognize that, as José Itzigsohn (2009, p. 202) asserts, the future of ethnoracial relations “will be determined by the political dynamics of the country, not by the passing of generations” or any other nonpolitical factors.

8 The major point of departure for this dissertation is the claim that although we cannot, as Lawrence Bobo (2011, p. 32) has correctly argued, predict the ethnoracial future with “any measure of certainty,” the widespread political mobilization of ideas and images of the future are having concrete effects. In contemporary racial politics, political actors are deploying statistics about the future to make particular kinds of claims on the present. It is not farfetched to assume that these and other racial projects will have some impact, whether intended or not, on the ethnoracial future that sociologists have attempted to theorize. Indeed, “How America responds now to the new challenges of racial and ethnic diversity will determine whether it becomes a more open and inclusive society in the future—one that provides equal opportunities and justice for all” (Lichter,

2013, p. 361, emphasis in original). But, as I illustrate in this dissertation, emergent responses or reactions to “demographic change”—far from induced by objective factors—cannot be fully appreciated, understood, or theorized in isolation from current racial projects and the politicization of demographic futures.

Aims and Arguments

While sociologists have debated the impact of demographic trends on the ethnoracial order, the proliferation of public controversy and political conflict over the future has, curiously, escaped sociological scrutiny. Consequently, we have little understanding of the ways in which demographic projections are being politically mobilized in public life, and how, in turn, such actions are dialectically shaping contemporary ethnoracial politics and identities.

With a focus on the interrelation between knowledge and politics, this dissertation aims to understand how “demographic change” operates as a stake and instrument of

9 contemporary ethnoracial political struggle. This objective, pursued through a case study of national Latino civil rights organizations and leaders, departs from the tendency to treat “demographics” as an objective force that impinges on social life, unmediated by cultural categories and political projects. As I elaborate in later empirical chapters, I reject the notion that, for instance, demographic change automatically or necessarily leads to feelings of threat. As such, I do not treat affective responses as natural byproducts. Instead, I understand them as outcomes of sociohistorical and political processes that need to be documented and analyzed. In other words, I do not approach demographic trends as matters of fact. Rather, I am interested in the ways that these ostensible “facts” are politicized and affectively mobilized to intervene in the present.

The empirical data and analysis presented in this dissertation highlights the intersection of politics, demographic knowledge, and imagined futures. While the next chapter presents the conceptual and theoretical infrastructure of this dissertation, I will now briefly describe the major concepts and themes.

With few exceptions, the extant sociological literature reviewed above has largely ignored politics, and more specifically, what Omi and Winant (1994 [1986]) term “racial projects.” Racial projects are attempts to transform, in some way, the existing ethnoracial order. Racial projects compete over the symbolic representation of “race” and the material spoils of racial struggle. Far from mere observers of “demographic change,” contemporary racial projects are engaged in deliberate efforts to accelerate or avert projected demographic futures.

These efforts rely on scientific knowledge, especially demographic statistics and projections. Building on interdisciplinary scholarship from anthropology, history, science

10 and technology studies, and recent interest in the “sociology of quantification” (e.g.,

Desrosières, 1998; Espeland & Stevens, 2008; Igo, 2011; Urla, 1993; Waidzunas, 2012), my analysis explores the orchestration of “statistical effects.” By statistical effects, I mean the performative power of numbers and statistics to enact rather than simply describe “reality,” and to do so through the generation of affects, such as hope and fear.

Demographic projections, as a temporally oriented form of knowledge, are wielded by racial projects to reconfigure the political terrain.

I describe this mobilization of demographic futures as a manifestation of

“temporal politics,” by which I mean the politicization of temporal representations. By focusing on the “future,” this dissertation draws inspiration from the nascent “sociology of the future” (e.g., Frye, 2012; D. Gibson, 2011; Mische, 2009; Tavory & Eliasoph,

2013) and breaks with the tendency to treat this temporality as a domain of speculation rather than as a topic of empirical investigation. It joins this research in exploring the ways in which ideas or conceptions of the future shape human action.

Drawing together these concepts and concerns, the following pages address three overarching (and interlocking) themes. The first theme is the linkage between statistical knowledge and ethnoracial recognition. What role do statistics play in making possible particular forms of recognition? How do statistics enable and constrain ethnoracial identification and claims making? As anthropologist Jacqueline Urla (1993, p. 836) has written, non-dominant groups have deployed statistics—a form of authoritative knowledge—“to make themselves visible, to make claims upon the state, and to describe who they are to themselves and to society.” Indeed, as Morning and Sabbagh (2005, p.

70) have noted, the post-civil rights era is marked by a tension between the “politics of

11 distribution” and the “politics of recognition.” In fact, political theorists such as Nancy

Fraser (1995) have argued that this tension pervades the contemporary political field.

And yet, insufficient attention has been give to the role of statistical knowledge in struggles over redistribution and recognition. I argue that demographic statistics have provided national Latino advocates means to seek political recognition in the present by forecasting a “Latino” future. However, I show that these efforts have not been without challenge, as these political actors struggle to translate projected futures into lived presents.

The second major theme is the relationship between politics and affect.4

Traditionally, political sociologists and students of social movements have conceived politics as an overly cognitive enterprise (Jasper, 2011)—although I should note the cultural turn and, specifically, research on framing (e.g., Benford & Snow, 2000; Snow,

Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986) has opened space for the consideration of emotions.

Similar to Deborah Gould’s (2009) important work on the radical AIDS activist group

Act Up, this dissertation reveals that politics is suffuse with feelings of hope, aspiration, fear, and frustration. The desire for recognition is, itself, a powerful affect. I argue that racial projects are central to the production and management of affects about the future.

4 Over the past decade, social scientists and political theorists have turned to the term “affect” to capture the nonlinguistic and non-cognitive dimensions of human social existence (e.g. Connolly, 2011; D. B. Gould, 2009; Massumi, 2002; Navaro-Yashin, 2009). Similar to many scholarly concepts, “affect” has been defined in numerous ways, and should not be confused with Affect Control Theory (Heise, 1987). While most recent works distinguish affect from emotions, I will treat them as roughly interchangeable in this dissertation. As James Jasper (2011) states, the sociology of emotion suffers from obfuscating conceptual binaries. As a corrective, I draw on the work of Margaret Wetherell (2012). Wetherell defines affect as “embodied meaning-making… something that could be understood as human emotion” (p. 4, emphasis on original). Whereas some theorists of affect have eschewed the discursive, Wetherell recognizes that discourse “very frequently makes affect powerful, makes it radical and provides the means for affect to travel” (p. 19).

12 As I show most extensively in the Chapter 4, the charging of statistics with particular political and racial valences is key to this process. However, racial projects cannot entirely predict or control the affects sparked by temporal politics. Moreover, my analysis suggests that political actors do not only work to mobilize affects; they are also themselves moved by affects—even while carrying out seemingly instrumental practices.

The third and final theme that runs through the dissertation is, unsurprisingly, temporality. Building on the work of the theories Mead and Schütz, a growing number of scholars have become attentive to the temporal dimensions of social existence

(Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; E. Zerubavel, 2003). The issue of temporality is present in both of the preceding themes. Demographic projections seem to promise recognition in the future, and the affective potency of statistical knowledge is rooted, at least in part, in notions of the future. As intimated throughout the dissertation, I conceive of politics as a temporal affair, and I have structured this dissertation chronologically, so as to capture, in particular, the unfolding quality of political life. I do not, however, subscribe to a rigid path-dependent vision of this unfolding; rather I understand it as a contingent process.

Most centrally, however, this research provokes reflection on the ways in which temporal representations can variously serve as weapons, shields, and stakes of ethnoracial and political contestation.

These themes are pursued through a case study of the temporal politics of national

Latino civil rights organizations and leaders. National Latino advocacy provides an important window into the ways in which demographic futures, supported by statistical knowledge, are being mobilized by racial projects to affect change in the contemporary.

13 These political actors have received little sustained attention from sociologists.5 Cristina

Mora’s (2014) Making Hispanics is a recent exception. Political scientists and historians have been more attentive, but even in these disciplines the body of work is small.

Existing scholarship on national Latino advocacy tends to concentrate on the origins and history of the major groups, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (Craig

Allan Kaplowitz, 2005; Márquez, 1993) and the National Council of La Raza (Mora,

2014b). As a result, we have little scholarly insight into the major aims of this dissertation. In the next section, I provide a general overview of national Latino advocacy and present background information on the main organizations examined herein.

National Latino Civil Rights Advocacy

National Latino civil rights organizations and leaders form a network within the broader Washington, D.C. political field. These political actors navigate and negotiate a political field inhabited by think tanks, political parties, corporate funders, and state bureaucracies. As scholars of U.S. politics have observed, policymaking and political discourse has generally moved to the Right over the last several decades (Gross, Medvetz,

& Russel, 2011; O'Connor, 2002; Omi & Winant, 1994 [1986]). Within an increasingly polarized partisan context (McCarty, Poole, & Rosenthal, 2006), Latino civil rights advocates represent a kind of racial project premised on the desire to increase the “power” and influence of the “Latino” population. A centerpiece of this effort—articulated in distinct but increasingly interlocking ways—is investments in classificatory struggles

5 For evidence of sociological inattention (to put it mildly), one need only search the publication record of the discipline’s two premier journals, the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology. A search using “the League of United Latin American Citizens” and “the National Council of La Raza”—the names of the most well-known and oldest organizations—harvested only three articles. In addition, only in one of the articles was national Latino advocacy central to the analysis (see Mora, 2014a).

14 over the meaning and significance of the “Latino demographic,” the panethnic population at the epicenter of controversy over demographic change.

Relatively marginal in the national political field, organizations such as the

National Council of La Raza, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Mi

Familia Vota are cautious and calculated. This relative marginality—revealed in interviews and their public statements—however does not mean that these actors have not influenced public policy or debate. The historical record reveals that these political actors have had some impact, such as on the development and uptake of panethnic categories and the inclusion of a language amendment in the Voting Rights Act. Notwithstanding, more progressive Latino groups have charged that these organizations have also served as impediments to radical change. The leaders of these national groups are used to the critiques leveled at them—that they have sold out, rely too much on corporate dollars, and have abandoned, in some cases, their activist origins for professionalized lobbying

(c.f. Gonzales, 2014; Márquez, 1993). Yet they charge that their absence would have resulted in greater political dismissal and increased attacks on this population. My objective in this dissertation is not to evaluate or judge the political merits of national

Latino advocacy; but rather I aim to better understand how temporal politics and demographic knowledge factor in their ongoing campaigns to translate demographic growth and projected futures into present political influence.

Over the past four decades, Latino organizations and actors in the Washington,

D.C. political field have grown considerably, both in partisan and nonpartisan sectors.

Latino lobbyists, for instance, now have a professional association and have a presence in major consulting firms, such as the Podesta Group and the Raben Group. Top lobbyist

15 Micky Ibarra has established the Latino Leaders Network, which sponsors quarterly luncheons that are attended by the “Who’s Who” of the Latino policy and advocacy field.

The Pew Hispanic Center, the most influential nongovernmental source of data and analysis on the Latino population, is located in Washington, D.C., as are numerous think tanks that now also devote time and energy to research on this population, such as the

Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institute, among others. There has also been a rapid growth in nonpartisan panethnic advocacy organizations. Indeed, the

National Hispanic Leadership Association, a major coalition of Latino advocacy groups founded in 1992, contains over 35 organizations and leaders. In addition to long established groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the

National Council of La Raza (NCLR), and the National Association of Latin Elected and

Appointed Officials (NALEO), and the Mexican League Legal Defense and Educational

Fund (MALDEF), there are newer organizations, such as Voto Latino, Mi Familia Vota, and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH). Over the past five years, several collaborative projects have been developed, such as Latinos for

Immigration Reform, Latinas Represent, and the National Latino Civic Engagement

Table. Although the major organizations pursue their respective agendas and have somewhat different priorities, these new initiatives suggest a growing investment in coalitional strategies.

In this dissertation, I concentrate on five organizations within this wider national

Latino advocacy network. I have selected these organizations because they offer a cross- section of civil rights advocacy, including the oldest organizations to the newest. The leaders of these organizations are some of the most influential within the network, and

16 have been particularly active during the period under investigation. As I briefly discuss next, these organizations have different organizational structures, histories, and, to some extent, different constituencies and specializations. Nonetheless, they have— independently and collaboratively—engaged in temporal politics of the future, and have both positioned themselves and have been called upon to speak on behalf of the country’s reportedly “fastest-growing” population.

League of United Latin American Citizens

In February 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, the League of United Latin

American Citizens (LULAC) was founded in Corpus Christi, Texas. Guided by the motto

“All for One and One for All,” LULAC unified several Mexican-American organizations composed primarily of middle class professionals (Craig Allan Kaplowitz, 2005;

Márquez, 1993). LULAC’s founders were concerned with improving the status of

Mexican-Americans in U.S. society. As narrated in the LULAC Council Guide (2012),

“LULAC was created at a time in our country’s history when Hispanics were denied basic civil and human rights, despite contributions to American society.” Present-day

“LULACers”—as their members are called—draw a great sense of pride at being the

“oldest” Latino civic rights organization in the country.

Political scientist Benjamin Márquez (1993) has described LULAC as rooted in a politics of “assimilation and accommodation.” In its founding constitution, the organization’s first objective was “to develop within the members of our race the best, purest and most perfect type of a true and loyal citizen of the United States of America.”

Controversially, LULAC restricted its membership to U.S. citizens and made English the organization’s official language. While undocumented immigrants are no longer barred

17 from membership, the founding spirit of U.S. patriotism continues, as all major LULAC events begin with the Pledge of Allegiance. Women were also originally prohibited from positions of leadership. The primary cleavage between “citizen” and “non-citizen” emerged within a context of growing nativist animosity towards “illegal aliens” (Ngai,

2004). Oliver Douglas Weeks, a University of Texas political scientist, published an article in 1929 on the founding of LULAC, where he notes, “Those who favor the restriction of incoming Mexicans are inclined to put all Texas-Mexicans into one category and to characterize them generally as ignorant, slothful, unclean, dangerous, and incapable of assimilation or of good citizenship” (Douglas Weeks, 1929, p. 257). LULAC adopted a defensive embrace of whiteness (Dowling, 2014), fighting educational and housing segregation by claiming the dominant racial status. Departing from Benjamin

Márquez’s (1993) influential assessment, historian Craig Kaplowitz (2003, p. 196) has argued that, while it is “easy to criticize LULAC for its members’ class and racial bias,” it is important not to minimize the difficulty of advocating “for equality and against discrimination based solely on Mexican ethnicity” during the 1930s and 40s. Kaplowitz further adds that LULAC adopted some of its stances on pragmatic grounds, and never entirely abandoned its pride in Mexican culture or excluded undocumented individuals from accessing its services or resources.

LULAC grew quickly, establishing quasi-independent councils throughout the

Southwest in the following decades.6 Currently, LULAC claims to have over 900 councils throughout the country, including Puerto Rico. Historically, the organization has actively used the courts to overturn discriminatory practices, and by the late 1950s and

6 See Deirdre D. Martinez (2009) for a detailed analysis of the complicated organizational structure of LULAC, which operates at two major levels: 1) councils and 2) national office.

18 throughout the 1960s began to pressure for national reform. While the emergence of more radical Chicano movements came to overshadow LULAC in the politics of the day and in the history books, LULAC’s close relationship with the Johnson and Nixon administrations were pivotal in advancing the idea that Mexican-Americans constituted a

“distinct ethnic minority” (Kaplowitz 2003).

In the mid-1980s, LULAC established a national office in Washington, D.C., today home to nearly twenty full time staff and a fluctuating number of volunteers and college-aged “fellows.” The national staff has given the organization some administrative continuity and is responsible for supporting the implementation of LULAC’s mission “to advance the economic condition, educational attainment, political influence, housing, health and civil rights of the Hispanic population of the United States” (League of United

Latin American Citizens, 2012). As with other national Latino advocacy organizations,

LULAC counts on substantial corporate sponsorship, and has established a “LULAC

Corporate Alliance” to “foster stronger partnerships between corporations and the

Hispanic community and to provide advice and assistance to the LULAC organization.”

Some of the major corporate funders include: AT&T, MillerCoors, Tyson Foods, Wal-

Mart, McDonalds, and P&G.

National Council of La Raza

The mission of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) is “to improve opportunities for Hispanic Americans.” NCLR was founded in 1968 with a $630,000 grant from the Ford Foundation (Mora, 2014b).7 The grant, secured by Notre Dame sociologist Julian Samora and several Mexican-American activists, was part of a larger

7 For more on the role of the Ford Foundation in 1960s Mexican-American and Latino politics, particularly in the educational field, see MacDonald, Botti, and Hoffman Clark (2008).

19 Ford allocation that helped establish, among other initiatives, the Mexican American

Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1967. Samora used his research, particularly his influential book La Raza: Forgotten People, to motivate Ford to invest in the Mexican-

American population (Mora 2014b). Reflecting its regional and ethnic orientation, the organization was initially named the Southwest Council of La Raza. In 1972, under the leadership of Raul Yzaguirre, the name of the organization was changed to reflect its desire to pursue a national agenda.

Founded at the height of the Chicano movement, NCLR’s founding board of directors spanned the “Chicano-integrationist spectrum” (Mora 2014b, p. 54). Moreover, some of its major leaders were respected on both sides of the ideological divide, such as

Herman Gallegos and Raul Yzaguirre (Mora 2014b). A major source of frustration for

NCLR leaders was the invisibility of Mexican-American needs in the national political conversation, which at the time was predominated by the African American Civil Rights movement. According to NCLR’s official history, “Without such recognition, legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, while creating enormous change in other areas of the country, had relatively little impact on the

Hispanic community.” NCLR leaders, then and now, attributed the lack of visibility to the regional isolation and the lack of national vehicles, comparable, for instance, to the

NAACP or the Urban League, which focused on the condition of African Americans. As

Cristina Mora (2014b) shows, the pursuit of national recognition was increasingly couched in panethnic terms throughout the 1970s, and involved active efforts to frame

“Hispanics” was a national constituency deserving of federal attention. Therefore, similar to LULAC, NCLR invested in the transformation of Mexican-Americans and other Latin

20 American groups into a “minority” population, and thus were key participants in what

Skrentny (2002) has labeled the “minority rights revolution.”

The shift towards a national organization also radically altered its relationship to its “affiliates,” community organizations with a formal relationship to NCLR. Initially, leaders saw the organization’s objective as providing funding support for barrio-based nonprofits. However, financial costs grew as it gained more affiliates. After it established an office in Washington D.C in early 1970s, NCLR decided that new affiliates would only receive grant-writing and technical assistance. Mora (2014b, p. 58) notes, “by positioning itself as an informational broker instead of a grant maker to new affiliates,

NCLR could expand its constituency in a cost-effective manner.” During this period,

NCLR began to invest in research and analysis, and projected itself as a source of data on the growing “Hispanic” population.

Throughout the 1970s, NCLR relied heavily on federal support for its programing.

But the 1980s, especially during the Reagan administration, led to substantial cuts in federal funding. To maintain afloat, the organization turned to corporate (and to a lesser extent philanthropic) sources (D. Rodriguez, 2002). Like LULAC, NCLR today depends on grants from major corporations, a fact that is visible at its annual conferences.

Currently, NCLR owns a building less than four blocks from White House and has a multimillion-dollar budget that dwarfs the other national Latino advocacy organizations. According to its press materials, it has nearly 300 affiliates in over 41 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, and has state and regional offices across the country. Combing research, advocacy, and investments in its affiliates, NCLR purports to offer a “Latino perspective” on several policy areas. The most significant of

21 these are civic engagement, immigration, civil rights, economy and employment, health, education, and youth.

National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials

Founded in 1976, the mission of the National Association of Latino Elected and

Appointed Officials (NALEO) is to “facilitate full Latino participation in the American political process, from citizenship to public service.” NALEO and the two remaining national Latino advocacy organizations I review below have not been subjects of extensive scholarly research. A history of these organizations remains to be written.

Congressman Edward R. Roybal, the first Mexican-American from California elected to the U.S. Congress since the 19th century, founded NALEO in the same year that he established the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Unlike the latter organization, which was composed exclusively of Democrats, NALEO was to become a nonpartisan organization focused on creating a network for Latino elected officials. For this reason, the organization changed its original name—the National Association of Latino Democratic

Officials—to its current nonpartisan name. According Dr. Harry Pachon, once the Chief of Staff of Congressman Roybal and former NALEO executive director, the organization was “started by Democratic-elected officials who said that [they] needed a nonpartisan group that [could] conduct civic affairs [and] activities on behalf of the Latino community” (cited in D. Rodriguez, 2002, p. 69). To foster nonpartisanship and encourage Republican membership, Rodriguez (2002) notes that the organization has emphasized unity on issues rather than political ideology.

During its first several years, NALEO was a “paper organization,” initially run out of Roybal’s office (Rodriguez 2000, p. 70). In 1983, the organization’s budget was a

22 paltry $27,000. That year, NALEO created an “educational fund” with Pachon as its executive director. Since then, the National Latino Elected and Appointed Officials

Educational Fund has become the organization’s hub for research and advocacy. In this dissertation, when I refer to NALEO, I am referring specifically to this half of the organization.

Throughout the past three decades, NALEO’s membership has grown to over

6,000. The vast majority of its members are elected and appointed officials at nearly all levels of government, from the U.S. senate to local school councils. NALEO regularly hosts a “National Institute for Newly Elected Officials” to train elected officials on public finance, media relations, and policymaking. The organization has increasingly focused on three routes toward incorporation—the primary goal of the organization—immigrant naturalization, voter registration, and public service. For instance, in 2001, NALEO created “Voices del Pueblo” as a campaign to “respond to the institutional barriers preventing low propensity voters from participating in the electoral process” (Ramírez,

2005, p. 68). In recent years, NALEO has speared the ¡ya es hora! (the time is now) campaign, which began as a naturalization initiative but has expanded to voter and census related issues. Arturo Vargas, NALEO’s current executive director, once described the campaign as a “comprehensive, multi-year effort to integrate Latinos into American life.”

According to its website, NALEO’s civic engagement work seeks to build “a culture of civic participation through a sustained national infrastructure that informs, engages, and mobilizes the Latino community.” Each of its major programs is described as “research- driven.” Christopher, a lead civic engagement coordinator for NALEO, described the use of polls, field experiments, and other techniques to develop their get-out-the-vote

23 programs and messages. “We take positions on issues very heavily driven by data, hard numbers.” Like NCLR, NALEO produces reports on the Latino population, usually on topics related to voter participation, redistricting, and voting rights.

NALEO currently has almost fifty full-time employees, the majority of which work out of its Los Angeles headquarters. Along with an operation in Washington D.C., composed of public relations specialists and data analysts, NALEO has a presence in

Houston, Austin, Orlando, and New York City.

Mi Familia Vota

Mi Familia Vota (MFV) was founded in the mid-2000s by leaders in the immigrant rights movement with ties to major unions, particularly the Service Employees

International Union (SEIU). Over the past decade, MFV has grown into one of the most successful Latino-targeted civic engagement organizations in the country. The origins of

MFV can be traced to California, where two of its founders—Eliseo Medina and Ben

Monterroso—worked in the labor movement. For these founders, the watershed year was

1994, the year that Republican Governor Pete Wilson introduced the controversial

Proposition 187. Many local Latino community organizations and leaders (and their national counterparts) actively opposed the proposition, which prohibited undocumented immigrants from accessing social services such as emergency hospital care.

In 1998, the proposition became a highly contentious issue during Wilson’s reelection campaign and galvanized the state’s Latino vote. According to MFV’s history statement, SEIU launched a civic engagement initiative known as the Organization of

Los Angeles Workers with hopes of tapping into the surge in voter enthusiasm. OLAW’s first campaign—called “Mi Familia Vota 100%”—was “intended to build on the

24 community’s family values and to cement that in order to succeed everyone has to participate.” In 2004, the campaign expanded beyond California to Florida, Illinois, and

Maine.

Several years later, after pro-immigrant rights marches erupted in opposition to the anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner bill H.R. 4437, SEIU established the Mi Familia Vota

Education Fund, as the successor to OLAW. MFV became a major partner of the

NALEO-spearheaded campaign ¡ya es hora!, participating in naturalization, get-out-the- vote, and census promotional activity. The 2008 presidential election was particularly significant for the organization, as it expanded its reach to Arizona, Texas, Colorado, and

Nevada. In 2012, it returned to California and added Florida. Currently, it has offices and operations in each of the states where it has conducted voter registration and voter turnout work over the last two presidential cycles.

MFV describes its mission as “working to unite the Latino community and its allies to promote social and economic justice through increased civic participation.” As with the other national advocacy organizations, MFV seeks to secure immigration reform.

Through its efforts, the organization envisions “a future in which the electorate is energized and empowered, and reflective of the growing diversity in the United States.”

Voto Latino

At the organization’s recent 10-year anniversary celebration, activist-celebrity

Rosario Dawson expressed, “I co-founded Voto Latino to help give future generations of

American Latinos the opportunity to follow our forebears’ legacy of service and a platform where they can write the history books of tomorrow.” Voto Latino began as a phrase uttered by Dawson during the 2004 presidential election. Dawson subsequently

25 reached out to Maria Teresa Kumar, who had a background in finance, to help create an organization to reach out to young Latinos—“millennials”—using social media and new technologies. Kumar, who was born in Bogotá, Colombia but raised in California by her

U.S. father and Colombian mother, accepted the offer and became the organization’s president and CEO. Dawson and Kumar have argued that outreach to Latinos has historically meant outreach in Spanish. For them, this excluded many second and third generation Latinos from civic engagement and participation. Voto Latino describes itself as a “a nonpartisan organization that empowers Latino Millennials to claim a better future for themselves and their community.” The organization is “united by the belief that

Latino issues are American issues and American issues are Latino issues.”

In 2008, Voto Latino actively participated in voter registration and education campaigns, being one of the first Latino advocacy organizations to aggressively use twitter and other social media. In the years since, it has created a bilingual iPhone app about the 2010 census, extensively used SMS text messaging services, and has even developed a field operation for voter registration, unveiled in 2012. It has taken credit for over 100,000 new voter registrations in the past several years.

Voto Latino has distinguished itself by its use of celebrities, both musicians and actors, to communicate its messages. These have included Wilmer Valderrama, America

Ferrer, Pit Bull, Romeo Santos, Eva Longoria, and others. Its celebrity allies have featured prominently in several Voto Latino produced PSAs urging Latinos to vote, participate in the census, and take civic action for immigration reform. Similar to other national Latino organizations, its budget comes primarily from corporate and foundation dollars. For instance, it has received grants from both the MacArthur and Ford

26 foundations. Presently, Voto Latino has a small but dedicated staff in its Washington,

D.C. headquarters and other staff working in Texas, California, and Florida.

Data Collection and Methods

In April 2012, I boarded a plane to Los Angeles to attend Voto Latino’s first

“Power Summit,” a gathering of hundreds of Latino and Latina “millennials” from across the country. Over two and a half days of workshops and plenary sessions, Voto Latino’s leadership and allies implored those present and following through social media to join the “movement” and help turn out the “Latino vote” in the 2012 election. That summer, I continued my research. In July, I attended the National Council of La Raza’s annual conference in Las Vegas, Nevada and the Labor Council of Latin American

Advancement’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida. At these and other annual gatherings of Latino advocacy organizations I attended during fieldwork, I took part in a wide range of activities, including keynote addresses, panel discussions, family expos, press conferences, and entertainment activities. Following these conferences, I made my first visit to Washington, D.C. where I made initial contact with the advocates and organizations that fill the pages of this dissertation. These early research experiences convinced me that studying the role of demographic statistics in contemporary Latino advocacy was a worthwhile enterprise. I heard speeches and sat beside audiences entranced by power point presentations populated by figures and charts. I spoke to data analysts and spokespersons about their work and objectives. Their responses to my questions were filled with diverse affects, which I would learn were entangled with temporal imaginings.

27 At the end of September 2012, I jumped into the next phase of research, returning to Orlando, Florida at the height of partisan and nonpartisan electoral activity. I could have chosen a number of locations to study the work of national Latino groups during the

2012 electoral season, but I was drawn to Central Florida. Perhaps the state with the most controversial electoral record in recent decades, Florida was (can continues to be) the crown jewel of “swing states” for both of the major political parties. Its 29 Electoral

College votes were up for grabs and, according to many political observers, the victor would need to win Central Florida. The growing electoral profile of this region of the state has been attributed to the rapid growth of Latino populations—most significantly the Puerto Rican population—within the counties of Orange, Osceola, and Seminole.

Most of the national Latino advocacy organizations established “civic engagement” operations in the months and weeks before the election.

Due to prior relationships with a few activists, I quickly made contact with advocacy campaigns. I first connected with Mi Familia Vota, then Voto Latino, followed by the National Council of La Raza and El Movimiento Hispano, an initiative composed of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Labor Council for Latin American

Advancement, and the Hispanic Federation. As a volunteer in their respective campaigns,

I observed and participated in voter registration outside local groceries and community centers, joined canvassers on house visits, phone banked, and attended public forums and organizational meetings. These activities took place primarily in Orange County, and most centered in Orlando, but I made trips to Tampa and Miami to learn about some of the operations outside of Central Florida, also referred to as the I-4 Corridor. I complemented these ethnographic experiences with nearly 35 interviews with canvassers,

28 field organizers, local leaders, researchers and analysts, national civic engagement coordinators.

At the start of the New Year in 2013, my research moved to Washington, D.C., where I spent the majority of the year within the national Latino advocacy field. Thanks to relationships I established in Orlando and at national conferences, I made further contact with key individuals in these organizations and their allies. For nearly four months, I spent several days a week as a volunteer in the office of the League of United

Latin American Citizens. I was graciously given a workspace and allowed access to staff meetings. During this time, I worked most closely with the coordinators and staff of

LULAC’s civic engagement work, which had, following the election, decided to concentrate much of their energy on immigration reform. As a minor compensation for the access I was granted, I proofread documents, designed posters and fliers, reached out to potential speakers for “town hall” forums, and provided logistical support where possible. With LULAC, I participated in several lobbying visits, joining LULAC council members from across the country speaking to congresspersons and senators about immigration reform. I participated in similar efforts organized by Voto Latino and the

National Council of La Raza. My time in DC was also filled with attending public events organized by leading Latino lobbyists, major think tanks and research institutes, and other public functions organized by Latino civil rights organizations.

I also interviewed nearly 40 individuals during this period.8 Respondents include organizational leaders, public relations specialists, policy analysts, researchers, federal appointees, partisan lobbyists and consultants, and staff members of national Latino groups. On several occasions, I did these interviews outside Washington, D.C, traveling

8 With the exception of public figures, I use pseudonyms for interview respondents.

29 for instance to Los Angeles in 2014 to speak with members of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and to Seattle to interview the leadership of

Latino Decisions, a major polling agency. These interviews, as with others I conducted during fieldwork, were typically conducted in English, the primary language used by these advocates. The only exception to this was interviews conducted in Orlando, where many were done in Spanish, as canvassers tended to be first generation Latin American immigrants. Typically, interviews lasted an hour, but on several occasions exceeded two and a half hours. Several individuals were interviewed repeated times. While most interviews were semi-structured, I did use a more structured interview protocol in select cases where I was interested in capturing some of the variance between similarly positioned actors. Adapting certain techniques of the “focused interview” (Merton &

Kendall, 1946), I used prompts in many of the interviews. To elicit reflections on situations experienced by actors, I used objects such as newspaper articles, promotional materials, and infographics. In particular, I found infographics containing graphs and other visualizations of statistical data helpful in discussing ideas and assumptions about demographic trends. Interviews were audio recorded (with a few exceptions) and were later transcribed.

Throughout my fieldwork I also amassed a cache of primary materials, both documents and multimedia products. These included over 700 newspaper articles, commentaries, and visualizations (e.g., infographics, photographs, and cartoons). I also collected over 50 reports produced by national Latino advocacy organizations and other organizations within (or influencing) the Washington D.C. political-policy field, such as the Pew Hispanic Center, the Center for American Progress, the Center for Immigration

30 Studies, Latino Decisions, the Brookings Institute, and the Cato Institute. These reports covered a wide range of substantive issues from immigration related issues, electoral outcomes, demographic trends, and voting rights. I also collected dozens of multimedia products, such as public service announcements made by national Latino organizations and shorts produced by media outlets, as well as recordings of webinars on the latest polling data on Latinos, immigration reform, and the results of the 2012 election. Due to financial limitations and the physical impossibility of attending all relevant events, I depended on audio and visual recordings of some public events. Employing the methods of historical ethnography (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1992; Eyal, 2013; Glaeser, 2011), I used this data to reconstruct unobserved events and actions. This was particularly useful when events under consideration had taken place before I began fieldwork, but which fell within the temporal scope of the research.

In addition to data collected between April 2012 and April 2014, this dissertation draws on data I collected in 2011 in Rhode Island. As elaborated in Chapter Three, this research examined the promotional work of local Latino leaders seeking to ensure mass participation in the 2010 census. In many respects, this research was the precursor to this dissertation, as it provoked a number of the questions and themes taken up herein. I include some of the data from this project because it offers an inside look into a pivotal moment, namely the 2010 census and the construction of the “Latino demographic.”

In short, the analysis presented in this dissertation is based on qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork conducted across multiple sites, both physical and virtual. I integrate ethnographic observations, interview data, and primary materials of various sorts to understand the temporal politics of national Latino advocacy within the context

31 of growing anxieties about the country’s ethnoracial future. In this vein, this dissertation joins and contributes to recent sociological interest in qualitative and ethnographic research on politics (e.g. Auyero, 2012; Baiocchi, 2005; Decoteau, 2013; Eliasoph, 1998;

Glaeser, 2011; Mahler, 2011).9

Chapter Overview

This dissertation is composed of five chapters. The first two chapters provide conceptual and contextual foundations. The remaining three chapters are empirical. The empirical chapters cover—in a roughly chronological fashion—five years of recent political history, beginning with the orchestration of the 2010 census and concluding with post-2012 election period. In specific ways, each of these chapters broaches the major themes described above and addresses the politics of ethnoracial recognition, affect, and temporality. Individually and collectively, they provide insight into the ways in which demographic futures are imagined, mobilized, and contested by national Latino civil rights advocacy.

Chapter One elaborates on the organizing concepts sketched above. These concepts are racial projects, statistical effects, and temporal politics. In turn, I situate each of these concepts within their intellectual environment and specify the particular use I will make of them in the empirical chapters that follow. In addition, I take this chapter as

9 Growing recognition of the limitations of other research strategies has begun to draw political sociologists towards ethnography. Unlike macro-comparative or quantitative research, political ethnographers focus on the practices, meanings, and interactions through which political life unfolds and changes (Tilly, 2006). Sociological political ethnographies, such as Baiocchi’s (2005) study on participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Eliasoph’s (1998) work on political apathy in the U.S., help to address, what sociologist Javier Auyero (2006) once described as a “double absence,” namely the absence of research on politics among sociological ethnographers and the absence of ethnography in political sociology.

32 an opportunity to discuss some of the ontological assumptions that animate my analysis and sociological imagination.

Chapter Two situates the dissertation within a historical and contemporary context.

It begins by mapping a longer historical trajectory marked by race and a legacy of white anxieties to “minority” population growth. I follow this with a review of the politics of categorization and quantification that produced the “Hispanic” population, a statistical entity that has become a fixture in the U.S. ethnoracial imaginary. Finally, I shift to the contemporary, where I discuss growing anti-Latino rhetoric and policy, partisan polarization, and an Obama presidency that has not produced the change envisioned by these particular political actors. Ultimately, the chapter describes the current “problem- space” of national Latino civil rights advocacy.

Empirics begin with Chapter Three. This chapter examines the promotional work of national and local Latino advocacy groups and leaders leading up to the 2010 census, the most recent decennial census. Building on interdisciplinary scholarship on census making, I track efforts to cultivate consent for the census within the “Latino community.”

This involved public attempts to address indifference, frustration over census ethnic and racial categories, distrust and fear enflamed by increased deportations, and outright opposition to the census. Drawing on media coverage, interviews with national spokespersons, and an ethnographic case study of Latino-targeted promotions in Rhode

Island, I argue that census data—far from being simply cold, hard facts—were objects of desire. This desire for data was anchored in aspirations for demographically based political recognition. In this chapter, my analysis reveals that practices of “consent- building” are one of the means through which Latino advocates have contributed to the

33 statistical construction of the “Latino demographic,” the panethnic population on whose behalf they purportedly speak.

Chapter Four explores public discourse following the release of data from the

2010 census. Demographic change reemerged as a volatile public issue following the release of the results of the 2010 U.S. census, the most recent census to stoke growing racial anxieties and anticipations about the future. The media immediately seized upon census data as further confirmation of the changing “face” of the country. Despite rarely employing explicitly racist language or imagery, I argue that the mainstream media nonetheless contributes to white “demographobia,” that is, a racialized fear of demographic change. I support this argument by analyzing two methods by which the media contributes to white anxieties in the era of “colorblind” racism. The first, which I label “frames of gravity,” refers to textual and visual means of dramatizing change. The second method, which I term “racial juxtaposition,” describes the increasingly commonplace contrast between whites and nonwhites, most often Latinos. I contend that these methods engender a vision of demographic change as a zero sum game, composed of population winners and losers. The final section of the chapter shifts from media representations to the media work of national Latino advocacy spokespersons. Here, I show that these political actors have attempted to reframe Latino population growth as benefit rather than as a threat to the country. To accomplish this, they engage in what anthropologist Arlene Dávila (2008) has described as “Latino Spin,” the depiction of

Latinos in a politically sanitized and marketable manner.

Chapter Five, the final empirical chapter, shifts to the politics of the 2012 U.S. presidential election. This chapter explores how national Latino advocates worked to

34 demonstrate Latino political “power.” I argue that this demonstration was temporally oriented, as leaders hoped to demonstrate Latino power not only in the election but also for years to come. Leading up to the election, they coordinated get-out-the-vote campaigns around the country, including Central Florida where I conducted fieldwork. In addition, they actively deployed statistics about the decisiveness of the “Latino vote.” In the chapter, I focus on three of these statistics. The first figure projected that 12.2 million

Latino voters would participate in the 2012 election. The second maintained that 50,000

Latino citizens turn 18 every month. The third figure affirmed Latino voters accounted for 10% of cast ballots, a number that came to validate the idea that the “Latino vote” decided the election. Drawing on the science studies concept of demonstration, I show how these statistics—coupled with their expansive civic engagement campaign—were mobilized to publicly demonstrate a future in which the so-called Latino “sleeping giant” had realized its political potential. This analysis, however, reveals that the aims of this temporal project proved elusive for various reasons, not the least of which were the vulnerabilities of the statistics themselves and the challenges produced by the expectations they generated.

In the conclusion, I revisit the major themes and arguments of the dissertation and reflect on some of the broader sociological implications of the analysis presented herein.

* * *

In short, Temporal Politics of the Future provides an original exploration of the topic of demographic change in the United States. While ubiquitous in public discourse, sociologists have devoted little attention the ways in which racial projects are actively wielding demographic projections and, in the process, shaping contemporary ethnoracial

35 identities, politics, and policymaking. Addressed to this lacuna, this dissertation pursues the production and mobilization of numbers and narratives about the changing “face” of the country. Foregrounding national Latino advocacy organizations and spokespersons, it documents and analyzes a persistent desire and inability to translate projected demographic growth into present political power. More broadly, this dissertation engages and contributes to sociological and social scientific inquiries into the politics of recognition, affect, and temporality.

CHAPTER ONE

Conceptual and Theoretical Infrastructure

Introduction

The analysis presented in this dissertation is anchored in a conceptual and theoretical infrastructure drawing on several traditions and fields of inquiry. Readers will notice that I have chosen not to subsume the project within a single, overarching theoretical tradition or framework. Notwithstanding, this dissertation is party to what

Swidler and Arditi (1994) described as the “new sociology of knowledge.” Recent research has shown growing engagement with the ways in which knowledge impacts on social life, rather than the prior (yet still important) concern with the social determinants on knowledge and consciousness, as found in the canonical work of Marx (1978) and

Mannheim (1971). With broad interest in the intersection of politics and knowledge

(Foucault, 1975; Glaeser, 2011), I have assembled three organizing concepts to assist my empirical investigation and analysis. The first concept is “racial projects,” a term developed by Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1986). While I modestly revise the

37 definition provided by these scholars, the major point of departure for my dissertation is its appreciation of the politics of racial knowledge, which I suggest has been conspicuously marginal to the study of racial projects. The second concept is “statistical effects.” Building on recent interdisciplinary research and the “sociology of quantification” (Espeland & Stevens, 2008), I join efforts to reconceive statistics as political artifacts with the capacity to shape and constitute identities, understandings, and the political horizon. I contend that the study of such statistical effects needs to address the affective potency of numbers. The third concept is “temporal politics.” As I elaborate below, temporal politics refers to the transformation of temporality into an object and instrument of political struggle. While the scholarly literature on state formation, collective memory, and social movements are replete with examples of what I term temporal politics, I contend that the politicization of temporal representations remains under-thematized and under-theorized. Before I turn to these respective concepts and their scholarly supports, the next section outlines some of the ontological foundations and assumptions I make in this dissertation.

Ontological Foundations

Social scientific research rests on ontological assumptions. In recent years, sociologists have made “ontology” an object of research and reflection (e.g., Abend,

2014; Glaeser, 2005; Mol, 1999; Rodriguez-Muñiz, 2015; Somers, 1996). By ontology, I mean the productive claims made about the composition and content of the social world

(Glaeser, 2005). These assumptions are often latent, inherited from the field of research and broader “epistemic community” (Knorr-Cetina, 1999). Our ontological assumptions, whether rendered explicit or not, shape our scholarly pursuit by sensitizing us to

38 particular features of the social world and governing the constellation of questions we pose and pursue. To invoke a familiar phrase in cultural sociology, ontologies enable and constrain sociological research. As a reflexive consideration, this section briefly sketches some of the ontological foundations on which this dissertation rests. While there are others, I will highlight three major assumptions: relationality, circulation, and temporality.

Due to its overarching centrality, I will devote more space to the issue of temporality.

The first ontological assumption—relationality—has gained currency over the past several decades. Inspired to a great extent by Pierre Bourdieu (e.g., 2000), sociology has experienced a “relational” turn (e.g., Desmond, 2014; Emirbayer, 1997; Go, 2013;

Mische, 2010). Writing about ethnography, Desmond (2014, p. 554) posits, “relational ethnography gives ontological primacy, not to groups or places, but to configurations of relations.” The central insight of relational analysis is the assumption that social existence is constituted through relationships—direct or mediated—between entities. Scholars have positioned this ontology as a counterpoint to the tendency to treat the social world as composed of discrete, bounded peoples and spaces. Early sociological writings on the constitution of the self exhibit a strong appreciation for relations (e.g., Du Bois, 1989

[1903]; Mead, 1956), as did mid-century theorists, like Antonio Gramsci (1971, p. 352), who while not typically associated with relational sociology, wrote, we “must conceive of man as a series of active relationships (a process) in which individuality, through perhaps the most important, is not however the only element to be taken into account.” A relational account thus privileges relationships over the assumed content or meaning of pre-existing categories. In this dissertation, for example, I do not ascribe the panethnic category “Latino” any intrinsic valence or value; rather I explore how a network of

39 political advocates within a wider political field has rhetorically deployed the category to enlarge its political influence and manage anxieties fueled by its putative demographic growth. As my case study illustrates, relations are not limited to face-to-face interactions.

They also include imagined relations. To use an example I discuss more in Chapter Four,

Herbert Blumer’s (1958) writing on “group position” refers to how actors perceive and imagine their racial positionality vis-à-vis other racial groups. These imaginings can have a powerful effect on how actors interact with others and understand themselves. In addition, relations are often—and increasingly so—mediated by technologies, devices, and other material objects. The demographic statistics examined in this dissertation offer an example of this mediation. In this regard, my approach to relationality is closer to the vision proposed by the scholars in science and technology studies and, in particular,

Actor-Network Theory. Here, relations are not limited a priori to “human” actors (e.g.,

Callon, 1986; Latour, 1992; Law, 1986).

However, a relational conception of social existence is incomplete without an account of movement and circulation, my second ontological assumption. That is, this account privileges understanding the movement of actors and is attentive to the ways in which actors come to have agency by acting on and across many different stages. This assumption departs from the conventional view that treats circulation as “processes that transmit meanings, rather than as constitutive acts in themselves” (B. Lee & LiPuma,

2002, p. 192, emphasis in original). Bruno Latour has distinguished passive transmission, or intermediaries, from active transformation, or “mediators” (Latour, 2005). Indeed, STS scholars have shown, for instance, that the creation of scientific “facts” involves more than relations between scientists; it also requires the circulation and uptake of knowledge.

40 As inscriptions travel, they accrued objectivity (Latour, 1987). The census—which occupies a central place in this dissertation—is a case in point. The production of census data cannot be fully accounted for without attending to processes of circulation. To focus on census administrators working with their census “lab,” so to speak, fails to appreciate that the creation of data involves the circulation of blank census schedules to homes that then—if enumeration is to be successful—need to be completed and returned to census officials for aggregation. Moreover, the kinds of statistical effects that I discuss in this dissertation would have been impossible without the travel of statistics across sociopolitical fields.

The third ontological assumption that pervades this dissertation is the assumption that politics is a temporal affair. This means privileging the temporal dimensions of social action. I understand politics as temporal in three distinct but interlinked ways: politics is historically situated, inescapably processual, and temporally oriented. Let me briefly elaborate on each. As Margaret Somers (1996, p. 54) has argued with respect to knowledge cultures, politics is “indelibly (even if obscurely) marked with the signature of time.” Politics is not a transhistorical phenomenon; rather it is a temporally situated one.

Specific manifestations of politics emerge within particular temporal zones. This

‘historical’ context is not only the material and morphological configuration of social relations, but also the political episteme and prevailing categories and understandings in circulation. While there remains debate among scholars over the degree to which historical context determines or merely influences political life, the key point is simply that historical periods enable and constrain what is doable, imaginable, and desirable, in short, what Deborah Gould (2009) describes as the “political horizon.”

41 And yet, temporality, as William Sewell (2005, p. 10) has noted, is not reducible simply to “historical contextualization.” Politics is not only temporally rooted; it also takes place over time. Each political act—whether a rally against the deportation of immigrant children, the dropping of bombs by drones in Syria, or the electoral campaigns

I discuss in this dissertation—represents a moment within an unfolding process rather than a singular, frozen act or culmination. The unfolding quality of social life is perhaps most evident in historical sociological research (Sewell, 2005). Whether this process is conceptualized as linear or nonlinear, path dependent or contingent, politics transpires in and through time.

Finally, politics is also temporally oriented. By oriented, I follow social theorists that have understood human action, such as politics, as directed and motivated by particular envisionings of the past, present, and future. While we might quibble with his typology or conclusions, Karl Mannheim, for example, registers this temporal orientation.

In “Conservative Thought,” Mannheim (1971, p. 160) famously described conservatism as a “style of thought” that “clings to the immediate, the actual, the concrete” (emphasis in original). In contrast, he writes, progressivism “transcends the given immediate present, by seizing on the possibilities for systematic change which it offers” (p. 161). For a more basic example, consider voting. The decision to cast a vote in favor of a particular candidate (and conversely to withhold one’s vote for another) is influenced, among other things, by temporally loaded aspirations to either continue the path of a given incumbent or to alter it in favor of another. In other words, politics is guided by desires or aims to resurrect past arrangements, sustain present relations, or create new political realities.

42 In sum, these ontological assumptions provide a foundation for this dissertation’s three organizing concepts.

Racial Projects

In their important work, Racial Formation, Omi and Winant (1994 [1986]) introduce the concept “racial projects” as the linchpin of their “racial formations” theory.10 Racial formation, they insist, refers to “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (p. 55). Race, they argue, is preeminently a political construct, whose meaning and significance is determined through competing “racial projects.” Omi and Winant define racial projects as

“simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (p. 55). In other words, they argue that efforts to transform what “race” means are necessarily implicated in the transformation of how race structures social life—and vice versa. It is the “synthesis” of struggles to “rearticulate” the meaning of race that establishes the

“racial order” of a given society in a particular moment.

The concept of racial projects is useful for several reasons. First, it approaches race and racial domination as a political issue. This political foundation represents an important challenge to prevailing accounts of race, as either a biological fact or individual pathology. Second, the concept is attentive to the politics of meaning: racial categories do not have any inherent valence or significance, as conventional ocular markers of race

(e.g., skin color, hair type, etc.) have no natural or necessary relation to our racial categories (Obasogie, 2014). The apparent ‘fit’ between physical or cultural referents and

10 For a recent assessment of its major elements and uptake among sociologists, see Saperstein, Penner, and Light (2013).

43 categories is a consequence of racial projects, which have successfully codified and naturalized race in particular ways. Third, Omi and Winant ground their account within a broader historical sociology of race. Along with other critical scholarship (e.g., Du Bois,

1906; Fanon, 1967; Quijano, 2000), they situate race and racism as a product and producer of modernity, founded in the institutions of colonialism and capitalism. As elaborated by Winant (2001b, p. 19), “Race has been a constitutive element, an organizational principle, a praxis and structure that has constructed and reconstructed world society since the emergence of modernity…” Moreover, it remains an organizing and stratifying principle across social life. Despite these and other strengths, the empirical case and substantive concerns at hand demands some conceptual retooling.

To begin, I depart from Omi and Winant’s far too narrow definition of race—“a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (p. 55, emphasis in original). This definition can be challenged on theoretical and empirical grounds. Barnor Hesse (2007), for instance, has charged that Omi and Winant and other contemporary race theorists remain, paradoxically, wedded to a 19th century conception of biological race, despite embracing social construction.11 Offering an alternative theory, Hesse argues that “race” is a colonially ascribed assemblage of meanings and materials, including taxonomies of geography, custom, language, climate, and history. Omi and Winant’s conception is further challenged by the findings in Ann Morning’s (2011) The Nature of Race, which found that people conceptualize different “races” by different criteria. For instance, her respondents adopted a more biologically based conception of African Americans, but

11 In his words, “Conceptualizing this distinction, despite genuflections to social construction or recodings as cultural difference, tends to encourage a reading of race through some exclusive attachment or attribution to the body as a discrete entity” (Hesse 2007, p. 645).

44 tended to view other populations as racial via non-physical or bodily criteria. Moreover, with respect to the population at the center of this dissertation, scholars have shown that

“Latinos” do not understand themselves in racial terms strictly in reference to the body or phenotype (e.g., Flores-Gonzalez, 1999; Golash-Boza, 2006; Itzigsohn, 2009; C. E.

Rodriguez, 2000; Roth, 2012) nor are they racialized exclusively along these lines (e.g.,

Dávila, 2008; Ngai, 2004; Rosa, 2010; Santa Ana, 2002). For this reason, some have suggested the term “ethnorace” (Alcoff Martin, 2006; see Goldberg, 1993b). This is not to suggest that perceived phenotypic or physical appearance is not a key factor, only that a narrow focus on the somatic runs the risk of limiting our understanding of how racial projects rearticulate race.

While Omi and Winant provide a restrictive notion of race, their definition of racial projects is overly expansive. They suggest that racial projects take place at the

“macro-level” (political policy and public discourse) and the “micro-level,” where race is made “common-sense” in everyday interactions (p. 59). Some scholars, instead, consider it a “meso-level” construct (Saperstein et al., 2013). Although there are numerous problems with a “layer cake” vision of social reality (Glaeser, 2014, p. 220; see also

Latour, 2005), the major issue I would like to highlight is the loss of analytic bite. Omi and Winant recognize that racial projects are “vastly different in scope and effect” but nonetheless suggest they can be profitably understood as belonging to the same class of racial phenomena. How might we distinguish state policies from personal identification from intersubjective negotiations of racial meaning in workplaces? Rather than presume that these different modes of race-making are racial projects, I find it more useful to employ a delimited definition. Interpersonal negotiations of race can certainly have wide

45 ranging effects on identity and group relations and can reproduce racial inequalities, such as through microaggressions, but are nonetheless analytically distinct from intentional forms of collective action seeking to transform the meaning and structure of the racial system. Consequently, I reserve the notion of racial projects for deliberate attempts by institutional actors and movements to transform the racial order, such as the national

Latino civil rights groups I analyze herein.

Yet, even when Omi and Winant (1994 [1986]) have written about “politically organized racial projects” (p. 59), these accounts tend towards macro-historical narratives or typological schemas of racial projects (c.f. Winant, 2001b, 2004). Winant’s (2004) insightful essay, “Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary US Racial Politics,” provides an example of the latter (see also Winant, 2001a). His analysis of whiteness in the post-Civil Rights period is organized into brief reviews of white racial projects, such as far right, new right, neo-conservative, liberal, and, what he terms, “new abolitionists.”

My point is not that these schematic rendering of the racial landscape have no heuristic or substantive value. Rather, the issue is that the existing scholarship rarely specifies and unpacks the concrete practices, representations, and tactics employed by racial projects to rearticulate race.

Of particular concern for me is role of what philosopher David Theo Goldberg

(1993a) has termed “racial knowledge.” Limited attention has been directed towards the role of racial knowledge and expertise in racial projects. Although largely absent from

Omi and Winant’s (1994 [1986]) analysis of white “racial reaction,” historical research on U.S. policymaking in the post-Civil Right era, for example, indicates that racial knowledge has been a major point of contention and tool of combat. Conservative groups

46 have not only mobilized racial ideologies to challenge welfare and affirmative action policies; they have also deployed statistics and quantitative measures about the

“underclass” (O'Connor, 2002). Moreover, it is impossible to understand the “minority rights revolution” (Skrentny, 2002)—and specifically what groups were extended and denied official recognition—without tracing the politics of racial knowledge (see also

Mora 2014; Morning and Sabbagh 2005).

In this dissertation, I emphasize the role of racial knowledge in current racial projects. By racial knowledge, I mean codified ideas, categories, and data about ethnoracial populations.12 I argue that racial knowledge is an important product, stake, and instrument of racial struggle. Racial projects are producers of racial knowledge and they invest such knowledge racial meaning and significance. They also circulate and mobilize racial knowledge in attempts to sustain, modify, and reconfigure the racial boundaries that structure the racial order.

Historically, the census has been a major source of official (i.e. state) racial knowledge. Research on the census has, perhaps most effectively, illustrated that the study of racial politics has been historically inseparable from racial knowledge. Drawing on Foucault, Goldberg (1997, p. 30), for instance, argues, “The census has been a formative governmental technology in the service of the state to fashion racialized knowledge—to articulate the categories, to gather data, and to put them to work.” As

Goldberg and other scholars argue, censuses have not passively documented pre-existing

‘races,’ rather they have actively helped to constitute racial populations through

12 This definition differs from the one offered by Goldberg (1993). He defines racial knowledge as “a library or archive of information, a set of guiding ideas and principles about [racial] Otherness: a mind, characteristic behavior or habits, and predictions of likely responses.” While a useful starting point, I work with a slightly more general definition, one that includes, unlike Goldberg, knowledge about “whites.”

47 techniques of categorization (S. Lee, 1993; Loveman, 2007b; Mamdani, 2002; Mezey,

2003; Nobles, 2000; C. E. Rodriguez, 2000).13 In addition to “making up people”

(Hacking, 2002), census categorization has influenced the life chances of differentially categorized groups. For instance, census categories have determined access to citizenship for much of U.S. history (Haney López, 1996; Jung & Almaguer, 2006). At the same time, individuals and groups have not only contested the very terms of state categorization (Choldin, 1986; Hochschild & Powell, 2008; Hochschild & Weaver, 2010), but have mobilized census data for political ends, such as redistricting or resource distribution (M. J. Anderson & Fienberg, 1999; Appadurai, 1993; Choldin, 1994; Prewitt,

1987).

With few exceptions, the scholarship on censuses has focused on the politics of categorization rather than the politics of “quantification” (Espeland & Stevens, 2008).

However, as Benedict Anderson (2006 [1983], p. 168) has argued, “the real innovation” of the modern census was “not in the construction of ethnic-racial classifications, but rather in their systematic quantification” (emphasis in original). As I demonstrate in this dissertation, racial projects are actively engaged in the production, circulation, and mobilization of statistical knowledge about ethnoracial populations. In fact, to understand

13 The study of racial categories has contributed to and has benefited from growing interest in the politics and processes of categorization. This development, at least within sociology, was to a great extent stimulated by the emergence and elaboration of cultural sociology, and more specifically, cognitive sociology. In more general terms, categories have been credited with making possible human thought (Durkheim, 1961), serving as the interpretive schemas through which individuals and collectivities make sense of themselves and others (Brubaker, Loveman, & Stamatov, 2004; Jenkins, 2000). While still a focal point of contemporary research and theorizing, a growing number of scholars have broadened the field beyond questions of subjecthood. Often inspired by Bourdieu’s writing on “classificatory struggles (e.g. Bourdieu, 2000), recent studies have examined the creation, circulation, and consumption of categories within economic (e.g. Barman, 2013; Fourcade & Healy, 2013), political (e.g. Skrentny, 2002; Stampnitzky, 2013; Steensland, 2007), and cultural fields (e.g. Benzecry, 2014; DiMaggio, 1987).

48 many contemporary racial projects, particularly those engaged in temporal politics about demographic futures, sustained attention must be directed towards statistical knowledge and projections.

At this point, however, it is important to note that the relationship between racial projects and statistics is far from new, or limited exclusively to censuses. Indeed, race and statistics have a long and complicated history. Suffice to say that, as with the other

“sciences of man” (Foucault, 1970), race was central to the emergence and development of social statistics and demography (Desrosières, 1998; S. J. Gould, 1996 [1981]; Zuberi,

2001).14 Equally, statistical methods and techniques have been used to generate an ever- increasing body of “racial statistics” (Zuberi 2001). To this end, I turn next to the second guiding concept of this dissertation: statistical effects.

Statistical Effects

During the 19th century, Western societies and their colonies experienced, in the famous phrase of philosopher Ian Hacking (1991), an “avalanche of printed numbers.”

Ever since, statistics have moved from the periphery to the center of social, political, economic, and academic life. Beginning with the pioneering research of scholars such as

W.E.B. Du Bois (1899) and Émile Durkheim (1897), social scientists have progressively relied on human statistics to describe and explain social phenomena and dynamics. Yet this frequent and routine use of statistics as a “means” for analysis contrasts sharply with the rare and intermittent interest in it as an “object” of analysis (Starr, 1987, p. 8). Indeed,

14 In his provocative indictment of “statistical racism” and appeal for the deracialization of statistics, Tukufu Zuberi (2001) illustrates how eugenicist statisticians, such as Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and Ronald A. Fisher, among others, developed the breakthrough techniques and methodologies of 20th century inferential statistics. For another critique of the contemporary treatment of ‘race’ in statistical analysis see, Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi (2001).

49 as Espeland and Stevens (2008, p. 402) note, “quantification is a constitutive feature of modern science and social organization, yet sociologists have generally been reluctant to investigate it as a sociological phenomenon in its own right.”

Over the past several decades, an interdisciplinary body of research has begun to place statistics at the center of analysis. In this scholarship, statistics are understood to a great extent as “an inherently political and administrative knowledge,” which has been both a tool and consequence of relations of power (Curtis, 2006, p. 619). Historically, statistics emerged and remain closely, although no longer exclusively, bound to modern statecraft (Desrosières, 1990). In his famous essay, “On Governmentality,” Foucault

(2007) traces the shifting political rationalities that came to take the “population” as the defining object and target of modern technologies of power and knowledge. Enabled by the development of statistical knowledge, this new “political science” of government was oriented, above all, towards the control, management, and welfare of “populations.”

Building on Foucault and others, later scholars have further documented how statistics helped to extend the administrative capabilities of state officials, allowing them—in the words of James Scott (1998)—to “see like a state.” Through censuses and other knowledge-gathering techniques (e.g. cadastral maps, civil registries, and passports), heterogeneous people, places, and things were simplified, homogenized, and ultimately rendered “legible” to state officials and bureaucrats (Scott 1998). This process, although at times contested by local populations (see Carroll, 2006; Loveman, 2007a), eventually made possible “governing at a distance” (Rose, 1991). However, the historical record shows that not only have statistics been used as instruments of control, but also as weapons of contestation (Porter, 1996). In either case, whether as a tool of control or

50 opposition, the political use of statistics rests on the widespread valorization and “trust in numbers” accrued over the past two centuries (Poovey, 1998; Porter, 1996).

Scholars have labored to break with the tendency to take statistics as a reflection or approximation of reality. As Curtis (2001, p. 34) argues, “The preoccupation with accuracy seeks truth in a correspondence theory of reality and representation, rather than attempting to evaluate the construction of population in terms of their practical utility for social projects.” Whether explicitly or implicitly, this scholarship has confronted the three realist attitudes outlined by Desrosières (2001). The first attitude—“metrological realism”—is based on a theory of measurement in the natural sciences that was imported into the human sciences by way of the sampling method. This attitude believes that statistics reflect an underlying reality. Desrosières describes this attitude as a statistician’s dream. The second attitude—“accounting realism—grew out of practices of double entry bookkeeping, famously examined by Max Weber. This attitude rests on the creation of an

“equivalence space,” such as money, that allows for transactions between different qualities. The final kind of realism—“proof in use”—is an attitude based on the

“consistency and plausibility of the results obtained” when making statistical arguments

(p. 347). Users are not concerned with the underlying accuracy or precision of the data, only that they be internally consistent and validated by external entities. Desrosières contrasts these realist attitudes with a sociologically familiar one: constructionism. This perspective holds that statistical ‘facts’ are products of coding conventions and other techniques to render the world quantifiable. As Espeland and Stevens (2008, p. 419) summarize, this approach strives to understand “how quantitative authority is accomplished and mobilized, how it gets built into institutions, circulates, and creates

51 enduring structures that shape and constrain cognition and behavior.” Accordingly, this dissertation does not adjudicate on the objectivity or accuracy of competing statistical claims. Instead, it examines how racial projects produce and deploy statistical projections for political ends.

By shifting away from the question of “accuracy,” scholars have seized upon the insight that statistical knowledge does not simply reflect reality, but rather helps to enact it (Law, 2009; Loveman, 2005). Historical research has revealed that statistics have transformed identities and sociopolitical imaginations (e.g., De Santos, 2009; Urla, 1993;

Vardi, 2014; Waidzunas, 2012). As Hacking (1990, p. 3) once remarked, “The systematic collection of data about people has affected not only the ways in which we conceive of a society, but also the ways in which we describe our neighbour. It has profoundly transformed what we choose to do, who we try to be, and what we think of ourselves.” In her important work, historian Sarah Igo (2007) documents the construction of the

“average American” through surveys and opinion polls during the 1940s and 1950s. Igo insists that polls did not just reflect the opinions and perspectives of the broader public; rather they actually created the “public” and normalized particular, and often essentialist, conceptions of self and community.

Moreover, numbers and statistics have also shaped prevailing conceptions of democracy and democratic citizenship (Rose, 1991). For instance, Paley (2001) suggests that polls played a key role in the Chilean democratic transition, even though certain social groups paradoxically contested and relied on statistics to make claims on the state.

Shahrokni (2012) shows that polls have helped strengthen Iranian reform movements through the formation of new “counter-publics.” Anthropologist David Scott (1999)

52 argues that liberal democratic thought espouses a commitment a “majoritarian principle,” which has been legitimated by numbers. He describes:

In the late modern political world we inhabit it appears self-evident to us that rule ought to be in the hands of the largest number, that is, of the majority. There is a relationship between abstract number and political representation that we take for granted as defining the field of possible argument about justice, and there is a calculus of probabilities that we can invoke to supply–and ground–the rationality that connects the distribution of number and political outcomes (Scott 1999, p. 162).

Yet, as Scott recognizes, the submission to the majoritarian principle generates a number of inescapable political conundrums, such as the fate of “minority” groups, the tension between “representation” and “representativeness” (Appadurai, 1993, p. 332), and the obsession with “unity” that numbers encourage (Beltrán, 2010).

This brief review of the extent literature illustrates that statistics do not passively describe; they powerfully prescribe (Desrosières, 1998). I term this performative capacity as “statistical effects.”15 Statistical effects include impacts upon identities and political imagination. As subsequent chapters reveal, these effects stem to a crucial extent from the affective potency of numbers. Far from cold “brute facts,” statistics are multivalent cultural artifacts, which, as Martin de Santos (2009) has shown, can become “fact-totems,” that is, powerful collective representations—such as the economic figures the “99%” and the “1%.”

In this dissertation, I am concerned with statistical effects generated by projections—statistics that make claims about the future. These statistics can stimulate variable affective stances, from hope to fear. I contend that racial projects are chiefly responsible for fueling collective anxieties and anticipations about demographic trends.

15 My use of the concept of “effects” draws inspiration from Timothy Mitchell’s (1991, 1999) influential writings on “state effects.” State effects are symbolic demarcations of “state” and “society” produced through panoply of techniques, representations, and practices.

53 Deploying statistics charged with racial meaning, racial projects have engaged in what I term “temporal politics,” the final guiding concept of this dissertation.

Temporal Politics

I define, broadly speaking, “temporal politics” as the transformation of temporality—either as imagined or organized—into a stake or weapon in political struggle. I understand temporal politics as operating within the three temporal dimensions of politics described above. To begin, specific manifestations of temporal politics take place within particular historical contexts. The temporal politics I examine in this dissertation, for instance, would have been impossible, discursively and institutionally, without the development of demographic knowledge and the emergence and adoption of the panethnic categories “Hispanic” or “Latino.” Furthermore, the politics examined here have also unfolded over time, as the introduction of new statistics has opened new possibilities for imagining and demonstrating the future. Finally, temporal politics is also temporally oriented, such that, national Latino spokespersons anticipate and work towards a future when the “Latino demographic” is no longer a “minority” population.

At its most basic, I would like to distinguish analytically between two kinds of

“temporal politics.” Each kind shares a definition of politics offered by Andreas Glaeser.

For Glaeser (2011, p. 49), politics refers to any “deliberate effort to effect, maintain, or alter particular institutions.” Politics, in short, is by definition interventionist. It seeks to configure social life in particular ways, a project that is not simply discursive but also material. Defined this way, we can interpret “racial projects” as a particular kind of politics. Importantly, Glaeser insists that politics cannot, therefore, be limited to domains or actors conventionally understood as “political” (e.g. politicians and elections);

54 struggles over religious authority and campaigns to privatize education, as attempts to shape social relations, are no less political. Similarly, temporal politics is not confined to the machinations of state officials or social movements, although these actors have historically invested in the “politics of time” (Opitz & Tellmann, 2014).

The first kind of temporal politics regards deliberate attempts to organize and structure temporal experience. This form of temporal politics is present in E. P.

Thompson’s (1967) influential essay on the disciplining effects of time standardization on industrial labor. His detailed account shows how, against much opposition and resistance, British capitalists disciplined laborers through incentives, coercive measures, and the use of technical devices, especially clocks. These techniques not only eventually made workers “docile bodies,” as Foucault (1975) would put it, but also transformed the phenomenological experience of time, or what Thompson simply terms “time-sense.”

Another example is Javier Auyero’s (2012) “tempography” of the politics of waiting within an Argentinian welfare office. Building on Bourdieu, Auyero illustrates how waiting is not only a form of “everyday domination” but also a “producer of daily submission” (p. 158). Interactions between citizens and street-level bureaucrats are mediated by the relative dispossession of the former and the arbitrary powers of the latter to determine how quickly or slowly services are distributed. This political context,

Auyero argues, “engenders one particular subjective effect among those who need the state to survive: they silently comply (ply from the Latin plicare, to bend) with the authorities' usually capricious commands” (p. 19). These examples suggest that our experience of temporality is not universal. Rather, as Auyero notes, our embodied relation to time is a political artifact of particular conditions of power.

55 The second kind, and the focus of this dissertation, involves the production and mobilization of temporal representations and knowledge for political effect. This form of temporal politics emphasizes the ways in which ideas and understandings about temporality—such as the past, present, and future—are given political valences and deployed to shape social and political life. This form of temporal politics is evident in the literature on public commemorations and national monuments (Bodnar, 1992; Hobsbawm,

1992; Olick, 1999; Saito, 2006; Y. Zerubavel, 1997); climate change (Buizer & Lawrence,

2014; Mahony, 2014); development projects (Evren, 2014; J. C. Scott, 1998), population policy and politics (Dean, 2015; Greenhalgh, 2008; Marchesi, 2012); economics and economy (Berman & Milanes-Reyes, 2013; Mitchell, 2014); and national security

(Mallard & Lakoff, 2011). A few illustrative examples should suffice.

While not employing the term, Eric Hobsbawm’s (1992) discussion of the role of

“invented traditions” in the formation of the modern nation-state offers several examples.

As he put it, “all invented traditions, so far as possible, use history as a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion” (p. 12). Another example is Olick and Levy’s

(1997) analysis of German society and politics after World War II. As they narrate,

“From the immediate postwar period to the present, powerful images of the Nazi past have shaped West Germany. Virtually every institutional arrangement and substantive policy is a response, in some sense, to Germany's memory of those fateful years” (p. 921).

German political leaders and intellectuals have not simply responded to an objective past, but rather have mobilized interpretations of the Holocaust in the service of domestic and international considerations.

56 Another example is Michael Kennedy’s (2002) research on “transition culture” in

Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Institutional actors like the

World Bank and leading development economists advanced claims laden with temporal registers. As Kennedy notes, “the underlying structure of transition culture relies on a basic opposition: the future is a form of global integration based on the articulation of transnational organizations dominated by the West. The past is form of inferior economic organization dominated by a Russian statist culture” (p. 96). These potent oppositions were mobilized as rhetorical devices to amass support and consent for the shift towards market economics. Mara Loveman’s (2014) recent comparative historical sociology of

Latin American census making illustrates how ideas of “national progress” were communicated and elaborated through censuses. Seeking to project a “whiter” future,

“the authors of census reports deployed racial statistics to depict the observable diversity of their populations as a transitory demographic state” (p. 164).

And while these and other works provide examples of what I consider temporal politics, in most cases the politicization of temporal representations were not the focal point of this scholarship. Consequently, the concept of temporal politics—as elaborated and employed in this dissertation—is designed to capture how political actors produce, deploy, and contest ideas and inscriptions of temporality. This form of politics operates principally on the terrain of affect and emotions rather than cognition. For example, as

Saito (2006) shows, national commemorations about Hiroshima were not meant to simply present facts about the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan and its effects. Instead, commemorations were designed to generate a collective sense of trauma, which resulted in “new structures of feeling about victims of the atomic bombing, sympathy and

57 solidarity with their suffering” (Saito, 2006, p. 373). Drawing inspiration from recent interest in the emotive and affective dimensions of social movement politics (e.g., D. B.

Gould, 2009; Jasper, 1998, 2011), I contend that one of the benefits of studying temporal politics is the prospect of expanding our knowledge base on the role of hopes, fears, anticipations, and frustrations in political processes.

* * *

Animated by an ontological attentiveness to relations, circulations, and temporality, the following empirical chapters draw upon this conceptual assemblage to investigate and analyze national Latino advocacy in the wake of the 2008 general election.

To restate, I define “temporal politics” as a practice of politicizing ideas and data about the past, present, and future. The concept of “racial project” is used in reference to collective political projects aiming to preserve, reconfigure, or upend the racial order.

Lastly, the notion of “statistical effects” seeks to capture the performative power of statistics, particularly the ways in which numbers can incite affective responses. These three concepts and the scholarly traditions and literatures out of which they were developed permeate the subsequent chapters. I contend that contemporary national Latino advocacy represents a kind of racial project that engages in temporal politics in order to reposition “Latinos” in U.S. society and to augment their political influence within the

Washington, D.C. political field. Statistical knowledge, particularly demographic projections, is one of the chief instruments of these efforts, as statistics provide them with a means of bringing demographic futures into the present.

In the next chapter, I discuss the demographic problem-space inhabited by national Latino civil rights advocacy.

CHAPTER TWO

The Demographic Problem-Space

Everybody is aware of such banal facts. But that they are banal does not mean they don’t exist. What we have to do with banal facts is to discover—or try to discover—which specific and perhaps original problems are connected with them. –Michel Foucault (1979)

Introduction

The temporal politics of demographic change currently erupting across the U.S. political field have a history, a complicated one. It is beyond the scope of this dissertation to exhaustively narrate this history, but the analysis I undertake in the chapters to come requires some account of the historic intersection of demographic knowledge, racial discourses, and white anxieties over the future. Indeed, if we are to understand our contemporary moment, as Foucault (1975, p. 31) once insisted, we need a “history of the present.” That being said, my account intentionally becomes more detailed as we approach the contemporary and the specific emergence of Latin American descent groups as an ethnoracial demographic threat. While this grounding is critical, it is incomplete

59 without an account of the statisticalization of the “Latino” population—a history out of which national Latino advocacy has grown. Adding to these two interlinked discussions of history, I conclude this chapter with a shift towards the political contours of the contemporary moment inhabited by national Latino advocates. My overall objective in this chapter is to illuminate the “problem-space” confronted by these political actors.

Anthropologist David Scott (2004, p. 4) defines “problem-spaces” as “the ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable [conceptual and political] stakes…hangs.” For Scott, the concept problem-spaces is a temporal concept; problem- spaces, as historical formations, are contexts of contention over what political questions can be posed and what problems are perceived to matter. The problem-space inhabited by national Latino advocacy, I contend, cannot be understood apart from the politics of demographic change. Indeed, the temporal politics examined herein represent a specific response to a historically rooted but contemporaneously inflected demographic problem- space.

Demographic Knowledge and the Racial Politics of Population

By the time demographic knowledge became the lingua franca of population politics and policy in the early twentieth century, the application of the concept of “race” to human societies was already entrenched in the Western “social imaginary” (C. Taylor,

2003), and was, in fact, constitutive of that imaginary (Hesse 2007; Winant 2001). As

Europe laid claim over much of the world’s inhabitable lands and peoples throughout the modern era, its philosophers and scientists would partition humanity into discrete “races” and rank them on a hierarchical continuum of civilization. While there was no taxonomic consensus over how many putative races existed or how they could be distinguished (D.

60 Roberts, 2011), a growing compendium of racial knowledge would nonetheless produce

“evidence” of innate and, to some extent, inescapable racial differences (Fredrickson,

2002). This knowledge would position “whites” at the top of the racial hierarchy, in effect, offering a justification for the colonial order of things.

As a vast scholarship attests, the British colonies that became the United States were chief incubators of racial thinking. The initial development of conceptions of race was inseparable from the enslavement of West African groups and the violent and duplicitous seizure of indigenous lands (Morgan, 1975). Within this political horizon, concerns over the ethnoracial composition of the thirteen colonies were endemic. For instance, in 1751 Benjamin Franklin expressed what historian Matthew Connelly (2006, p. 301) believes may have been the “first proposal for a policy to shape world population”:

…the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small... I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we, in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? Why increase the Sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind (cited in Connelly, 2006, p. 301).

While Franklin here adopted a paternalistic stance towards indigenous populations

(“Red”), he expressed fear about the growth of Blacks and Germans (“Tawneys”).

However, we know from the historical that indigenous groups were systematically treated as “problem” populations, subjected to forced assimilation, physical removal, and extermination (Hoxie, 1984). Far from unique, preoccupations such as Franklin’s continued after independence and were inscribed into the U.S. constitution, including the

61 infamous “three-fifths compromise” that counted slaves as three fifths of a person and excluded native populations for purposes of apportionment (M. Anderson, 1988; Prewitt,

2013; Rose, 1991).16 This “compromise,” which had substantial political ramifications, was rooted in a racial conception of African descent populations as subhuman. As

Kenneth Prewitt (2010, p. 236) has surmised, “Race numbers immediately entered the policy process and have been securely lodged there since.” Over the 19th century, the census played a critical role in institutionalizing ideas about race, and increasingly grounded them in newly developed statistical methods (Mezey, 2003; Nobles, 2000).

Offering an example of Ian Hacking’s (1982) claim that statistics are hungry for categories, the mid-19th century witnessed the emergence of new categories (e.g.,

“mulatto,” “quadroon,” and “octoroon”) that promised a more accurate means of capturing the blood quantum of racial populations and additional statistical fodder for racial projects seeking to make a “scientific” case against miscegenation (Nobles 2000).17

By the late 19th century, when discourses of the “Yellow Peril” first emerged, eugenics had become a major scholarly and political force. Francis Galton, the pioneering statistician and founder of eugenics was strongly influenced by Thomas Malthus, whose writings, perhaps more than any thinker, transformed “population” into an object of study and political concern in the 19th century.18 In direct opposition to liberal optimism in population growth, Malthus famously argued that overpopulation would eventually outstrip the natural resources needed to sustain human life (Dean, 2015).

16 In U.S. history, slavery was exclusively reserved for those classified as “black.” 17 Comparative students of race will note that these “mixed race” categories were widespread throughout the Spanish colonies (Loveman, 2014; Telles, 2004). 18 For this reason, scholars have queried why Foucault devoted such little attention to Malthus and his influence on what Foucault would describe as liberal “governmentality” (Dean, 2015; Tellmann, 2013).

62 Racial eugenicists led nativist movements that successfully achieved the passing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and decades later the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which introduced national quotes to (primarily) minimize Southern and Eastern European migration (Ngai, 2004; Tichenor, 2002). In the U.S., eugenics fused longstanding white concerns about “problem” races and Malthusian anxieties of overpopulation. Consider this 1919 statement from Prescott F. Hall, a leader of the U.S. Immigration Restriction

League:

Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat, where its own multiplication in a limited area will, as with all organisms, eventually limit its numbers and therefore its influence. On the other hand, the superior races, more self- limiting than the others, with the benefits of more space and nourishment will tend to still higher levels (cited in Connelly, 2006, p. 303-304).

Laden with vivid biologistic imagery, Hall and other eugenicists were obsessively concerned with the racial degeneration of white society. This theme was globalized in

Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which featured a racially color-coded map of the planet. Anxieties about what Ute Tellman

(2013) has termed “catastrophic populations” were also commonplace in fictional writing

(Domingo, 2008)—precursors to present-day literature. As noted by Connelly (2006), the claim that migration had the potential to lead to degeneration was shared and provided grounds for collaboration between European and U.S.-based eugenicist movements. “In different contexts they focused on the growth of disease, criminality, or degraded classes rather than ethnic minorities. But the figure of the immigrant often served to embody these diverse concerns.” Connelly further contends that immigrants “represented the immanence—and imminence—of this threat in a way more easily and vividly conjured

63 than dry tables detailing differential fertility. In time, even scientists would begin to refer to ‘native stocks’ they considered unfit as ‘alien’” (p. 303).

It was within this intellectual and political context that the field of demography was established. Following the Nazi genocide of Jews and other populations, eugenics went into retreat. Demography, which was built upon the models and assumptions of eugenicists like Galton and Karl Pearson, struggled to break its ties to eugenics in the post-war era (Greenhalgh, 1996; Hodgson, 1983; Prévost, 1998; Ramsden, 2003). Within the scholarship on the history of the field, scholars tend to either conclude that demography entirely excoriated eugenics or continued to pursue a covert eugenicist agenda. However, for Ramsden (2003), the relationship between demography and eugenics was more complicated than this bifurcation admits. Instead, he argues, “social demographers did indeed challenge some of the most fundamental eugenic assumptions, yet those involved in the eugenics movement went on to find leadership roles in the population field” (p. 551).

The Malthusian topic of “overpopulation” reemerged prominently in the post-

World War II period, especially as Western demographers inserted themselves into policy debates about the “modernization” of the “Third World.” Arguably, public attention to overpopulation reached its highpoint with the 1968 publication of The Population Bomb.

Authored by Stanford professor Paul R. Ehrlich, this massive bestseller had a huge effect on domestic policy and international development. In the U.S., the book “first appeared only a few months after the Kerner commission report on civil unrest in Detroit and

Newark, and just before what many feared would be another long, hot summer”

(Connelly 2006, p. 316). The influence of Ehrlich and other similarly themed books were

64 evident in Richard Nixon’s 1969 “Special Message to the Congress on Problems of

Population Growth.” It was under his administration that political discourse elevated family planning and overpopulation to a national social problem and object of policy

(Gutiérrez, 2008, p. 301). In his address, he framed the problem as follows:

One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of the population. Whether man's response to that challenge will be a cause for pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today. If we now begin our work in an appropriate manner, and if we continue to devote a considerable amount of attention and energy to this problem, then mankind will be able to surmount this challenge as it has surmounted so many during the long march of civilization… Let us act in such a way that those who come after us--even as they lift their eyes beyond earth's bounds--can do so with pride in the planet on which they live, with gratitude to those who lived on it in the past, and with continuing confidence in its future.

Nixon proposed the creation and later succeeded in establishing the Commission on

Population Growth and the American Future (CPGAF). Nixon named John D.

Rockefeller III the commission’s chair, an unsurprising move given Rockefeller’s influential Population Council and his years of lobbying for federal population policy.

According to one leading social scientist, the Commission’s membership was politically

“conservative by college student standards, liberal by national and White House standards” (Westoff, 1973, p. 494). Eventually, and after “acrimonious debates” (Westoff

1973, p. 497), CPGAF submitted a final report to Nixon in May 1972. After several months of silence, Nixon—to the surprise of the commission and many observers— decided not to endorse the report’s recommendations.19 This decision, however, did not

19 Charles Westoff, who was commissioned by the American Sociological Association to analyze the sociology of the CPGAF, attributed Nixon’s decision to number of factors. “After some acclaim for the importance of the research for government planning, the President reiterated his personal opposition to abortion and disagreed with the recommendation that contraceptive information and services be made available to minors, on the grounds that this would weaken the family. No attention at all was directed to the basic analysis of the costs and benefits of

65 stifle growing public debate and emergent white anxieties about demographic issues, internationally as well as domestically. Indeed, the CPGAF report contributed to a major shift in U.S. population discourse and policy: immigration as the nexus of preoccupations over both planetary and national overpopulation.

In her important work, Fertility Matters, sociologist Elena Gutiérrez (2008, p. 22) shows that the CPGAF increased public awareness of population growth due to immigration, and specifically “stimulated debate regarding its negative impact.” Notably, the CPGAF report highlighted that the Immigration Act of 1965 had changed the ethnoracial and geographic composition of immigrants. The report also did not limit its discussion to “legal” immigration. In fact, according to Gutiérrez, it emphasized “illegal” immigration, which was framed by the report as “a major and growing problem.” While researchers have located the historical origins of the “illegal alien,” as a paradoxical legal concept and stigmatized personage, to early twentieth century nativism (Chavez, 2008;

Ngai, 2004), it was in the 1970s that the concept gained widespread currency (Ackerman,

2014).

Over the next decade, the “problem” of overpopulation became increasingly couched as a problem of illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico and other parts of

Latin America. Even here, Ehrlich, already a legend in nativist and population control circles, made a contribution to this shift. In The Golden Door, published in 1979, Ehrlich and his collaborators wrote:

population growth and the conclusion that population stabilization was desirable. In effect, the response was narrowly political and greatly at variance with the concerns about population that the President had expressed less than three years earlier. The environmental fever had diminished, the birthrate had fallen, and the Census Bureau had revised downward its projection of population growth. Probably of greater importance, it was an election year” (Westoff 1973, p. 501).

66 Across the southern border of the United States are 67 million Mexicans. They are poor and Americans are rich. They speak Spanish and we speak English. They are brown and we are white. They want it and we've got it: jobs, prosperity, the Ladies Home Journal-Playboy lifestyle. As a result we are being invaded by a horde of illegal immigrants from Mexico... The furor has attracted the attention of bigots and bureaucrats as well as concerned citizens who ask: If we are limiting our family sizes so that our children can inherit a better nation, why should we throw open our doors to over-reproducers? (cited in Gutiérrez 2008, p. 73).

If the writings of Ehrlich and other population control advocates helped to popularize the theme of overpopulation, ophthalmologist John Tanton provided much of the ideological and organizational muscle to shift the debate towards immigration. Tanton was on the board of directors of the national group Zero Population Growth and had close ties to environmental conservation movements and organizations like the Sierra Club and

Planned Parenthood. Throughout the 1970s, Tanton actively worked to problematize

Mexican immigration within these movements (Gutiérrez 2008). While he was unsuccessful in moving established groups like Sierra Club to “make the conceptual leap” into immigration, he has nonetheless had a major political effect. (cited in Gonzales, 2014, p. 26).20

In his recent work, political scientist Alfonso Gonzales (2014) examined Tanton’s influence on the anti-immigration reform and nativist lobby. As narrated by Gonzales,

Tanton established an annual retreat known as WITAN to strategize on how to intervene in the public debate about immigration.21 In leaked memos written by Tanton for these retreats, he made explicit reference to the demographic and political implications of

Mexican and Latin America migration on white U.S. society. In one of these memos,

Tanton posed the question: “As Whites see their power and control over their lives

20 Gutiérrez (2008) suggests fears of being labeled racist dissuaded leaders in the conservationist Sierra Club from openly joining Tanton’s call. 21 Gonzales (2014, p. 28) notes that WITAN is an old English term for a council of wise men.

67 declining, will they simply go quietly into the night?” Gonzales (2014, p. 28) believes,

“Tanton assumes that Latinos and the Euro-American majority could never peacefully coexist and live under the same political community.” In 1979, Tanton founded the

Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and later the Center of

Immigration Studies (CIS), as well as influenced the creation of Numbers USA and other anti-immigration organizations espousing a Malthusian philosophy laden with assumptions based on racial eugenics. According to many political observers, Tanton and the organizational network he helped establish in Washington, D.C. have blocked several pieces of immigration reform legislation and, perhaps, more importantly have impacted public discourse.

A centerpiece of the political rhetoric employed by Tanton and other population control advocates is the idea of Mexican “hyper-fertility” (Gutiérrez 2008). For Gutiérrez

(2008, p. 93), “John Tanton’s advancement of an immigration control platform focusing on the fertility of Mexican-immigrant women clearly shows how policymakers and population activists constructed and manipulated a racialized demographics aimed to incite fear in the general public for the advancement of an immigration control agenda.”

Notions of “hyper-fertility” are a key element of what anthropologist Leo Chávez (2008) has termed the “Latino Threat Narrative,” an ensemble of representations that cast the

Latino population as a “threat” to U.S. society. Claims about hyper-fertility and mass migration have been routinely described as an “invasion” (Santa Ana, 2002). Beginning in the 1970s, this depiction became prevalent—particularly following a series of U.S.

News and World Report articles drawing comparisons between the U.S. Southwest and the Canadian province of Quebec. Chávez describes this as the “Quebec Model,” the

68 belief that Mexicans are unwilling to assimilate and as a result will eventually constitute a threat from within, similar to Quebecois nationalism. To be sure, characterizations of

Mexican fertility as tantamount to an invasion have a much longer history. For instance, in 1929, University of California zoologist Samuel J. Holmes published an article titled,

“Perils of the Mexican Invasion,” in which he writes, “This excessive fecundity is of course exceptional but it is indicative of the breeding habits of this class of our population. It is not evident, then, that the Mexican invasion is bound to have far- reaching effects upon rug national life?” (cited in Gutiérrez, 2008, p. 10). What is startling about this metaphor is the treatment of fertility as an act of war, of which

Mexican mothers are chiefly responsible.

Chávez suggests that these and other representations of Mexican “threat” narrative have been increasingly generalized to all “Latinos.” Samuel P. Huntington’s

(2004a) controversial essay, “The Hispanic Challenge,” provides evidence for Chávez’s conclusion. The late Harvard scholar began his essay with these words:

The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril (Huntington 2004, p. 30).

Huntington does not restrict his concern to Mexican immigration; he is concerned with

Latin American immigration writ large. Huntington and other “threat” narrators worry that as long as Mexicans and other Latin Americans continue to migrate, maintain their cultural identity and language, see no need to assimilate, and exhibit fertility rates far above white Americans, the national and racial survival of the U.S. is at risk. As with

69 debates about population trends in the “Global South,” debates about the “growth” of the

Latino population or the coming “majority-minority” future remain embedded within “a discursive tradition that continues to shape how people perceive and report population problems, even if they come to different conclusions” (Connelly, 2006, p. 318).

The Statisticalization of “Hispanics”

Although not entirely linked or correlated, the dramatic explosion of population control rhetoric and white nativism in the 1970s coincided historically with the development of the statistical category “Hispanic.” Although taken-for-granted today, the

“Hispanic demographic” came into existence during this same decade.22 The historical statisticalization of this panethnic population, therefore, represents one of the major conditions of the possibility for contemporary struggles over the country’s ethnoracial future. In this section, I will briefly sketch how distinct ethnic and national groups were statistically and politically amalgamated in the course of the 20th century.

Before panethnic categories were developed to make possible the production of statistical knowledge about the “Hispanic” population, the U.S. federal government used other categories to classify and quantify Latin American origin populations. Following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe that brought the Mexican-American war to a close,

Mexicans now settled in annexed U.S. territory were classified as “white,” unless “visibly” non-white (i.e. Indian). Similarly, Puerto Ricans, who became colonial subjects in 1898 after the Spanish-American War, were categorized “white,” unless visibly black or

22 I do not subscribe to the idea that “Hispanics,” for instance, fought in the War of 1812. The panethnic category “Hispanic” (and later “Latino”) helped to “make up” people that previously did not exist. It is relevant to recall philosopher of science Ian Hacking’s “looping effects.” Human categorization is dynamic because categories “interact with the targets themselves, and change them. And since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before” (Hacking, 2007, p. 293).

70 mulatto (Loveman, 2007b). Notwithstanding official ascription, these populations were considered and treated as racially mixed and inferior (Briggs, 2002; Go, 2008; Montejano,

1987).

In the 1930 census—for the first and only time in its history—the U.S. Census

Bureau introduced “Mexican” as a racial category, in order to more effectively track the demographic size and growth of the Mexican population (Hochschild & Powell, 2008;

Ngai, 2004). While white nativists advocated and applauded the measure, Mexican-

American elites, such as the newly formed assimilationist organization the League of

United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Mexican state successfully forced the

Census Bureau to strike the category. An example of the “defensive” embrace of whiteness (Dowling, 2014), this opposition viewed the category as an affront to their

“white” racial status and as a threat to their access to U.S. citizenship, then available exclusively to whites (Haney López, 1996).

Over the next several censuses, the Census Bureau relied on a series of “objective” measures, such as birthplace, surname, and language, to track these populations. In the

1950 and 1960 censuses, for instance, Mexicans in the Southwest were primarily counted through surnames (Petersen, 1997). With the assistance of the Immigration and

Naturalization Service (INS), it compiled over 7,000 Spanish-sounding surnames.

Enumerators were taught how to distinguish Spanish last names from those of other romance languages (Hattam 2007). The Census Bureau applied specific measures by

71 region and nativity to capture the growth of the Puerto Rican and Cuban populations in the Northeast.23

By the 1960s, the apex of the Civil Rights movement, Mexican-American community leaders began to criticize these “objective” measures, and along with African

Americans made census undercounts a hot button political issue. As documented in

Choldin’s (1986) important work, Mexican-American leaders questioned the logic of using surnames, a practice that reduced the overall count of the community due to the loss of individuals without Spanish-sounding names or through intermarriage. Leaders also challenged the accuracy of counts using Spanish language as a measure, especially for a population composed of many English dominant individuals and families. Just as leaders today insist that not all Latinos speak Spanish, Mexican-American advocates claimed that many of young generation were not fluent in Spanish.24

With the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, federal grants-in-aid, and new policies aiming to increase minority political representation, the “undercount” shifted from a statistical dilemma to a highly contested political issue (M. Anderson, 1988; M. J.

Anderson & Fienberg, 1999). More broadly, this period witnessed the elevation of

23 For instance in the 1960 census, only in New York City did the Bureau include a “redundant nativity question that distinguished ‘U.S., Puerto Rico, Elsewhere’ as places of birth, and asked whether those born ‘Elsewhere’ were U.S. citizens” (Lowry, 1980, p. 9). 24 Leeman (2004) interprets the reliance of linguistic markers in the face of linguistic variation as an evidence of the close linkage between race and language historically upheld by census administrators. By the turn of the 20th century, the Census Bureau had already begun to treat “mother tongue as a hereditary characteristic passed from one generation to the next, regardless of actual language use” (Leeman 2007, p. 519, emphasis in original). This essentialist, hereditary, binding of language to group, would attach most firmly to Mexicans and other Latinos, serving as a primordial rationale for panethnic categorization. The existing historical record does not tell us if leaders shared or disagreed with essentialist readings of Latino origins. We only know that they felt that many members of their communities could not be adequately counted through “Spanish language” measures.

72 statistical knowledge by political actors from non-dominant populations, and the pursuit of statistics as a tool to make claims about equality and proportional representation.

In 1968, the U.S. Interagency Committee on Mexican-American Affairs (later renamed the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish Speaking People) issued a recommendation to the Census Bureau demanding the inclusion of an ethnic identity question in the 1970 census schedule (Mora, 2014b). Notably, leaders requested ethnic categories, such as “Mexican,” “Mexicano,” and “Chicano,” rather than panethnic labels.

The Census Bureau resisted the recommendation, citing it had already printed the entire volume of short forms and the two types of long forms. However, pressure from the

Nixon administration resulted in the addition of a question on “Spanish heritage” to the long forms, which were distributed to a sample of the national population.

As undercount battles raged, political pressures were also directed towards federal agencies responsible for addressing ethnoracial inequality and discrimination. These agencies often used their own classificatory systems (Hattam 2007). In 1973, on the heels of the U.S. Commission on Civil Right’s lambasting of the Census Bureau (Mora 2014), a subcommittee of the Federal Interagency Committee on Education (FICE) released a report titled, “Higher Education for Chicano, Puerto Ricans and American Indians.” One of the major recommendations of the report was that “uniform, compatible, and nonduplicative rational/ethnic categories be developed for use across federal agencies”

(Nobles 2000, p. 79). The following year, FICE established an Ad Hoc Committee on

Racial and Ethnic Definitions. Melissa Nobles (2000, p. 80) claims the committee was

“guided by two principal aims: to devise categories that would satisfy the multiple federal needs for such data and to develop categories that made sense in some general way.”

73 After much deliberation, the committee created a racial classification system based on a continental conception of race. It also introduced “Hispanic” as an ethnic rather than racial designation. The FICE Ad Hoc committee’s final report (1975, p. 13) noted that the

“term ‘Hispanic’ was selected because it was thought to be descriptive of and generally acceptable to the group to which it is intended to apply.” Specifically, it defined

“Hispanic” as “a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race” (p. 12). Two years later, the Office of

Management and Business (OMB) issued Directive 15, which stated the Federal government’s official racial and ethnic categories. Subsequently, the Census Bureau debuted the “ethnic” category Hispanic in the 1980 census. These struggles over categories would shape the production of statistical data, enabling the creation of particular statistical populations, such as the “Hispanic population” and “white non-

Hispanic population.”

In her recent work, Cristina Mora (2014) has emphasized how collaboration between civil rights advocates, state officials, and media entrepreneurs led to the development and eventual institutionalization of the statistical category “Hispanic.” As noted above, Mexican-American advocates, later joined by Puerto Rican and Cuban leaders, were instrumental in demanding federal data on these populations. In addition, as

Mora shows, political actors, such as the National Council of La Raza, were active promoters of the category and participants in the statisticalization of the “Hispanic population.” Census data gave NCLR (as well as other advocacy groups) support for claims that “Hispanics” were a national rather than regional population and evidence of economic and educational inequalities. Although the category “Hispanic” was

74 ambiguously defined, statistical knowledge not only helped to constitute the “Latino demographic,” it also facilitated the creation of a national Latino lobby and advocacy field (Mora 2014).

In the wake of the 1980 census, statistical knowledge about Latinos—whether demographic, attitudinal, voter, or consumer—has become ubiquitous in U.S. society.

While social scientific research has revealed that the adoption of panethnic identities among members of this population has been contentious and uneven (e.g., De Genova &

Ramos-Zayas, 2003; Garcia & Rua, 2007; Itzigsohn, 2009; Rodríguez-Muñiz, 2010), in public discourse these statistics are typically taken as proof of the existence of Latinos as a veritable, self-recognizing group. Ever since that fateful census, statistics about the size, characteristics, and trajectories of the “Hispanic demographic” have become major objects of analysis and intervention for government agencies, political parties, think tanks, corporations, activist organizations, polling agencies, the media, and academic institutions. Within this ever-increasing knowledge base, the topic of demographic growth has predominated, as evidenced by, for example, the media buzz about the growing “purchasing power” of this emerging “market” and doomsayer narratives about a Latino demographic invasion. Indeed, the statisticalization of “Hispanics” has fueled growing racial anxieties and anticipations about the political, economic, linguistic, and cultural future of the country.

The Contemporary Horizon

Steeped in the histories I described above, the theme of “demographic change” was powerfully jolted by the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois. Many across the country greeted Obama’s election with jubilation

75 and hope in the future. Change, it appeared, was on the horizon, a temporal vision contrasted against the policies of the Bush administration. Prospects of economic recovery and the cessation of overseas wars seemed within reach. The discourse of change that permeated the candidacy of Obama was also, and perhaps most of all, about racial change.

Whether embraced or rejected, Obama’s rise to national prominence was widely taken as emblematic of projected ethnoracial futures. The country’s future, cultural observers noted (Hsu, 2009), would more resemble Obama’s multiracial heritage and the diversity of his winning coalition than the forty-three presidencies before him. Racial projects from across the ideological spectrum have, for example, made much of Obama’s complex racial position, as the son of a Kenyan father and white mother who is now taken as the first Black president in U.S. history. While there have been many detractors on the right (and extreme right), sociologist Enid Logan (2011) argues that following his election, Obama became the chief character in a “triumphant narrative of post-race

America.” Logan claims, “this ostensibly celebratory narrative encodes a series of deeply problematic assumption about black Americans, the course of American history, and the roots of social inequality” (p. 13). Critical scholars of race have written extensively that one of the major ironies of Obama’s historic campaign and election has been the increased difficulty of elaborating a progressive agenda on race and racial inequality

(Bonilla-Silva & Dietrich, 2011; de Leon, 2011). This conundrum led journalist Ta-

Nehisi Coates (2012) to write: “Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race.” And while some on the

76 left have criticized Obama’s ambiguous engagement of the complicated topic of race, his presence and presidency has provoked substantial backlash among white conservatives, most evident in the rapid emergence of the Tea Party.

Political scientists Barreto, Cooper, Gonzalez, Parker, and Towler (2011) trace the proximate origins of the Tea Party to just before the 2008 election, at a 2007 online fundraiser for the libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul. The fundraiser, which took place on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, reportedly generated nearly six million dollars, as well as notable enthusiasm for a conservative alternative to the

Republican Party (Vogel, 2007). Yet, the movement did not develop until after Obama’s triumph over McCain. Williamson, Skocpol, and Coggin (2011) argue that the Tea Party formed out of growing conservative opposition to Obama’s proposed economic stimulus, famously derided by Rush Limbaugh as “Porkulus.” One month after the inauguration, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli launched into an on-air rant against the stimulus, calling for a “Chicago Tea Party.” Days later, as the rant went viral, “Tea Party” protests began to erupt across the country, attracting anywhere from dozens to a hundred persons. By April, Nate Silver estimated that the Tea Party had attracted more than

300,000 participants. As the protests gained momentum, Tea Party activists established officially recognized organizations and, with substantial funds from major corporate donors such as Charles and David Koch, put up candidates in that year’s

November elections. The following year, the movement’s highpoint, the election of Tea

Party candidates helped to dismantle the brief Democratic majority in both legislatures.25

25 This abbreviated chronology is based on the timeline offered by Williamson et al. (2011). See Skocpol and Williamson (2012) for a more extensive account of the origins and membership of the Tea Party.

77 While Tea Party adherents draw on longstanding currents in U.S. conservatism, such as calls for small government, protection of privacy, and individualism, scholars have argued that the Tea Party does not simply represent a conservative movement.

Barreto et al. (2011, p. 131) argue, “At a much deeper level, Tea Party sympathizers are concerned with the distribution of goods and rights in a changing America.” As numerous researchers have noted, the Tea Party professes a seemingly paradoxical support for social security, but an aversion to bilingual programs, welfare, public education and healthcare. Even scholars that have challenged the characterization of the Tea Party as racist acknowledge the mobilizing role of race in the movement. “Racial resentment stokes Tea Party fears about generational societal change, and fuels the Tea Party’s strong opposition to President Obama” (Williamson et al. 2011, p. 34). Put more forcefully, Barreto et al. (2011, p. 105) conclude, the Tea Party “represents a right-wing movement distinct from mainstream conservatism, that has reacted with great anxiety to the social and demographic changes in America over the past few decades.”

Unsurprisingly, “illegal” immigration, particularly from Mexico, has been a major organizing tool and agenda piece. As Williamson et al. (2011, p. 34) put it, “immigration worries Tea Party activists almost as much as the avowed flagship issue, deficits and spending.”

The Tea Party’s anti-immigrant stance, shared by many Republicans, has been translated into policy. Over the past several years, there has been a proliferation of repressive anti-immigrant legislation in statehouses throughout the country. The most famous of these was Arizona’s controversial bill, S.B. 1070. Arizona Senate Bill 1070, signed by Governor Jan Brewer in April 2010, was widely considered at the time of

78 passage the country’s most expansive and rigid statute targeting undocumented persons.

Invoking racial demographic narratives described above, former Arizona State Senator

Russell Pearce, a sponsor of S.B. 1070, once commented: “I will not back off until we solve the problem of this illegal invasion. Invaders, that’s what they are. Invaders on

American sovereignty and it can’t be tolerated” (cited in Wallace 2014, p. 261).

One of the bill’s most controversial provisions required local and state police to act as immigration authorities when “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present.” Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that certain aspects of the bill were unconstitutional in Arizona v. United States 11-182, the

“show me your papers” provision (as it was termed by civil rights advocates concerned with racial profiling) was spared.26 For national Latino advocates, S.B. 1070 exemplified a pervasive anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiment in U.S. society. While the introduction of state-level immigration legislation is not new, the “frequency and intensity” have increased (Wallace, 2014, p. 261). In addition, recent elaborations of the

Latino Threat Narrative—rooted in Malthusian thought and traces of racial eugenics— have also contributed to hate crime against this population, attacks on Ethnic and

Mexican studies and bilingual education.

National Latino advocacy operates within this demographic problem-space. As narrated in interview after interview, contemporary national Latino advocacy is grappling with a persistent marginality and growing “anti-Latino” sentiment, fueled by other, more powerful racial projects. Speaking to Washington Post journalist David Broder (2010) about Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, NCLR’s Janet

26 For more on SB 1070, see Menjívar and Garcia (2011).

79 Murguía commented: “As long as the immigration issue is unresolved, we feel under threat.” This political context has provoked assertions such as:

How do we take advantage of this fast growth? We are 17% of the population and we are going to be 30% of the population by 2050. How do we make sure that those numbers of fast growth is reflected in the political impact…to make sure that in 20 years one of the most vulnerable communities in the nation…are not facing the same challenges we are facing right now?

In an interview, Hector Sánchez, the president of the Labor Council of Latin American

Advancement and the current chair of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, raised these questions and concerns, which are far from unique among national Latino advocacy organizations. Indeed, the problem of translation—or the inability to convert growth into power—remains a central preoccupation of these leaders. If growth could be turned into influence and recognition, the assumption is that they could ensure that “one of the most vulnerable communities” does not have to endure these problems. I argue, and will attempt to convince empirically, that national Latino advocates like Hector Sánchez, have engaged in temporal politics of the future precisely with the goal of reconfiguring the contemporary political landscape. Within this demographic problem-space, national

Latino advocacy invests in the production, circulation, and deployment of statistical knowledge about the “Latino demographic” and the country’s ethnoracial future. As this chapter suggests, this particular racial project has not surfaced out thin air. To the contrary, it has a long history and is embedded in a sociohistorical horizon from which it draws its tools, aspirations, and challenges. In the next three chapters, I track their temporal politics across time and space, beginning first with the 2010 census.

CHAPTER THREE

Desire for Data: Consent-Building and the Construction of Population

I think for too long people keep looking at Latinos as foreign. I think what the census is going to demonstrate is that we are not foreign. We are Americans that happen to be Latino and we are proud to be able to participate. –Maria Teresa Kumar, Voto Latino

Introduction

In a prepared statement, Arturo Vargas, Executive Director of the National

Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), testified before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

On April 6, 2011, Vargas, a Stanford graduate born in El Paso, Texas to parents from the

Mexican state of Chihuahua, was speaking on the 2010 census and providing an assessment of the Census Bureau’s efforts. With over two decades of experience in

Latino advocacy, first at the National Council of La Raza and then at the Mexican Legal

Defense and Education Fund, this was hardly his first appearance before U.S. senators and their aides. During this particular testimony, Vargas expressed:

81 Mr. Chairman [Senator Thomas R. Carper], it is critical that the nation’s decennial Census produces the most accurate count of our nation’s population as possible. Census data are the fundamental building blocks of our representative democracy; census data are the basis for reapportionment and redistricting. The results of the 2010 Census revealed the importance of the decennial enumeration for charting the dramatic growth of our nation’s Latino community and the implications of that growth for our democracy’s future.

Vargas described the significance of the census along two future-oriented dimensions.

First, the census provides a foundation for the future of U.S. representative democracy.

According to the U.S. constitution, this future will be determined by the results of the census, which will parse out the number of congressional representatives a given state will have for a minimum of ten years. That future, for better or worse, will then be inscribed in the maps produced in negotiations and struggles over redistricting. From this point, Vargas then shifted to communicate the second importance of the census: its power to document both the “dramatic growth” of the Latino population and its political

“implications.” The causal direction of Vargas’s assertion was quite revealing: demography—not democracy—was the independent variable here.

Of critical importance for this dissertation is the fact that the seemingly objective phenomenon of Latino demographic growth, nonetheless, needs to be proven and demonstrated statistically. For growth to matter politically, particularly within a liberal democratic system indentured to the “majoritarian principle” (D. Scott, 1999), it must be—in effect—quantified and given a numerical register. Indeed, demography itself is a kind of statistical effect. Understood as such, it is not difficult to understand why the census is and has been central to national Latino advocacy, a point that cannot be overstated. For decades, leaders like Vargas and their political primogenitors, such as

NALEO’s founder, Congressman Roybal and NCLR’s pioneering president, Raul

82 Yzaguirre, have invested in the census and its production of demographic data. As previously noted, these political actors were instrumental in the development of the category “Hispanic” and its fateful inclusion in every census since 1980. While they have challenged the U.S. Census Bureau on several accounts—from its failure to produce bilingual materials to its lack of staff diversity—they have also publicly defended its mission against those that would defund it or tarnish its overall legitimacy. For this racial project, the decennial census and other Census Bureau data-collection initiatives are indispensible for political recognition, and, thus, have become objects of desire.

NALEO and other Latino advocates have not waited for the Census Bureau to produce data; rather they have actively participated and intervened in the production process. This involvement has taken numerous forms for NALEO. In the lead up to the

2010 census, for instance, NALEO leaders served on the Secretary of Commerce’s

Census Advisory Committee, the Joint Advisory Advertising Review Panel, and co- chaired the Census Task Force of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a major coalition of civil rights groups based in Washington, D.C. But its efforts were not confined to relationships with the Census Bureau and other advocacy organizations.

NALEO also assisted the production of census data by promoting census participation within the “Latino community.” As Vargas told the Senate subcommittee,

NALEO has been “actively involved in the outreach to the Latino community for the decennial enumerations in 1990, 2000, and 2010.” In 2010, NALEO spearheaded the

“¡HAGASE CONTAR! (Make yourself Count)” campaign, an initiative that counted on the involvement of major Spanish-language media outlets and advocacy organizations, as well as local partners throughout the country. To my knowledge, NALEO’s outreach

83 campaign was the largest initiative focused on the Latino population but certainly was not the only one. In cities and regions throughout the country, promotional efforts, sometimes independent from and at other times in collaboration with national groups, sprung up to encourage this population to participate in the census. Many of these campaigns heeded longstanding requests from the Census Bureau to assist in communicating the importance of the census, particularly among “hard-to-count” populations (Choldin, 1994; Hillygus,

Nie, Prewitt, & Pals, 2006; Mora, 2014b). In other words, groups like NALEO have engaged in what I term “consent-building,” that is, efforts carried out to cultivate public consent for and participation in state projects.

This chapter, therefore, examines the consent-building practices of national and local Latino leaders during the 2010 census. Against the backdrop of mass deportations and a growing anti-Latino sentiment (Chavez, 2008; Menjívar & Abrego, 2012), this chapter provides a unique look into the ways in which racial projects worked to mediate complex and contentious relations between state agencies and ethnoracial “minorities” in pursuit of demographic data. I specifically track efforts to overcome several affect-laden obstacles to consent, ranging from public indifference to frustrations with ethnoracial categories to fear of state surveillance to organized opposition to the census. Drawing on interviews with national leaders, primary documents, and a case study of promotional efforts in Rhode Island, I explore how the desire for data enrolled national and local

Latino advocates in the production of the 2010 census. I argue that census promotions targeting Latinas and Latinos represent an important, although understudied, aspect of the statistical construction of the “Latino demographic,” the chief protagonist in temporal

84 struggles over the future. For this reason, the empirics of this dissertation begin with the

2010 census.

Census-Making and Politics of Consent

Over the past several decades, censuses have received significant attention from social scientists and historians.27 While scholars have analyzed various aspects of census making, consent-building projects, such as those examined in this chapter, have received limited attention. I contend that consent-building promotions are a major form of the

“infrastructural work” needed to render social actors and relations amenable to enumeration (Curtis 2001). Building on the work of Geoffrey Bowker (1994), sociologist

Bruce Curtis (2001, p. 31) defines infrastructural work as “all the arrangements necessary to translate the imaginings of state officials about social relations into practical observations and measures of ‘the population’ and its activities.”

The scholarly literature reveals that historically local elites and brokers have cultivated consent for state projects, such as the census. For example, in his analysis of

British state formation in Ireland, Carroll (2006, p. 94) finds that after “widespread resistance” to the 1812 census, colonial authorities urged local Catholic leaders to publically communicate “the intentions and design of the census.” Heeding this request,

27 No longer simply viewed as a neutral, technical method of data collection, the scholarly literature has examined censuses in relation to several sociologically salient topics, including state formation and colonial administration (e.g. Carroll, 2006; Curtis, 2001; Starr, 1987), national imaginaries and race-making (e.g. B. Anderson, 2006 [1983]; Hirschman, 1987; Jung & Almaguer, 2006; S. Lee, 1993; Loveman & Muñiz, 2007; Morning, 2008), citizenship and political representation (e.g. M. J. Anderson & Fienberg, 1999; Nobles, 2000; Prewitt, 1987; D. Scott, 1999), social movements and policymaking (e.g. Choldin, 1986; Hattam, 2005; Hochschild & Weaver, 2010; Paschel, 2013; Skerry, 2000), and numeracy and the popularization of statistical knowledge (e.g. Cohen, 1999; Desrosières, 1998; Hacking, 1990; Porter, 1996). In addition, whether treated as a state technology to manage populations or an instrument to inculcate the official “principles of vision and division” (Bourdieu, 1994), scholars have demonstrated that censuses “help to constitute what they appear merely to represent” (Loveman 2005, p. 1653).

85 they helped calm tensions in subsequent censuses. Tracing the development of caste censuses, Cohn (1987, p. 250) similarly comments that by the 1930s Indian elites had begun to “set out to influence the answers which people would give in the census.” An even more recent example is provided by Brubaker, Feischmidt, Fox, and Grancea (2006), who briefly describe an aggressive campaign carried out by a local chapter of a

Hungarian political party to drum up census participation in the Romanian town of Cluj.

In the U.S. case, for instance, the Census Bureau established minority advisory committees in the late 1970s to help “sway public opinion toward the census” (Choldin

1994, p. 60). As Choldin (1994, pp. 60-61) notes, census officials believed that “if these minority leaders could be persuaded that the census was valuable and trustworthy, perhaps they could influence their groups to cooperate.” These committees were in many ways the precursors to the “community partnerships” and “complete count committees” developed in recent censuses, and which I examine below.28 Indeed, as this chapter reveals, ethnoracial leaders—motivated by hopes of political recognition—are key agents of consent building.

Census Promotions in 2010: An Overview

In 2010, for the twenty-third time in its history, the U.S. federal government conducted a decennial census, which it often describes as the country’s “largest peacetime operation.” On March 15, census schedules began arriving at homes across the country. Months before this date, households were sent several informative postcards, later followed by encouraging reminders to fill out the form and “march to the mailbox.”

28 Minority advisory committees were also the precursors of the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations, on which Arturo Vargas and other Latino advocates currently serve.

86 Beginning in May, enumerators began visiting uncounted residences. In the year prior to enumeration, a multi-million dollar media and advertisement campaign saturated national and local television, radio, print, and online outlets. The official 2010 slogan, “It is in Our

Hands,” was translated into about twenty-eight languages and printed on an untold number of documents, billboards, and promotional objects. In K-12 classrooms throughout the country, teachers gave civic lessons and facilitated exercises about the importance of the upcoming enumeration. Joining the promotional chorus, thousands of community organizations and leaders publically exhorted local residents to take part in the census. These practices and countless others like it systematically carried out throughout the country belie the potential fragility of the census project: individuals and populations may—and do—ignore, refuse, and even actively oppose state projects such as the census. The construction of statistical populations via the census requires not only technical devices, but also public consent.

Over the last century, promotions have become an integral part of consent- building around the census (M. Anderson, 2008; Igo, 2007). Although common to recent censuses, historian Margo Anderson (2008, p. 12) notes that in the U.S. census promotion and advertisement first emerged in the early twentieth century, as census administrators

“became increasingly concerned about the interaction between government and respondent in the census process.” Since the 1970s, the challenges to enumeration have increased as census administrators began to rely primarily on “mail-in” responses rather than exclusively on door-to-door enumerators.

In recent decades, the Census Bureau has developed an increasingly sophisticated and multifaceted promotional arsenal to confront decreasing mail-in response rates,

87 soaring enumeration costs, persistent disparities in participation among “minority” ethnoracial populations and language groups, controversies over privacy, and mistrust in government. Building on the 2000 census, census officials planned and carried out an

“integrated communications campaign” to coordinate 2010 census promotions.

Accounting for about $340 million out of the Census Bureau’s roughly $13 billion budget for the 2010 census (Newburger, 2012; S. Roberts, 2010), the integrated communications campaign was composed of three major initiatives. The first initiative, paid advertisement, Following a precedent set in 2000, the 2010 census was promoted in national and local television, radio, billboard, and print advertisements. Advertisements included a controversial 30-second spot during the Super Bowl halftime that cost $2.5 million. The Census Bureau also collaborated with the producers of the popular

Telemundo telenovela “Más Sabe el Diablo” (The Devil Knows Best) to introduce a subplot where one of its characters become a 2010 census enumerator. This particular attempt by census officials to reach out to the Spanish-speaking population generated some coverage in the English media (see Darby, 2009; Montgomery, 2009).

The second major promotional strategy aimed to saturate elementary schools and high schools with messages about the census. As part of their ambitious “Census in

Schools” program, which also debuted in 2000, census employees distributed census educational kits to principals and teachers throughout the country.

Along with these components, the third strategy of the integrated communication campaign concerned the formation of “community partners” and “complete count committees.” According to the Census Bureau’s (2008) Complete Count Committee

Guide:

88 A Complete Count Committee (CCC) is a volunteer committee established by tribal, state, and local governments, and/or community leaders, to increase awareness about the census and motivate residents in the community to respond. The committees work best when they include a cross section of community representatives from government agencies, education, business, religious organizations, and the media. The CCC is charged with developing and implementing a plan designed to target the unique characteristics of their community.

Expanding on prior censuses, the Census Bureau reportedly assembled over 250,000 leaders and organizations from the religious, civic, political, and economic sectors to promote the census in local communities. It equipped these local stakeholders with a slew of promotional materials, including talking points, templates for fliers, and press releases, as well as census paraphernalia such as hats, t-shirts, tote bags, stickers, and flash drives.29

These promoters or “trusted voices,” as census administrators described them, were encouraged to translate Census Bureau messages based on the “unique characteristics” of local communities. As a result of the politicization of “undercounts” in the post-civil rights era (M. J. Anderson & Fienberg, 1999), specific urgency was given to non-dominant linguistic and ethnoracial populations, which have consistently exhibited lower response rates than whites and monolingual English speakers.

The challenge of census promotions—as Choldin (1994, p. 61) expressed with respect to the race and ethnicity advisory committees founded in the late 1970s—was making a case in favor of the census “without promising any specific benefit from participating in the census, and in sending this message to people who distrust government and expect nothing but inferior services and facilities from it.” Nonetheless,

29 Community partners could make requests to the Census Bureau for small grants to produce their promotional materials.

89 for both the Census Bureau and community leaders, only familiar and trusted voices could convince “hard-to-count” groups to participate.

Throughout the country, 2010 census promotional work was carried out by national and local leaders and organizations, which both heeded the Census Bureau’s call and were independently invested in census data. In the next section, I briefly describe several campaigns developed by national Latino advocacy organizations.

National Latino Promotional Campaigns

Building on previous decennial censuses, national Latino civil rights organizations took an active role in promoting the 2010 census. NALEO led the national initiative, ¡HAGASE CONTAR! (Make Yourself Count). The initiative was the third phase of the “ya es hora” (the time is now) campaign, which began in the mid-2000s as a naturalization project. In an interview with Arturo Vargas, he stated that it was “natural to convert [the ya es hora] infrastructure to census outreach.” Other ¡HAGASE CONTAR! national coordinators included NCLR, MFV, SEIU, and the major Spanish-language media outlets, Univision, Entravision, and impreMedia. The campaign also counted on the participation of LULAC, the Hispanic Federation, LCLAA, and other national advocacy groups. In his testimony to the Senate subcommittee, Arturo Vargas claimed that the campaign assembled over 400 national and local partners.

NALEO and its collaborators launched ¡HAGASE CONTAR! in April 2009—exactly a year before the census—at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. During its press conference, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke acknowledged NALEO’s longstanding investment in the decennial census, commenting, “you have not left the

90 work to the Census Bureau alone. You are leading the way and taking charge of your destiny. Yes. It is time.”

Similar to other national initiatives and their local counterparts, the ¡HAGASE

CONTAR! campaign set out to increase mail-in response rates within the Latino population. According to its website, the campaign had four major objectives:

1) Inform Latinos about the importance of a full census count, how it affects their daily lives, the impact of the Census on their community and the benefits of participating. 2) Assure Latinos that the Census will maintain their information confidential and private, as protected by federal law and by sworn employees. 3) Mobilize the national, statewide, and local grassroots networks that have supported past phases of the ya es hora campaign to help disseminate information about the 2010 Census and assist the community in being counted. 4) Amplify the impact of the Census Bureau's message by adding an independent and trusted community message focused on empowerment and protecting the future. 5) Through a coordinated effort between community organizations and Spanish-language media, expand the message platform to go beyond paid advertising to community programming and Spanish- language media's innovative programming.

The future was a running theme throughout the campaign’s objectives and promotional messages. Its messages, for instance, stressed the future benefit of participation, and sought to convince that no future problems such as deportation would result from participation.

To accomplish the above goals, the ¡HAGASE CONTAR! campaign and its partners used several strategies. It organized educational forums throughout the country.

Vargas told the Senate subcommittee that these events provided a space to encourage participation and answer questions about the “Census process and form.” As with other campaigns, ¡HAGASE CONTAR! produced promotional artifacts, from t-shirts to

91 stickers. It also hosted 16 webinars on the census and distributed toolkits to assist local leaders. The campaign also launched a census hotline, which according to Vargas fielded nearly 14,000 calls, a website, several public service announcements (PSAs), and an

Univision special on the census. In California, NALEO called over 100,000 residents, urging them to fill out the census. ¡HAGASE CONTAR! partner, SEIU’s Eliseo Medina told the Wall Street Journal, “People will be hearing about the census on their way to work, at church and at union meetings...We are going to get the word out until people are sick and tired of hearing about the census” (Jordan, 2009).

The ¡HAGASE CONTAR! campaign not only promoted the census, it also challenged legislative attempts to prohibit undocumented immigrants from participating in the census. Known as the “Vitter-Bennett” amendment—named after its two Senate

Republican sponsors—the amendment was seen by national Latino advocates as a tactic of intimidation and exclusion. Groups like LULAC and others sent out action alerts and lobbied to prevent the passing of the amendment. Ultimately, much to their approval, the amendment failed to gain sufficient support in the Democratic majority senate. In a public statement, issued after the Senate vote, LULAC’s former national president, Rosa

Rosales, a longtime LULAC leader from Texas, wrote, “The community won an important battle today in the fight for a fair and accurate 2010 census that counts every person in the United States as required by the U.S. Constitution.”

Along with ¡HAGASE CONTAR!, Voto Latino launched a campaign targeting

“Latino millennials,” which according to leaders tend to participate at lower rates than the national average. Like NALEO’s operation, Voto Latino built on the organizational capacity it gained in the 2008 election. The “Be Counted” campaign drew on support

92 from other national Latino advocacy organizations, such as LULAC and involved both ground and virtual promotion. It used a text messaging service to reach its supporters, made extensive use of Twitter and other social media, offered 25 free songs on iTunes, and organized promotional events across the country.

One of the campaign’s major products was the production of a three-part PSA featuring a well-known cast of Latino celebrities, such as Rosario Dawson, Demi Lovato,

Wilmer Valderrama, Luis Guzman, Graciela Beltrán, and others. The PSA tells the story of an extended conversation on the census that arises during a birthday party. Set in a mansion, its highly informed characters debate the importance of the census, whether it is safe to participate, and how quickly the form can be filled out. Wilmer Valderrama plays the chief antagonist of the story, a young but cynical guy, who states his refusal to fill out the form because the census “is exactly how the government gets the information to get your ass.” Valderrama’s character succeeds in casting doubt in the minds of others.

Rosario Dawson’s character, a medical doctor that is dating Valderrama’s character, challenges those indifferent or opposed to census. As the conversation unfolds, Luis

Guzman’s character, the uncle, surprises everyone by stating that his pastor asked him to boycott the census unless they pass immigration reform. “If the majority doesn’t want us here, why should they get money from our numbers.” The census endorsers in the room charge back that most religious leaders, even the Catholic Church, does not support the boycott. At one point, Demi Lovato’s character, a college student, frames the stake of the census in terms of identity and recognition. “Before 1980, Latinos weren’t even considered a separate ethnic group on the census form, this is an opportunity for us to assert ourselves, to define ourselves. We can’t pass that up.” Her mother and aunt express

93 their pride in her blossoming civic awareness. Her words move one of the ambivalent characters, leading him to join the growing numbers that have pledged to participate.

Eventually, even Valderrama’s character agrees to fill out the census. But before he switches his position, he reveals that he is undocumented, and for this reason is apprehensive about sharing his information with the government. The rest of the group reassures him that he will not get deported if he participates. As I discuss below, many of these themes and issues permeated Latino-targeted census promotions at both the national and local level.

In this section, I have briefly described two of the major campaigns produced by national Latino advocacy organizations. Employing social media, traditional media, particularly Spanish-language media, celebrities, and on-the-ground promotional work, these organizations worked to build consent for and interest in the 2010 census. These national initiatives, however, were only part of a much broader field of activity. In the remainder of this chapter, I will draw on a local case study of census promotion that has many parallels with the efforts of national advocacy groups. My analysis documents the work of the Rhode Island Latino Complete Count Committee, an ad-hoc promotional coalition. This case study further elaborates how the desire for demographic data led

Latino advocates to engage in consent-building practices and, in the process, participate in the statistical construction of the “Latino demographic” in the 2010 census.

Local Promotions: The Case of the Rhode Island Latino Complete Count Committee

Similar to the efforts of national Latino advocacy organizations, the Rhode Island

Latino Complete Count Committee was established to stimulate interest in and support

94 for the 2010 census among Rhode Island’s diverse Latino population.30 Between 2009 and 2010, RILCCC promoters organized, hosted, and participated in dozens of community events, cultural festivals and public forums throughout the state and disseminated promotional messages through local English and Spanish language Latino media outlets. As expressed on its website, the RILCCC sought to “increase mail response rates among Latino households in Rhode Island through an active community education campaign.” For RILCCC members, this objective was especially critical in light of the low participation rates in the previous census. Results from the 2000 census revealed that response rates in areas heavily populated by Latino and Latin American immigrants, and especially Latino immigrants, such as the city of Central Falls and parts of several neighborhoods in Providence, fell far below the national average of 67%. For instance, only about 50% of Central Falls residents took part in the 2000 census.

Throughout the country, the Census Bureau deemed such areas high priorities and instructed its “partnership specialists” to oversee the formation of local promotional efforts. In Rhode Island, this task was placed in the hands of Gabriela, one of three local partnership specialists hired by the Bureau.

Gabriela is not a Rhode Island native, but she has deep roots in the state, beginning first as a student at Providence College, and later as a community activist and executive director of the Center for Hispanic Policy and Advocacy (CHisPA), one of

30 These data were collected between February 2010 and March 2011 in Rhode Island. I conducted interviews with twenty-two individuals, including local census promoters, elected officials, journalists, regional census officials, and temporary census employees, such as partnership specialists and enumerators. I also observed (and in some cases participated in) press conferences, educational forums, door-knocking drives, and other outreach events related to the 2010 census. Finally, I collected local (as well as national) media coverage in both the English and Spanish press to supplement interview and observational data. For a more detail description of this data and research, please see Rodriguez-Muñiz (Unpublished).

95 Rhode Island’s first Latino-focused social service and advocacy agencies. Extremely knowledgeable about the Latino population and local leadership, Gabriela set out to establish the committee. She first reached out to Javier, a well-respected obstetrician and community leader, whom other leaders consider the founder of Rhode Island Latino politics. Gabriela believed that not only would Javier’s political influence and reputation help her attract other leaders but also that his radio show on the local Latino Public Radio station could serve as an important transmitter of census messages. Javier agreed but insisted that two others help co-chair the RILCCC. Javier invited Ines, a homegrown,

Colombian-American advocate, then working at the respected Rhode Island Foundation, and Andrea, a first-generation Dominican-American who was the president of the Rhode

Island Latino Civic Fund during the period of enumeration. Ines and Andrea agreed to join the committee and, together with Javier and Gabriela, drafted a list of local leaders believed to be the most “influential.” The list included elected officials, community activists, cultural workers, nonprofit executive directors, religious leaders, educators, and business and media entrepreneurs. Reflecting the diverse ethnic composition of Rhode

Island’s Latino population (Itzigsohn, 2009), their list and subsequent membership was composed of Dominican, Puerto Rican, Guatemalan, Mexican, and Colombian leaders.

Though not all invitees joined the campaign, numerous leaders heeded the call and became local spokespersons for the 2010 census.

What motivated these leaders to join the committee and invest in the promotion of the 2010 census? Why did they choose to expend valuable resources and time to secure a strong Latino participation rate in Rhode Island? In short, how were the enrollers enrolled? Answers to these questions, I argue, point towards the fact that Latino political

96 leaders desire census data, viewing demographic statistics and projections of the future as vital means of achieving political recognition in the present.

Enrolling the Enrollers: “If They Don’t Count Us, We Don’t Count”

The members of the RILCCC were, in most cases, familiar with the census, and had experience promoting prior censuses, even as far as back as the 1980 census. A few had worked as enumerators. Possessors of what Arjun Appadurai (1993, p. 324) termed

“numerical habits,” most were active users of census data, either as employees of nonprofit organizations and government agencies or activists wielding data to advocate for the rights and welfare of the “Latino community.” Similar to their national counterparts, they expressed to me that census data was a key resource in political and policy struggles.

For instance, Ramón, a Harvard-trained educator and longtime policy advocate, raised this theme in relation to advocacy and need to produce data about the local Latino population. He described census data as “proof of what is out there.” He contrasted knowledge about Latino population growth based on census statistics from experiential knowledge.

[Census figures] is how we have proof of what is out there. It is undeniable when you show the numbers. So one of things is to be in the community and say, ‘My God, all these bodegas are popping up everywhere, and all these restaurants, and people coming into our schools.’ But a lot of times, I say well that’s anecdotal information, give me some hard numbers.

In order to influence policymaking, Ramón insisted upon the need for “hard numbers,” which unlike “anecdotal information” were, in his view, “undeniable.” According to

Nilda, a program director at a local organization encouraging women to become

97 entrepreneurs, only increased participation could get Latinos “a bigger piece of the pie.”

Javier echoed this sentiment stating, “public policy follows the numbers.” To render the needs of the “Latino community” visible and actionable, RILCCC promoters sought after and used census and other survey data. Such perspectives and practices—no doubt to some extent engendered and reinforced by the census—are, of course, not unique to the

RILCCC. Political leaders, as anthropologist Jacqueline Urla (1993, p. 836) writes,

“understand that in the current political economy of knowledge, numbers function as authoritative ‘facts.’” They are well aware that “what counts—in the sense of what is valued—is that which is counted” (Badiou, 2008, p. 2).

Latino census promoters—both in Rhode Island and among national Latino civil rights organizations—were also invested in the census as a means to increase the political representation of the “Latino community.” For instance, months before the 2010 census data was released, Javier wrote a commentary published by the National Institute for

Latino Policy that illustrates the perceived connection between the census and electoral representation. Focusing on the Rhode Island Latino Political Action Committee, an initiative he helped establish, Javier narrates some of the reasons behind what he described as Latino “political success” in Providence.31 Among these reasons, he reserved a special place for the census. “It was not until the year 2000 that we were able to claim a very important victory. The Census showed remarkable growth in our neighborhoods and redistricting presented us with an opportunity to draw favorable lines for the election of Juan Pichardo, our first State Senator and the first Dominican State senator in the country.” His essay credits the census with providing a “unique opportunity” that blossomed into subsequent achievements, such as the Fall 2010 election of Angel

31 For more on Rhode Island Latino and Latina politics, see Itzigsohn (2009) and Uriarte (2006).

98 Taveras, the city’s first Dominican-American and Latino mayor, and the then newly elected Governor Lincoln Chafee’s decision to reject the federal government’s controversial E-Verify program to track undocumented labor.

Such expressions about the instrumental value of census data were embedded in a broader desire for recognition, indexed most powerfully by RILCCC’s slogan: “¡Si No

Nos Cuentan, No Contamos!” (If They Don’t Count us, We Don’t Count). Javier first uttered these words during the RILCCC kick-off press conference in April 2009. In his closing remarks, this widely respected leader urged those present to join him in chanting the slogan. Soon after, the group’s “battle cry,” as Javier described it to me, would appear on promotional artifacts of various kinds, from t-shirts, hats, buttons, stickers, banners, and websites. It would be further invoked in print media, public service announcements, speeches, and on airwaves. The meaning of the slogan would be elaborated interviews with RILCCC. Gabriela summarized the importance of the census by arguing that it was a way to “make ourselves known.” Her pithy statement was echoed and expanded by

Camilo, a Colombian media entrepreneur. “[If] we don’t have participation, they don’t know us. We don’t count for anything… because it’s like if we didn’t exist. If we didn’t make ourselves count, if they don’t count us, we don’t count. We are not part of the community, not part of the process.”

National Latino leaders made similar statements about the census. For example,

Ben Monterroso, the leader of Mi Familia Vota, a longtime union organizer and immigrant rights advocate, expressed in an interview:

I just think that our community has not participated in the census in a way that we should. And therefore, it was earlier on that we realized that if you want to be part of the picture, you have to be in the picture or else you don’t count. You know how those family pictures are when you get

99 everybody together, and if you are not part of the picture then the picture is going to go on the wall and you were not there… So the way that I—the way that we saw this—is like if our community is not being seen in the picture, they are not going to pay attention to us…

Monterroso’s metaphor is particularly fitting, as the census is often described as a national portrait. These and other quotes suggest, that in many ways, recognition was “at the heart of the matter” (Calhoun, 1994, p. 20).

But how did RILCCC promoters want to be recognized? In a couple of words, as a “powerful community.” Ramon described the Latino population as “kind of a sleeping giant still, but numerically it is big.”32 Numbers, as Espeland and Stevens (2008, p. 408) note, express difference in terms of “magnitude.” For RILCCC leaders, the census was a means of demonstrating the importance of the Latino population. Take for instance the recollection of Manuel, an immigrant rights attorney of Puerto Rican descent:

The headlines [of] TIME magazine, shortly after the [2000] census figures came out, were Hispanic or Latino political force. I forgot the exact words, but it was right there, for everyone to see, a major U.S. publication coming to terms with the Latino community. The numbers are there, and we are going to be a political giant. All of a sudden politicians start paying attention to Latinos…

Manuel continued:

This didn’t happen back in the 90s… When Latino groups have press conferences the press shows up because this is a legitimate group and is recognized. Things like funding for activities whether it is political organizations, whether its PAC [political action committee] monies they come flowing. People are paying attention as a result to the community. You don’t demonstrate how many people you have doing the parade anymore that we used to do down Broad Street every year. Now they look at these census figures, at least the people that make important decisions, and looking at these census figures and they’re saying, look this is a community and certainly we saw that in the last elections.

32 For a provocative and insightful discussion of the concept “sleeping giant” and the assumption of unity on which it rests, see Beltrán (2010).

100 Manuel narrated a transition from public invisibility to visibility that—in his assessment—led to greater respect. Although far from satisfied or utopian, he recalls the difficulty local leaders once had in securing funding for Latino-focused social service agencies or convincing local media to attend press conferences. In his view, the dissemination of census data showing local and national demographic growth transformed the Latino population into a “legitimate group.” Gabriela made a similar point. Though she had been instructed and trained to emphasize the issue of federal resources, she was also personally motivated by the political possibilities of increased numbers. She commented, “We need to be counted because we could bring dollars, we need to make ourselves known, we need more, the whole idea of doubling numbers was an exciting thing… The more Latinos, the more political power.” These statements communicated a sense of pride and confidence, rooted in the belief that census data would render the “Latino community” and its growing importance visible. Indeed,

RILCCC promoters viewed the census as a kind of “obligatory passage point” (Callon,

1986), which was economically and politically “indispensable” to the future well-being of the Latino population. Being counted, as the RILCCC slogan dramatized, was fundamentality about recognition, i.e. being taken into account.

And yet, for national and local leaders, the promise of demography, namely greater recognition and influence, could only be realized if members of the “Latino community” participated in the 2010 census en masse. Conversely, if participation rates repeated the abysmal turnout of the 2000 census, this promise would be deferred for another decade. For, as Brubaker et al. (2006, p. 151) reminds, “Censuses provide group- mobilizing and group-making entrepreneurs the opportunity to demonstrate the strength–

101 but also the risk of exposing the weakness of the group in whose name they claim to speak.”

The Problem of Indifference: Motivational Rhetorics and Resources

On a temperate afternoon in April 2010, RILCCC volunteer Jackie and I made our way up the backstairs of a three-story building in Central Falls. We were participating, along with other volunteer teams, in a local manifestation of a national push to “march to the mailbox” before the April 15th deadline. As her three grandchildren waited patiently below, she knocked on the backdoor of the top apartment. Almost immediately, a young boy she seemed to recognize answered. She queried if his mother had completed the census form. Understandably, he did not know and quickly interjected that his mother was sleeping. Jackie courteously asked him to wake her up. Noticing the boy’s hesitation, she invoked the future, telling him “[we] gotta get money to send you to college and get better schools… Tell your mother not to get angry at you, tell her to get angry at me.”

The boy conceded and soon after his mother appeared. Seemingly unbothered by our visit, the mother confirmed, to Jackie’s delight, that she had already mailed her census. After an exchange of thanks and a 2010 census tote bag, we left and continued our door- knocking expedition.

In her interactions with Central Falls residents, Jackie drew explicit connection between census participation and future access to federal resources for education, health care, and social services, a rhetorical move heightened by the economic recession and foreclosure crisis during this period. A well-known personality in the neighborhood,

Jackie was at the time the coordinator of a food pantry at Channel One, a local social

102 service and community center.33 Jackie, of Cape Verdean descent, became a vocal contributor to the RILCCC-spearheaded promotions in Central Falls, which is located slightly northeast of Providence. As we walked from block to block, she described this small city as “85% Latino,” adding that the majority were undocumented immigrants, many of whom were afraid to participate in the census.34

Often employing stronger language than census administrators, local promoters often combated indifference towards the census by arguing that population size (as documented through the census) determined or decisively influenced the distribution of federal resources. In my interview with Ramón, he recalled passing out 2010 census pencils and making pitches about the census to parents at report card pickup. His pitch involved describing how local organizations had used census data to improve the livelihood of the community. “When you talk to people, particularly Latinos, and you say,

‘we weren’t able to build this brand new Women and Infants Hospital if it wasn’t for the demographics that proved we needed it. That is an important institution for us, for Latino families.’”

Such messages were frequently communicated with language and figures provided by the Census Bureau. As Census Bureau press materials noted, “Census data are used to apportion congressional seats to states, to distribute more than $400 billion in federal funds to tribal, state and local governments each year and to make decisions about

33 In July 2010, Channel One and the local public library were closed. Despite public opposition, public officials justified the decision due to lack of funds. The sad irony here, of course, is that increased participation rates did not, in this case, translate immediately into increased resources for these programs. 34 The 2010 census found a much lower percentage. In Central Falls, Latinos account for 60% of the population. Researchers have found that the U.S. public tends to deflate the demographic size of dominant groups and inflate the numbers for immigrants and non-dominant ethnoracial groups (Alba, Rumbaut, & Marotz, 2005; McConnell, 2011). In the European context, see Herda (2010).

103 what community services to provide.” At public events and interviews, census promoters repeatedly told me that each individual was worth $10,000 in federal funds. Thus the distribution of $400 billion in federal funds was framed as a simple calculation based on population size. National Latino spokespersons and organizations circulated similar claims. For instance, Voto Latino’s Maria Teresa Kumar told the following to the NBC-

Univision cable station, Mun2:

The 2010 census is perhaps the most important civic action that you can do this year. Why? Because the 2010 census is not only going to ensure that not only you’ll get counted for political representation, but it also ensures that 400 billion in federal funding is allocated appropriately to your community. So for every person that is counted, it’s $10,000 that we’re talking about that goes to your local community, in the form of funding for classrooms, roads, and clinics. So you know that pothole that you really hate. That 10,000 will go back to fix that pothole or overcrowded classroom you’re always worried about; that helps again address classroom size. Help Voto Latino ensure you don’t leave money on the table. We’re talking about ten grand!

Kumar’s message, directed at the cable channel’s target audience of young English- dominant Latino viewers, represents one example of promotional narratives that posit a straightforward distribution of funds based on census demographic data. Of course, as the previous section illustrated, these leaders know very well that data would have to be mobilized in policy fights to ensure that resources were properly allocated. However, promotional narratives rarely disclosed these political uses, tending instead to communicate that census participation would convert into greater resources or influence.

In their conversations with local residents and on airwaves, RILCC leaders often publicly framed the importance of the census in terms of the future. When I spoke to

Javier in his office-radio station, he posed the question, “What is going to happen to our children? What’s going happen to funds for education? What’s going happen with the

104 funds for communities that are now suffering? What will be the future if we don’t participate?” It is on this very issue of funding that Pablo differentiated the local messaging of 2010 census from 2000 census. While other RILCCC leaders might not entirely agree with his thesis, Pablo reiterated the centrality of resources:

In 2000, it was almost all about politics. In 2010, it was more about civic life and the impact on the civic life of all people… It was all about money. It is about resources. It is about the future of our communities and it’s about life in our neighborhoods and our streets and you live it. It doesn’t matter if you are documented and undocumented if you are whatever, you will be impacted regardless of the outcome.

The seriousness of Pablo’s questions about the “future” and his insistence that “it was all about money” must be understood in the context of a reality riddled with social and economic uncertainty. Places like Central Falls or South Providence, predominantly populated by ethnoracial “minorities,” suffer from among the highest levels of poverty and unemployment rates in the state (Pew Hispanic Center, 2011). The perceived linkage between social policy and statistics within a context of marginalization provides powerful incentives for ethnoracial enumeration. Since the passing of the Civil Rights Act, African

American and Latino political leaders have effectively politicized “undercounts” and dramatized its detrimentally impact on poor, urban communities (M. J. Anderson &

Fienberg, 1999; Choldin, 1994). Although the connection between data and resources might appear as obvious and self-evident for RILCCC members, this is not exactly the case in the broader population. Though modern numeracy has made us all calculative agents, the desire for data is not universal. As the RILCCC website reminds, “We cannot assume that Latinos are interested in or want to participate in the Census.”35 In fact, by

35 A near verbatim line also appeared on the ¡HAGASE CONTAR! website.

105 tying together federal resources and participation, census promoters sought to make the census relevant to everyday life and future aspirations, such as college.

Motivational rhetorics, however, did not encompass the totality of census promotional activity, as indifference was not the only obstacle. One challenge was the census schedule and its ethnic and race categories. Far from straightforward, Ruppert

(2008) argues that census taking requires a particular capacity to identify with categories found on the census. “Individuals must engage in both creative and confessional acts that involve comprehending and identifying themselves in relation to categories of the population” (p. 9). Yet, as past research shows, this capacity manifests great variation.

The Problem of Identification: Ethnoracial Categories, Confusions, and Commensurations

On a chilly Saturday morning in February 2010, community leaders and residents gathered in Central Falls for the culmination of an “MLK food drive,” which doubled as a census promotional event. At the end of the program, I joined a small group of Mexican and Central American men on a tour of an interactive installation designed—according to

Bureau press releases—to bring “the 2010 census to life.” Led by a census worker, we visited 10 five-foot tall stations, each dedicated to a specific census question. Eventually, we came upon Question #8, which asks: “Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?” After we took a short pause to read and presumably reflect on the question, our tour guide led us to Question #9, which asks: “What is Person 1’s race?” 36 Curious to hear our guide’s response, I asked whether those who identify as “Hispanic” were required to fill out the “race” question. She responded affirmatively, matter-of-factly

36 Beginning in the 2000 census, the words “mark one or more boxes” have followed this question. On the issue of multiraciality and the census, see Perlmann and Waters (2002).

106 stating that one question captures a person’s “origins” and the other their “race.” On this day, neither the census employee’s distinction nor the census categories provoked much commentary or debate. And yet, as I would soon witness, this seamless and user-friendly trip through the 2010 census gave way, in just a matter of weeks, to a more fraught reality.

Indeed, once census schedules began to arrive, RILCCC members were forced to confront the chasm between lived identifications and state categories. As narrated by these census promoters and enumerators, local residents, coworkers, and relatives expressed serious reservations with the “Hispanic” and “race” questions—reservations many of them also shared. Interviews and ethnographic observations uncovered multiple sources of frustration. Echoing past research (for a recent review, see C. E. Rodríguez,

Miyawaki, & Argeros, 2013), the “Hispanic” question was generally described as less troublesome than the “race” question, although some expressed strong dissatisfaction with it as well.37 At the heart of the confusion and frustration were competing and intersecting “racial conceptualizations,” which Ann Morning (2011, pp. 9-10) defines as

“the web of beliefs” and “working models” people hold about race.38 But as Morning shows, the meaning of race has been historically linked to and constituted, at least in part, in relation to ideas about ethnicity (see also Hattam, 2007). My analysis reveals the negotiation of numerous, and not necessarily congruent, conceptions of race and ethnicity, which were inscribed in the census and within the wider cultural milieu inhabited by the

RILCCC, as well as national advocates.

37 For example, some individuals were critical that only three Latino populations (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans) were given check boxes, leaving the rest to write-in other identifications. 38 By this, Morning (2011, pp. 9-10) means the “notions of what a race is, what distinguishes one race from another, how many and which races there are, how we can discern an individual’s race, and how or why races emerge.”

107 In contrast to the Census Bureau’s position that “people of Hispanic origin can be of any race,” several RILCC members conceptualized “Latino” and “Hispanic” as a racial category.39 These individuals were troubled by the absence of the category “Latino” in the “race” question—an absence that scholars believe has contributed to the disproportionate selection of “Other Race” among self-identified Latinos and Latinas

(Compton, Bentley, Ennis, & Rastorgi, 2012; Dowling, 2014; Hitlin, Brown, & Elder,

2007; C. E. Rodriguez, 2000).40 In the course of expressing his frustration with the government’s ethnic designation of the category Latino, Manuel described a hypothetical scenario of an awkward encounter between a census enumerator and a census-taker identifying himself/herself racially as Latino. “Excuse me, this is incomplete, you just put

Latino.” “Yeah.” “But what race are you?” “What?” “Latino.” “No, you have to tell us if you are white Latino, black Latino, or all of the above.” Even permanent census employees, such as a census coordinator from Boston I interviewed, echoed this point: “I don’t see myself as white, black or anything, I see myself as Latino. So for me to fill out a race question, I really have to stop and think.”

Regularly, such racial conceptualizations were explained in terms of racial mixture. In an interview, Javier remarked, “We come from that tradition, of being the mix of…Africa, Spain and the Americas coming together and forming this new thing. It is part of our DNA. It’s part of our vision of ourselves.” Naomi, a 2010 census enumerator who worked at a Providence community organization, recounted numerous situations in

39 To clarify, the Census Bureau’s taxonomy and definitions are based on the Office of Management Budget’s (OMB) Statistical Directive 15. For more background, see Choldin (1986); Hattam (2005); (Mora, 2014b). 40 In line with the Bureau’s interest in collapsing the Hispanic origin and race questions, several RILCCC members explicitly recommended that the Bureau integrate Latino into the race question in the next census.

108 which people told her: “I am mixed, neither white or black. Look at my skin and see how

I am… Look, I am not of any of these categories, none qualify.”

Embedded in these assertions were understandings about the meaning of “race.”

Some of these meanings cast race as a biological construct, such as when Gabriela noted she would often mark “Native American” because she has “some Native American blood.”41 However, in most cases, mentions of physical traits or blood were interwoven, in rather ambiguous ways, with putatively “ethnic” markers, such as language and culture—once again revealing that clean analytic distinctions rarely hold up in practice

(e.g., Flores-Gonzalez, 1999; Itzigsohn, 2009; Morning, 2011; Roth, 2012).

More frequently, as Naomi’s account shows, the “race” question (and therefore the concept of race) was interpreted as a question of skin color. A particularly useful illustration comes from field observations in Central Falls. One afternoon I assisted an elderly woman complete the census form in her dimly lit dining room table. When we reached the “race” question, she gave me a puzzled look, and after pondering for a moment, proceeded to extend her arms out. Lacking the confidence she had when she told me to mark “Mexico” on the Hispanic origin question, she looked down at her forearm and softly stated, “Tengo negra y blanca” (I have black and white).42 After unsuccessfully trying to convince me to adjudicate, she sighed and instructed me to mark

“white.” Along with many RILCCC members, this census-taker interpreted the “race”

41 Such pronouncements support Morning’s (2011) claim that biological conceptions of race remain dominant, notwithstanding the emergence of constructivist perspectives. 42 Far from unique, several other individuals, including census promoters, also did this act. To accurately gauge skin color, one respondent recommended the Census Bureau develop some “visual way” to help people determine their race qua skin color. To assist census takers, this RILCCC leader suggested a United Colors of Benetton-inspired instructional video or props such as a mirror.

109 question as a question of skin tone. It further reveals the anxiousness generated by the census among some census takers.

These expressions and experiences indicate that for some members of the Latino population locating oneself on the census schedule was far from automatic or self-evident, particularly with respect to racial identification. In fact, for some members of the local

Latino and Latina population, inclusive of census promoters, the act of census-taking was experienced as a vexing and exasperating operation. RILCCC members worried that the disjuncture between self-definition and state categories would lead to refusals to participate in the census. This suggests that the census schedule itself can complicate and compromise the project of enumeration. National leaders also commented on the difficulties introduced by census categories. For instance, Vargas informed the Senate subcommittee, “confusion or concern regarding the difference of the race and Hispanic origin questions persists – at least 785 people called our 877-EL-CENSO hotline with questions on this issue.” Voto Latino’s Maria Teresa Kumar criticized the census for failing to recognize “how layered the Latino self-identity is” (Padgett, 2010).

Although RILCCC members harbored critical views about the census schedule, they nonetheless took steps to minimize widespread confusion and frustration. As

Gabriela had hoped, Latino Public Radio became an important disseminator of census promotions. Specifically, Javier used his radio program to allow listeners to voice their concerns and to receive clarifying information from “trusted voices” in the RILCCC and experts from the Census Bureau. Several community organizations, such as Progreso

Latino, which hosted the food drive mentioned at the beginning of this section, also agreed to serve as “Be Counted” and “Questionnaire Assistance Centers,” where

110 residents could seek answers to questions about the census. In addition, RILCCC leaders and volunteers discussed the census directly with local residents at community events and house visits.

In face-to-face and virtual encounters between the RILCCC and potential census- takers, promoters stressed that completing the census, and specifically the “Hispanic” and

“race” questions, was a personal affair. They insisted that only an individual knows what they are; that one’s ethnoracial identity is only for that person to determine. While their objective was to increase Latino participation, unlike some census promoters elsewhere, the RILCCC did not aggressively encourage people to identify racially in particular ways.43 As Javier once put it, what mattered was that people “participate, that’s all.” In this respect, they publicly articulated the Census Bureau’s own message, which as one regional census coordinator described it, was all about “self-identification.”

Although couched in the language of individual choice, the 2010 census was home (as are all modern censuses) to a set of preformed and standardized questions and categories. To minimize challenges to post-enumeration aggregation, it actually restricts choice to a limited number of “official categories” (Starr, 1992). Moreover, census administrators desired a particular kind of data: discrete and unambiguous. The aspects of census promotion I have discussed in this section not only aimed to assuage confusion and irritation but also to encourage the collection of the right kind of data. A short exchange between Gabriela and RILCCC co-chair Andrea offers insight into this

43 For example, the Afro-Latin@ Forum, a coalition of intellectuals and community activists primarily based in New York City, produced bilingual public service announcements encouraging Latinos and Latinas of African descent to identify as “Latino” and “Black” on the census. Voto Latino advocated for Latinos to fill out “other race” in the race question (Padgett, 2010). Efforts to shape how people identified in the census were not restricted to Latinos. For example, an Arab Complete Count Committee in Orange County, California garnered national media coverage due to its slogan: “Check it right; you ain't white!” (Blake, 2010).

111 dynamic. Moments before several teams of volunteers were dispatched for door-to-door outreach, Andrea asked Gabriela how to deal with individuals that write in “Hispanic” or

“Latino” in the “Some Other Race” line in the “race” question. In response, Gabriela acknowledged that people have the right to identify in whatever way they please but then stated that the Census Bureau does not prefer this choice. Gabriela stressed that census officials wanted to avoid, as much as possible, “fuzzy numbers.” She did not elaborate on this point and instead ended with a reminder to not argue with people about their choices.

While the “race” question was a source of frustration, it never became a major issue for the RILCCC and their national counterparts. To be sure, racial categorization was a subject of debate in early coordinating meetings and, as I describe above, modest attempts were made to address public frustrations. I contend that a major reason for this limited attention to racial identification was intimated in a comment made by Javier.

After discussing the challenges posed by the census’ racial taxonomy, Javier reminded me that the “important number was Latino.” Nilda made a similar point when I asked if her frustrations with the “race” question could have deterred her from participating.

“Even if we [Nilda and her husband] were not sure about the answer, I would have looked for the answers, some help, and someone that could guide us, but I needed to be counted… We needed to be counted and counted as a Hispanic.” For most RILCCC promoters, the question on Hispanic origin was largely seen as uncontroversial because, as Javier put it, this question was “so clear.” Consequently, little energy was expended on getting “Latinos” to identify as “Latinos”; this much was assumed. It was taken-for- granted that the “Latino community” existed and that Latinos and Latinas of diverse national origins, linguistic practices, legal statuses, generations, and migratory and

112 settlement experiences could be unproblematically housed under a panethnic label.44 As long as “Latinos” participated in the census and rendered themselves “commensurate”

(Espeland & Stevens, 2008), that is, equivalent to other “Latinos,” the bright future envisioned by Latino census promoters could be realized.

In efforts to cultivate consent, census promotions mediated how individuals and populations related to, interpreted, and identified themselves in relation to official race and ethnic categories. Many Latino census-takers were uneasy with the questions and categories used in the census form. The RILCCC thus assumed the difficult task of assuaging some of the widespread frustrations that threatened to lower participation rates.

Yet, as I note above, concerns with ethnoracial categories never became a focal point for promoters. Instead, other obstacles to participation came to dominate their promotional efforts.

The Problem of Mistrust: Noncitizens and the Fear of Deportation

As historically documented, popular fear and distrust have been a major obstacles to the success of early censuses (e.g. Carroll, 2006; Curtis, 2001; Loveman, 2005; J. C.

Scott, 1998). Yet, fear, as well as trust in government is not uniformly or universally distributed. The RILCCC and its counterparts in other states were often assembled with the expressed intent of convincing “noncitizen” immigrants to take part in the census.45

44 Far from inherent or straightforward, a growing scholarship has examined the historical, social, political, and cultural processes and dynamics through which such pan-Latino/a identities are developed, embraced, and contested (e.g. Beltrán, 2010; Dávila, 2001; J. Flores, 2000; Flores- Gonzalez, 1999; Itzigsohn, 2009; Ricourt & Danta, 2003; Rodríguez-Muñiz, 2010). More broadly, scholars have also explored other panethnic formations, such as Asian-American (Espiritu, 1992) and Native American (Cornell, 1988; Nagel, 1995). For a recent assessment of and proposal for a sociology of panethnicity, see Okamoto and Mora (2014). 45 By “noncitizen,” I am primarily referring to undocumented immigrants, but also those living,

113 For both census administrators and local leaders, Latino undocumented immigrants, a major target of consent-building promotions, would only participate if encouraged by reputable and publically recognized leaders. Recent memory and new contingencies, however, made this goal difficult to accomplish.

As narrated by RILCCC promoters, Rhode Island’s immigrant community has in recent years experienced an increasingly inhospitable climate, marked by both the previous governor’s public support for increased surveillance of undocumented workers and repeated (albeit failed) attempts to introduce legislation similar to Arizona’s S.B.

1070. Further complicating matters, the Obama administration did not cease Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids or deportations during enumeration. As Manuel expressed, “We thought that was a setback. [Halting deportations] had been achieved in previous years.” In fact, memory and traumas of ICE raids of local factories were still fresh when census schedules began reaching homes. Within this local context and the broader sociopolitical horizon, the RILCCC assumed the task of lessening fears and cultivating trust in the census among the noncitizen Latino population.

Census promoters described their work as, first and foremost, educational. They understood themselves as dispelling what they described as popular “myths” about the census, such as the idea that census participation increased one’s chances of deportation.

Camilo put the situation in these words: “They think that if they give all of their information, where they live, what their name is, where they work, their names and others, they are going to compromise themselves and that the data will be used to later prosecute them criminally as illegals and take them out of the country.” Leveraging their own

what Menjívar (2006, p. 1004) terms, “liminal legality”—the “gray areas between documented and undocumented.”

114 reputations and influence, promoters responded to these objections by proclaiming participation “safe” and “confidential.” Here it is worthwhile to distinguish, following

Prewitt (2004, 2010), between concerns of “privacy” and “confidentiality.” The former considers census questions as an infringement, while the latter simply expresses concern with how collected data is shared. RILCCC and national leaders approached hesitations to participate among noncitizens as matters of confidentiality, and thus rested their responses on protective legal statutes. Transmitting the language found in official 2010 census pamphlets and fliers, promoters habitually invoked Title 13 of the United States

Code, which stipulates that “no individual or agency (federal, state or local) can have access to any information that will tie the respondent to his or her responses.” I was repeatedly told that census workers—whether enumerators or permanent staff—could not share information under threat of imprisonment and hefty fines. Though these statements are technically true, recent scholarship (e.g. El-Badry & Swanson, 2007; Seltzer &

Anderson, 2001) attest to moments of interagency collaboration, such as the case of

World War II Japanese internment and more recently, post-9/11 surveillance of Muslim and Arab Americans. These historical experiences, which I cannot elaborate in detail here, were neither specifically acknowledged nor publicly engaged.

Notwithstanding, census advocates were quite aware that census results demonstrating a large and growing Latino population could generate a public “backlash.”

RILCCC co-chair Ines expressed her concern by parodying, in her description, an “anti- immigrant” and “anti-Latino” person. Making her voice deeper and raspier, she remarked,

“There are those Latinos. We must have at least 500,000 undocumented in Rhode Island.

They are all in our school system. No wonder Central Falls is crumbling apart. We are

115 educating all these illegals.” Although she insightfully described demographics as a

“double-edged sword,” she and the RILCCC embraced the 2010 census and invested in its success. The possibility of any negative or unintended consequences of census participation, such as growing anxieties with demographic change among some conservative whites and increasing hate crimes against individuals categorized as “Latino” or “Hispanic,” were never entered into the promotional record. In the next chapter, I discuss how national leaders worked to mitigate white backlash to Latino demographic growth.

Here, unlike the motivational rhetorics previously discussed, RILCCC promoters leaned heavily, if not exclusively, on the legalistic arguments of the Census Bureau. This is, at least, somewhat ironic since some noncitizens feared the very government that produced Title 13. If so, then how could these protections be trusted? RILCCC promoters expressed a clear answer to this question. What promoters and the Census Bureau believed would make the difference was the messenger. Rodrigo put it this way: “It is not the same for someone, for example, if I [promote the census], who has had relationships with the community for years, versus someone who has never physically visited it.”

According to both RILCCC promoters and census employees, the Census Bureau had to rely on “trusted voices” because it lacked intimate relationship with the individuals and communities it was seeking to enumerate. Ines similarly maintained that the success of the census depended a great deal on the presence of “well recognized, well respected people in the community.” While people might not “trust” the federal government or census officials, she believed that “if they heard our names being part of it, or if they saw our faces they might feel inclined to participate.” As Marjorie, the youngest member of

116 the RILCCC leadership, summed it up, the role of the group was to “relay the message that the census is safe and important and needs to be done.”

Despite their best intentions, RILCCC promotions were dogged by a contradiction poignantly expressed by a local bishop in the press: “The dilemma was, they were asking me to encourage the immigrants to come forward and be counted, through our parishes, presumably, at the same time we know that the federal government—at least in the last year or so—has been staging these immigration raids” (Ziner, 2009). Though this Bishop was not opposed to the census, a group of local and national religious leaders seized this contradiction and became major “dissenters” of the 2010 census (Latour, 1987). The emergence of this challenge threatened the promotional work of local and national leaders and the promise of demography motivating their efforts.

The Problem of Dissent: Boundary-Work and the Science/Politics Divide

In the summer 2009, RILCCC promoters and census employees staffed census promotional booths at each of the major Latino cultural festivals. Wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Si No Nos Cuentan, No Contamos,” they distributed census materials and tried to familiarize people with the census using mock schedules. As they projected the “importance” of the upcoming count, rumors began to surface about a national boycott of the census. To the chagrin of RILCCC promoters, they eventually learned that a group of local religious leaders, led by a minister in Central Falls, had endorsed the boycott. Adding a twist of irony, the reverend was a board member of

Progreso Latino, an official census “community partner,” whose executive director was an active member of RILCCC. As rumors turned into confirmations, the relatively calm

117 seas of census advocacy became quite turbulent. Soon Latino and immigrant rights activists were pitted against each other over the census, both in Rhode Island and across the country.

Launched roughly at the same time RILCCC was established, the census boycott was initiated and spearheaded by the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Churches

(CONLAMIC), which is headquartered in Washington D.C. CONLAMIC gained national exposure as co-plaintiffs against restrictive immigrant laws and boasts a membership of over 20,000 evangelical churches. Although all of the major national Latino and civic organizations, such as NCLR, LULAC, and NALEO voiced strong opposition,

CONLAMIC’s chairman, Reverend Miguel Rivera justified the boycott as a response to the treatment of undocumented immigrants. In a widely circulated press release, Rivera maintained, “Our church leaders have witnessed misuse of otherwise benign Census population data by state and local public officials in their efforts to pass and enact laws that assist in the perpetration of civil rights violations and abuses against undocumented workers and families.” CONLAMIC and its local representatives demanded the legalization of the country’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants prior to enumeration. As its slogan expressed, “Antes de contar, nos tienen que legalizar,” or in

English, “Before you count, you have to legalize us.”

Boldly, CONLAMIC claimed that it would organize over one million individuals to abstain from enumeration. For this reason, census promoters throughout the country took the boycott seriously. In Providence and Central Falls, the RILCCC immediately denounced the boycott and worked to minimize its potential effects. Although several

RILCCC promoters were also frustrated with stagnation on immigration reform and had

118 long histories advocating for immigrant rights, they challenged the boycott and its leadership in numerous ways. They charged that the boycott played into the hands of anti-immigrant organizations and leaders, some of which vehemently opposed the counting of noncitizens. In a 2009 Providence Journal op-ed, two members of RILCCC publicly questioned the logic of the boycott, charging that it would “hurt the very immigrant communities the ministers are trying to defend.” One of the authors, Rodrigo, a leader of the Immigrants in Action Committee of St. Teresa Church, appeared on a

Guatemalan talk show to urge migrants visiting their homeland to participate in, rather than refuse, the census. Immigration attorney Manuel played a critical role in the

RILCCC response, at one point debating Rev. Rivera at a CONLAMIC national meeting in December 2009. Months later, when we spoke, he still lamented failing to persuade the church leaders to end the boycott. Perhaps the RILCCC’s most successful response was the enrollment of a group of local pro-census religious leaders to counteract the boycotters. These religious figures reiterated messages of confidentiality and described the importance of the census to local communities.

National leaders adopted a similar strategy. The ¡HAGASE CONTAR! organized a national group of evangelical and catholic ministers to publicly endorse the census. In a

December 15, 2009 NALEO press release, Dr. Jesse Miranda, CEO of the National

Hispanic Association of Evangelicals of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership

Conference, described as one of the largest evangelical associations, was quoted endorsing the 2010 census. “Participating will help us secure a better future. The Census results will be the catalyst for financial and community development opportunities that can lift our community into social and economic prosperity.” The press release also

119 announced a NALEO produced promotional poster that featured Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem to participate in a Roman census (see Figure 1). The poster, which was distributed to churches around the country, sparked charges of blasphemy from leaders of the boycott and attracted press coverage (see James, 2009; Morello & O'Keefe,

2009).

Undergirding the debate between census promoters and their dissenters were competing understandings about whether the Census Bureau was a legitimate target for political pressure. Boycotters cited historical collaborations between the Census Bureau and intelligence agencies, as well as recent raids and deportations to advance the claim that as a federal agency institutionally connected to other agencies, it was a rightful political target. To the contrary, RILCCC leaders and other promoters asserted that the census was an inappropriate site for advocacy, especially with respect to the undocumented population and immigration reform. The boycott was often described as

“foolish” and “ridiculous,” and was, in a sense, almost inconceivable to promoters. For instance, Sara, the director of a Rhode Island state agency, shared, “I was shocked, especially coming from clergy. That they would use the community for something so out of place… we cannot hijack the community on things that are not necessarily straightforward.” Manuel similarly expressed, “I just didn’t see how they were helping the immigration cause by boycotting the census… It was almost like, ‘I’m going to hold you ransom. You don’t get any information from me unless you give me comprehensive immigration reform.’” NALEO executive director, Arturo Vargas told the Washington

Post, “The irony is that the enemies of immigration reform, this is what they want”

(Sherman, 2009).

120 Figure 1: NALEO Census Promotional Poster, December 2009

In response to boycotters and the suspicions their positions raised, the RILCCC depicted the census as a scientific enterprise, conducted by the Census Bureau, a relatively autonomous state agency. RILCCC co-chair Andrea, for example, described the census as a “really huge operation. It is an operation that includes so many ends within the state government, but at the same time, they have to get themselves independent from the government.” Expressing sympathy for census administrators,

Andrea distinguished between the “bureaucracy” and “government,” suggesting that only the latter involved politics. Along these lines, several RILCCC members described the

121 Census Bureau as nonpartisan, scientific and neutral. Ramon, for instance, “People who work for and volunteer for them understand that they are numbers gathering, scientific. It is not tied to any political party or affiliation.” Though he acknowledged that the wider community might never become totally convinced, it was nonetheless the job of the

RILCCC to “let people know that the census’ only job is to collect data.”

A story told by Gabriela is particularly telling in this regard. She shared that she once engaged a senior staff member at the Census Bureau’s regional office in a conversation about local frustrations with the race and ethnicity questions. As she told it, her supervisor told her, “you know Gabriela, the bottom line is the Census Bureau counts people. They don’t care…” From this, Gabriela concluded, though with some ambivalence, “They don’t care how you feel. They just, I guess, that is what it is…just a data place.” Noticeably, the inclusion of questions of race and ethnicity were attributed to political pressures outside of the Census Bureau. This perspective, of course, downplays or ignores the historically documented investment of census administrators to collection of “racial knowledge” (Goldberg, 1997; Hattam, 2007; Hochschild & Powell, 2008;

Nobles, 2000). In combating dissenters, the RILCCC embraced the Census Bureau’s own depiction and cast it as nonpolitical, and the 2010 census as merely a “head count.”

Both promoters and dissenters, therefore, took part in what Thomas Gieryn (1983) conceptualizes as “boundary-work,” namely, the activity of differentiating and demarcating “science” from non-science. Emphasizing science, RILCCC promoters sought to challenge the idea that the Census Bureau was merely an arm of the Federal government. They maintained that it was a relatively detached entity, disconnected from

122 other state agencies.46 Local and national Latino leaders confronted individuals and communities for whom these discursive differentiations were either unrecognized or could not be trusted. Only further exacerbating things, the expanded use of deportation under the Obama administration made it especially difficult to maintain the symbolic boundaries erected by the Census Bureau and its supporters. Even if people could be convinced that the census was merely a data-gathering initiative, state practices against undocumented immigrants reinforced fears and added fuel to boycotters. While census promoters believed the boycott negatively impacted census participation, they took solace and pride in the fact that, besides its original organizers, no other local leaders publicly joined the boycott. Ultimately for these census promoters, proof of their triumph over the boycott was found in the census numbers, which by mid-April 2010 revealed an increase in mail-in response rates over the prior census, particularly in Central Falls, where the rate was 57% in contrast to 48% in 2000. This increase was reported on in a Providence

Journal article by journalist Karen Lee Ziner (2010). In the article, Census Bureau regional partnership coordinator Anna-Maria Garcia was quoted stating: “It speaks to the effort of the community and all the people who stood up and said the census is important.

And you get to see the benefit of that.”

46 The boundary-work of Latino advocates represents an intriguing disaggregation of what Philip Abrams (1988) termed the “state-idea.” For Abrams, the hegemonic state-idea falsely imagines the “state” as a coherent, monolithic, and unified actor. This conception reified the complex and contentious activity and institutional dynamics, which he labeled the “state-system.” This empirical case offers an example of a situation in which the unified “state-idea” became an impediment to the objectives of a specific state agency within the “state-system,” in this case the Census Bureau.

123 Conclusion

Just days shy of Christmas Day, nearly ten months after the bumpy travels of the census schedule began, the Census Bureau delivered the 2010 census apportionment data to U.S. President Barack Obama. By February 2011, the Census Bureau commenced distribution of census results to state governments in time for redistricting negotiations.

Data eventually entered public life through coverage in the press. As I examine in the next chapter, public discourse became engrossed in the topic of “demographic change” and the statistically documented and projected growth of the “Latino demographic.”

National Latino leaders seized on the results of the census. In an interview, Mi Familia

Vota’s co-founder Eliseo Medina reflected on the post-census conversation that arose

Washington, D.C. policy circles. Full of confidence in the future, his account expressed how census data helped the Latino population increase its political recognition.

People were saying, holy moly, this is the future. Because when you start saying, now you’re talking about 50 and a half million people, that’s a significant number of people. And then when you look that it’s a young community, it tells you and gives you a glimpse of what the future America is going to look like. And I think for the first time people are actually focused that this is an extremely significant part of our population. So I think it’d really put it on the map in no uncertain way.

Thus, almost immediately, the complicated and politically mediated production of census data receded into the background, effectively “black-boxed” (Latour, 1987; Whitley,

1970). That is, now gone from the public eye was the vast labor that made possible the orchestration of the 2010 census. Instead, the circulation of census data came to the front, as the media and racial projects began to invest data with affective charges.

This chapter provides a rare account of the role of Latina and Latino stakeholders in the production of data on the Latino population. Motivated by a desire for

124 demographic data, Latino advocates throughout the country—from national civil rights organizations to local groups like the RILCCC—invested in consent-building for the

2010 census. Census data, particularly since the Civil Rights era, has been central to racial projects seeking to address inequality and political marginalization. In order to realize the ostensible promise of demographic growth, advocates urged Latinos and

Latinas to participate in the census and make themselves, in a sense, statistically visible.

This message involved convincing the public of the “importance” of the census, minimizing frustrations with ethnic and racial categories, fostering trust in the government, and even neutralizing organized opposition to the census. As scholars have argued, censuses do not simply confirm what already exists; rather they construct and constitute populations. This chapter shows that this process of construction counts on the active investment of certain racial projects, such as national Latino advocacy. In this way,

Latino advocates actively contributed to the construction of the “Latino demographic.” I contend that subsequent debates and controversies about the Latino “sleeping giant,” such as during the 2012 U.S. presidential election, and the broader anxieties and anticipations fueled by the so-called “Browning of America” cannot be fully understood apart from the statistical edifice produced by the 2010 census. This edifice itself, as I have shown, was assembled, at least in part, by national and local Latino leaders motivated by a desire for demographic data and its promise of political recognition.

125

CHAPTER FOUR

A Darker Horizon: Media Discourse and White Demographobia

For many Americans, the scariest phrase in the English language is “changing demographics.” — Ruben Navarrette (2014)

Introduction

As the lights dimmed, Univision’s award winning video, “The New American

Reality,” began to play.47 Silence quickly came over the Mandalay Bay convention hall in scorching Las Vegas. Dedicated to the “biggest game changer since the baby boom,” it was fittingly projected onto an imposing nearly two-story high screen. The video opens with a white-colored puzzle piece—symbolizing the “Latino demographic”—accented against a warm blue background and accompanied by a soothing Flamenco guitar. This and the next several shots produce a sentence: “Without me America would not GROW

47 Univision contracted the New York-based creative agencies Goodpenny and Parlor to produce “The New American Reality.” According to the project’s creative director, Robb Chant, the video’s aim was “to simply, and graphically, show how important and significant the Latino population is in the U.S. market.” The video later won a gold award at the 2011 NAMIC Excellence in Multicultural Marketing Awards. View here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQnhuj11zgI.

126 as fast or be as STRONG.” The sentence’s final word, fully capitalized, spans the exact width of a map of the continental United States, composed entirely of interlocking puzzle pieces. The remainder of this three-minute video visually and textually fastens data about the demographic vitality of the Latino population to ideas affirming its bicultural roots and economic benefit to the country. It ends, simply, with the words, “I am here.”

The video was met with enthusiastic applause from the over one thousand attendees of the 2012 annual conference of the National Council of La Raza. The event’s host, Maria Salinas, the co-anchor of Noticiero Univision, the country’s most watched

Spanish language news show, remarked, “I love that video, I’ve seen it a couple of times, and each and every time, it makes me feel so proud to be a Mexican American in this country.”48 Salinas continued the program by introducing Ivelisse Estrada, a Senior Vice

President for Univision, the conference’s lead media sponsor. Estrada began her remarks with a question. “Are we or are we not the new American reality?” Without allowing for a second of reflection to pass, she leaned into the microphone, lightly clutching it in her right hand, and declared, “Yes we are!”

Her answer, endorsed by applause, resonated not only with the demographic optimism expressed by Univision’s video, but also by national Latino advocacy organizations and leaders. These political actors have maintained that Latino population growth represents a force of national rejuvenation, a bright spot on an otherwise difficult period. Such articulations do not arise within a discursive and sociopolitical vacuum;

48 Several respondents I interviewed also expressed positive reactions to the video. For instance, a voter registration coordinator in Florida shared that she cried when she first watched it. She felt the video recognized her dual identity. “It’s really empowering. It’s about damn time that we get recognized as these type of people, like the in-betweeners, and we should be proud of that. I mean, I’m proud of it now. I wasn’t before because I just always thought I had to be so Puerto Rican or I had to be so American.”

127 rather they emerge in relation and response to what some have termed “demographobia.”

In his recent work, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, cultural critic Jeff Chang

(2014) credited the term to Stanford anthropologist H. Samy Alim, who defined demographobia as “the irrational fear of changing demographics.”49 In this chapter, I focus on the current production and management of white demographobia, a phenomenon that can be understood, in this context, as a statistical effect of racial projects.

Demographobia reigns heavily over contemporary public life and politics. For national Latino civil rights organizations, in particular, it is perceived as a major problem.

As such, it exercises influence over the ways in which advocates publicly represent and engage Latino population growth. Setting discursive and political parameters on their temporal politics of the future, they are mindful not to instigate white anxieties when attempting to capitalize on population growth. One advocate expressed this predicament as follows:

In terms of a broad strategy, it’s a matter of how to navigate the line of being sufficiently respected so that you have the space to, at least, have a fair shot at policy and practice that’s going to equitably serve the community, but at the same time resisting and avoiding being perceived or exacerbating the existing perception [of] this community.

49 To my knowledge, it appears that the origins of the term “demographobia” lie outside of the United States. The term seems to have been first used by the former Israeli diplomat, Yoram Ettinger, as the title of a 2006 commentary. In the commentary, Ettinger argued against Israeli territorial concessions to Palestinians, charging that these decisions are rooted in a “demographic fatalism” he contends is unsupported by population trends. From a critical perspective, scholar Shourideh Molavi (2013) recently described the centrality of racialized demographobia to the Israeli state. “In addition to control over the land, demographic control is also a cornerstone to the Zionist project. The Zionist settler-colonial paradigm dictates that the 'right' people—namely Jews—must settle the land and that this population must constitute a majority of the total population of the state to maintain its Jewish character. A recurring concern for Israeli national security officials, and a stimulant of periodic geographic and topographic changes to the state, demographobia, or the pathological fear of and concern around non-Jewish (i.e. Palestinian-Arab) births, has shaped Israel's public debate” (p. 138-139).

128 In contrast to some sociological research, I consider demographobia neither an automatic nor the inevitable outgrowth of change.50 Rather, it is an affective reaction rooted in what Herbert Blumer (1958) famously theorized as a “sense of group position.”

Rather than a defect of individuals, Blumer claimed that racial prejudice was the logical outcome of the collective process by which dominant racial groups “form images of themselves and of others.” (p. 3). He argued that these images and their attendant feelings of superiority, essential difference, proprietorship, and threat were generated in the

“public arena,” particularly through the work of spokespersons and “special interests”— in essence what could be considered “racial projects.” Indeed, demographobia has been primed to a crucial extent by racial projects that have dramatized demographic change as the demise of “Western civilization.”

Intellectual spokespersons of “white reaction” (Omi and Winant 1986), such as

Pat Buchanan, John Tanton, Peter Brimelow, and others have described the “new

American reality” as a nightmare, born of a demographic “invasion” that threatens the country’s “Anglo-Protestant culture” (Huntington, 2004a). In a 2011 essay, published shortly after the release of his alarmist Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to

2025, Buchanan laments the (then) latest demographic projections, “The Census Bureau has now fixed at 2041 the year when whites become a minority in a country where the

Founding Fathers had restricted citizenship to ‘free white persons’ of ‘good moral

50 Therefore, I depart from the conclusion that group size or growth have objective effects on social relations (c.f. Blalock, 1967; Quillian, 1995). Lawrence Bobo (1999, p. 450) has argued that, although scholars have identified Herbert Blumer’s (1958) “sense of group position” as a chief inspiration, they have “mistakenly reduce[d] the theory to a purely structural-level claim of objective threat.” Even scholars more attentive to perceptions of threat have often stressed structural factors that shape how group size is interpreted. For example, Alba et al. (2005) focus on the impact of residential context on demographic “innumeracy,” defined as the distorted translation of perceptions of group size into “numerical terms” (p. 902).

129 character.’” After fulminating about affirmative action, immigration, the loss of competitiveness on the global market due to the test scores of blacks and Latinos,

Buchanan concludes his premature autopsy of (white) “America” with these words:

Those who hold the white race responsible for the mortal sins of mankind—slavery, racism, imperialism, genocide—may welcome its departure from history. Those who believe that the civilization that came out of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome and London to be the crowning achievement of mankind will mourn its passing.

Historically, the media has been a major producer and disseminator of doomsday narratives and other understandings about demographic processes. In fact, it has helped to constitute “demographic change” as a public affair, object of debate and concern, in short, a “social problem.” As Blumer (1971, p. 298) wrote in a now classic work, social problems “are fundamentally products of a process of collective definition instead of existing independently as a set of objective social arrangements with an intrinsic makeup.”51 However, unlike the past, contemporary media coverage of demographic change largely refrains from explicitly racist language and images of non-white populations. As Ashley Doane (2007, p. 162) has noted, “In the face of the institutionalization of civil rights and the ascension of a more egalitarian discourse, it was now no longer possible to defend the status quo by using direct assertions of white supremacy.” Race scholars have tracked the emergence of new styles and modes of talking about race and racism, such as colorblind ideologies, which as Eduardo Bonilla-

Silva (2006, p. 53) has argued, are “slippery, apparently contradictory, and often subtle.”52

51 Sociologists of the media have examined the construction of “social problems” (e.g., Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, & Sasson, 1992; Jacobs, 1996; Orcutt & Turner, 1993). 52 This is not to suggest that openly racist images have been entirely banished from the public sphere. To the contrary, racist depictions of President Obama, such as the one that appeared in

130 A question arises: how does the media contribute to the generation of white anxiety about the future without using openly racist language or imagery? In the first half of this chapter, I argue that the media—whether intentionally or not—fuels demographobia by affectively charging demographic statistics and projections. I contend that the capacity of demographic statistics to provoke anxiety or anticipation is crucially dependent on the cultural or discursive charge given to statistics.53 When charged—that is, imbued with racial significance—demographic statistics acquire the ability to spark feelings of threat or desire. While individual media products (e.g., articles or infographics) can charge demographic knowledge, it is only in concatenation with other products, actors, and practices that charges can shape public discourse and understandings (Glaeser, 2011). Furthermore, I situate this process of charging statistics within a sociohistorical context marked by entrenched racial boundaries (i.e. the racial order). This context, however, is not a static backdrop, but rather can be reshaped and potentially transformed by statistical charges generated by the media and other racial projects.

The New York Post, indicate racist imagery and language persists. The point, however, is that most public discourse today communicates race and racism through coded language. To use Stuart Hall’s (1995, p. 20) terminology, “overt racism” has been largely replaced by “inferential racism,” those “apparently naturalised representations of events and situations relating to race, whether "factual" or "fictional," which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions” (emphasis in original). 53 Charge, as in an electrical charge, has been profitably used as a metaphor to explain the concept “affect.” For instance, the philosopher William Connolly (2011, p. 150) describes affect, “in its most elementary human mode” as “an electrical-chemical charge that jolts or nudges you toward positive or negative action before it reaches the threshold of feeling or awareness.” Another example, more familiar to the sociological tradition (and under exploited by Affect theory), is Durkheim’s (1961) discussion of “collective effervesce”—“The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation” (p. 217).

131 In the pages that follow, I present two interlinked methods by which the press has charged demographic statistics produced by the 2010 census.54 I term the first method

“frames of gravity” to describe the ways in which the media colored census data with characterizations that dramatized change in ways that induce fear in change. The second method—“racial juxtaposition”—refers to the ubiquitous practice of positioning “whites” in contrast to “minorities.” Particularly prevalent is the juxtaposition between Latino demographic “ascendancy” and white demographic “decline.” I argue that racial juxtapositions contribute to a polarized conception of demographic change, which essentially posits a zero-sum game between demographic winners and losers. As I show, the media employs textual and visual representations to charge demographic knowledge.

With respect to the latter, visualizations of demographic change include both traditional mediums, such as maps, charts, photography, and cartoons, and new online technologies that encourage users to ‘play’ with demographic futures.

The second half of the chapter shifts attention to national Latino advocacy organizations. Mindful of white anxieties, these actors are far from passive consumers of demographic discourses. Instead, they have actively worked to reframe (or recharge)

Latino population growth as a benefit rather than as a threat to the country. These efforts at redrawing racial boundaries, however, have relied heavily on what anthropologist

Arlene Dávila (2008) has described as “Latino Spin,” namely essentialist portrayals of this population as hyper-Americans, i.e. possessors of an almost engrained ethic of hard

54 This analysis relies primarily, although not exclusively, on national newspapers (e.g., The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post), influential political or social commentary magazines (e.g., The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, National Journal, The New Yorker, Newsweek, and Time), political blogs (e.g., The Huffington Post, Mic.com, National Review Online, Politico.com, and Salon), and major media outlets (e.g., ABC News, the Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, National Public Radio, and Reuters).

132 work and entrepreneurship, patriotic loyalty, and traditional commitments to family and religion.

The chapter begins, appropriately, with the Census Bureau’s official release of national statistics on the country’s racial and ethnic composition based on the 2010 census. After this narration, I delve into media representations and the media work of national Latino spokespersons.

Making the Census Public

Before cameras and journalists hungry for sound bites about the 2010 census,

Nicholas Jones, the affable Chief of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Racial Statistics Branch, unveiled the major findings on race and Hispanic origin. “These data provide insights into our nation’s changing racial and ethnic diversity and illustrate the new portrait of

America.” On this day, March 24, 2011, the Census Bureau hosted a press briefing at the

National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The briefing intentionally coincided with the final release of redistricting data. Jones was the third and final scheduled speaker. Before him spoke Robert Groves, then director of the Census Bureau, who discussed the quality of 2010 census data and announced the new geographic center of the population, and

Marc Perry, Chief of the Population Distribution Branch, who presented on the growth, decline, and geographic distribution of the overall national population.

Jones organized his presentation on ethnoracial statistics into three parts. As customary in Census Bureau presentations, he began with a review of the questions and categories behind the data. He reminded those present that the Census Bureau follows the

“guidance” of the Office of Management and Business (OMB), which sets the “standards

133 for federal data collection on race and ethnicity.”55 As it turns out, OMB’s guidance not only determines the “official categories” (Starr 1992), but also their official meaning. In particular, as Jones put it, OMB defines race and Hispanic origin as “separate and distinct concepts.” Even though the ethnic and racial categories are largely prescribed, Jones further noted that the data was based on self-identification—a relatively recent departure from enumerator ascription throughout much of U.S. history (M. Anderson, 1988;

Lieberson, 1993).

Assisted by numerous graphs and charts, the second part of his presentation delved into the new data. At this point, his focus was on the relative size of each of the major ethnic and racial populations, and some of the major multiracial combinations.

Following the order of the census schedule, Jones began by reporting on the “Hispanic population,” which was visually represented by the color orange:

In 2000, the Hispanic population numbered 35.3 million, and Hispanics made up 13 percent of the total United States population. The Hispanic population crossed the 50 million mark in 2010. And people of Hispanic origin now clearly represent the second largest group in the country, with 16 percent of the total U.S. population.

It is worth noting here that Jones’ description of the size of the Hispanic population differed from those given for other populations. Raw population size (rather than just percentages) and comparative data from 2000 were only given for the Hispanic population. Moreover, the statistics were charged through the use of phrases such as

“crossed the 50 million mark” and “clearly represent the second largest group.”

55 As described in Chapter Two, these standards are inscribed in Directive 15, which was originally adopted in 1977 and revised most recently in 1997. For historical background, see Hattam (2005); Morning and Sabbagh (2005); Mora (2014b). For a discussion of the uptake of OMB’s classification system beyond the federal government, see Bliss (2013).

134 This description was followed by the findings of the “race” question.56 The White population, Jones highlighted, was the largest, accounting for over 72.4% of the national population, while the Black, Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Native

Hawaiian and Pacific Island populations respectively accounted for 12.6%, 4.8%, .9%, and .2% of the total population in 2010. Another 6.2% of census-takers, mostly those who self-identified as Hispanic origin, selected “some other race,” and another 2.9% selected more than one race.

Over the next few slides, Jones illustrated several different ways of presenting the data. These included, among others, placing race and Hispanic origin side-by-side, contrasting monoracial and multiracial results, and creating a “minority population” composed of all persons that did not identify as “non-Hispanic white alone.” He also presented the data for the under 18 population.

In 2010, 23.1 percent of kids were Hispanic, 14 percent were black non- Hispanic, 4.3 percent were Asian non-Hispanic, and 3.8 percent were two or more races, non-Hispanic. This insight, from looking at kids in the United States, provides some interesting information for us to look at, in terms of what the future may bring in future generations.

It was at this point that Jones shifted from reporting on the population size to reporting on population trends by race and ethnicity, the third and final part of his presentation. This move required comparison between 2010 and 2000, and had the effect of pointing towards the future. In tandem with his slides, he indicated that although every major population grew, rates of growth differed. For instance, “minority” populations grew by

29% while “non-Hispanic whites alone” grew by 1.2%. As the press would later seize upon, the majority of this “minority” growth was attributable to two populations, the

Latino population and Asian population. Jones noted that “different patterns of growth

56 See Chapter Three for more on the Hispanic origin and Race questions in the 2010 census.

135 for kids are even more striking.” While notable, there were declines among non-Hispanic white, blacks, and American Indian and Alaska Native. In contrast, he stated there was

“tremendous growth in non-Hispanic Asian kids, Hispanic kids, and especially in kids who reported more than one race.”

To further illustrate “national trends,” Jones concluded his presentation with a series of county level maps. Represented with the color dark blue, one of the maps showed that 348 (out of over 3,000) counties were at least half “minority” in 2010. Other maps revealed the regional concentration of the “minority” population and the percent of change since the last census. This cascade of maps and graphs were neatly summarized by Robert Groves after Jones’ presentation:

Our country is becoming racially and ethnically more diverse over time, as is clear in the growth rates of the minority populations. Geographically, there are a lot of areas of the country growing in number that have large minority proportions. And we expect this to continue.

As Groves would admit at the briefing, many of the findings of the 2010 census were not outright surprising. They had, he noted, been “foretold” by the American Community

Survey. In fact, in December 2010, just months earlier, the Census Bureau released population estimates, including projections about the ethnic and racial composition of the country. Many of the estimates would be later confirmed by the census. As with the official census data, the press seized upon the ethnic and racial projections, producing headlines and visualizations similar to those I will describe below.

Although just occupying one-third of the briefing, the Q&A session was dominated by questions and commentary on ethnoracial demographics. As with the presentations of Census Bureau officials, journalists expressed a statistical realism about the existence of ethnoracial populations (Desrosières, 2001). For instance, Sabrina

136 Tavernise from The New York Times asked via phone-in what the size of the “minority” population was in 2000. Charlie Erickson, the founder of Hispanic Link News Service, asked for clarification on the percentage and size of the Latino population. Other journalists asked for a population distribution among Latino subgroups and inquired whether the population of Puerto Rico was included the total Hispanic count. Still others asked about the undercount and requested a distribution by race and ethnicity.

Some questions more directly previewed the issues that have predominated media discourse in the past several years. Michael Martínez from CNN, for instance, asked:

“What accounts for the Hispanic population growth? Birth rates or immigration or both?

And how much does illegal immigration account for this growth?” Former Huffington

Post writer, Lucia Graves shifted the discussion towards the political implications of

Latino demographic growth for the Republican Party, to which Groves insisted the

Census Bureau was nonpartisan. “We provide information to the society for everyone, any political stripe… We leave it to you and others to speculate on the implications for politics.” Another series of questions, posed by an individual that did not identify as part of the media, but who seemed to have served as a census enumerator, concerned the question of racial identity, and specifically the confusion felt by many self-identifying

Latinos.

Now public, the census data presented at the briefing and reported in the Census

Bureau’s report, “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010,” entered into circulation, carried by the media, blogs, and visualizations of all sorts. As these data traveled, they were integrated into and empowered by cultural narratives about the country’s dramatic transformation into a “majority-minority” country.

137

Frames of Gravity

Within hours of the Census Bureau briefing, the first wave of media coverage began to surface online. Many waves have come since, as new reports, statistics, and projections have entered the public sphere—each wave re-saturating public life with statistically informed narratives about ethnoracial demographic change. My analysis reveals that one of the ways the media has charged demographic statistics is by articulating the gravity of change. These articulations have been expressed in various ways, but most consistently through the frames of magnitude, speed, and reach. These frames were succinctly captured in a 2011 article printed in The Economist, entitled “The

Census: Minority Report”:

The latest release of data from last year's decennial census confirms that whites still constitute a slender majority, 54%, of those under 18, and a larger one, 64%, of the population as a whole. But America's transformation into a much browner, more suburban, more southern and western place is rapid and relentless.

Drawing a contrast between white demographics and “minority” demographics—an issue

I will discuss more in-depth below—this quote characterizes demographic change as

“rapid” and “relentless,” leading to a phenotypically darker, less rural America that is no longer concentrated in traditional population centers. For analytic purposes, I devote the remainder of this section to each frame of gravity.

Journalists often communicate demographic change by stressing the scale or magnitude of trends. Consider, for example, the headlines, USA Today’s (2011) “Census tracks 20 years of sweeping change” and The Wall Street Journal’s (2011) “Latinos Fuel

Growth in Decade.” Other examples include how demographic change has been variously dramatized as a “historic shift,” “transformation,” and even “revolution.” Moreover,

138 certain populations have been described as having “skyrocketed,” “soared,” “swelled,”

“surged,” and “jumped” over the past decade, while others have “plummeted” and

“shrunken” over the same period.

As these characterizations indicate, articulations of magnitude were closely connected to claims about rapidity, which was the most temporally oriented of the frames.

For example, in his reflection on the 2010 census, which he described as a “postcard from the future,” Ronald Brownstein (2011), the editorial director of The National Journal, wrote, “the new America is arriving faster than expected.” Along with numerous articles and op-eds, Brownstein focused on the potential implications of demographic change for the 2012 election. In USA Today, journalists Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg (2011) similarly noted, “It was always predicted that we would be diverse, but it’s happened faster than anyone predicted.” In addition, the use of the adjectives “slow” and “fast” to characterize rates of growth has been commonplace. For instance, The Economist (2011) article quoted above informed readers that “minorities” are “growing particularly fast in previously lily-white places such as Iowa and New Hampshire.” Emphasis was also frequently given to the “fastest” growing populations. In The New York Times, journalist

Susan Saulny (2011) described multiracial youth as “fastest growing youth group in the country.” In 2013, Fox News Latino published an article on Asian-American growth with the headline: “Fastest-Growing Minority Group In 2013? Not Latinos; Drop In

Immigration May Be Cause.” As with the other frames, the rapidity of change has been communicated through quotes from experts, such as Cheryl Russell of New Strategist

Publication, who was quoted in a USA Today article cited above stating, “for the first time, [Hispanics] increased faster than blacks and whites in the South.”

139 Interwoven with such claims about the rapidity of demographic change were descriptions about its territorial reach. This emphasis on geographical indicators was evident in the first article published by The New York Times following Census Bureau briefing. In the article, “Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend,” journalists Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff (2011) affirmed that “the share of black population growth that has occurred in the South over the past decade—the highest since 1910, before the Great Migration of blacks to the North—has upended some long- held assumptions.” The claim that the country is getting more urban and more diverse was ubiquitous in media discourse. In The Wall Street Journal, journalist Conor

Dougherty (2011a), for instance, wrote, “Americans continued to abandon the nation’s heartland over the past decade, moving into metropolitan areas that have grown less white and less segregated, the 2010 Census showed.”

Articulations of magnitude, rapidity, and reach are laden with implicit and sometimes explicit ideas about the country’s shifting complexion—a proxy, in many respects, for race. Indeed, these frames communicate a sense of momentum towards, above all, a darker future. This momentum, for instance, is widely indexed by the phrase,

“the changing face of America” (or some subset of the country, i.e. city or region). The phrase adorned, for example, the headline of The National Geographic’s much-discussed feature on the multiracial population. Carrying the subtitle, “We’ve become a country where race is no longer so black or white,” the article was accompanied by 25 close-up portraits of multiracial individuals by renowned photographer, Martin Schoeller. In the article, author Lise Funderburg (2013) ponders on the intrigue of such photographs, concluding, “We look and wonder because what we see—and our curiosity—speaks

140 volumes about our country’s past, its present, and the promise and peril of its future.”

Discussion of the “growing” multiracial population as the future population has been widespread. Other articles positioned “Hispanics” as the quintessentially multiracial population. Another Associated Press article (2013) captured this idea with the headline:

“Fast growth of Latino population blurs traditional U.S. racial lines.”

Media coverage of the 2010 census has articulated that the country is undergoing significant transformation, brought upon by the massive, rapid, and expansive growth of ethnoracial “minorities.” In this brief section, my objective was not to present an exhaustive review of the media but to map some of the major ways that the press communicated the gravity of demographic change. It is clear that, while it is often affirmed that statistics can speak for themselves, they never do. Media uptake of 2010 census data did not simply report on the data and provide the public with facts and figures.

Rather, as it circulated statistics, the media infused them with dramatizing connotations and placed them into cultural narratives about the darker future of the country. This method of charging statistics—central to the production of statistical effects such as white demographobia—was carried out in tandem with another method.

Racial Juxtapositions

Media frames about the gravity of demographic change—such as those described above—were anchored around a series of “racial juxtapositions,” by which I mean the practice of textually and visually contrasting ethnoracial populations. As a form of drawing symbolic boundaries, racial juxtapositions encourage polarized understandings of demographic change, made up of demographic winners and losers. With varying degrees of explicitness, media discourse has been populated with the routine

141 juxtaposition of “whites” and “minorities” (i.e. nonwhites). In some local contexts, other juxtapositions were used but the prevailing national story typically took this structure.57

The press has given particular emphasis to the “Latino demographic,” which have been portrayed as the driving force of non-white population growth. Indeed, my analysis of racial juxtapositions reveals a consistent and pervasive contrast between Latino demographic growth and white demographic decline—the latter of which has received substantial attention in the years since the publication of data from the 2010 census.

As illustrated in the previous section, the publication of 2010 census data was followed by news proclamations about the “fast” growth and “historic” size of the

“Latino demographic.” As widely circulated in the press, the census revealed that this population grew to over 50.5 million and accounted for nearly 60% of growth since the previous census. For example, CNN journalists Michael Martínez (2011), who attended the Census Bureau briefing discussed above, and his co-author David Ariosto wrote:

The most significant trend, however, appeared to be the nation’s new count of 50.5 million Latinos, whose massive expansion accounted for more than half of the nation’s overall growth of 27.3 million people, to a new overall U.S. population of 308.7 million, officials said.

Other news sources ran headlines, such as: “Census: Hispanics now comprise 1 in 6

Americans” (CBS News, 2011) and “Hispanic population tops 50 million in U.S.” (Los

Angeles Times, 2011). These news articles did not describe Latino growth in isolation from other populations; rather Latino demographics were related and compared to other populations. Different from mainstream media coverage following the 2000 census, where the major contrast was between Latinos and African Americans (I. Rodríguez,

57 For example, the media has often juxtaposed “blacks” and “Latinos” in major urban centers.

142 2007), coverage following the 2010 census most frequently juxtaposed Latinos with the white population.

For example, Los Angeles Times journalist Stephen Ceasar (2011) followed a review of Latino-specific data with information on other groups. “The non-Hispanic population grew at a slower pace in the last decade, at about 5%. Within that population, those who reported their race as only white grew by 1%.” The Wall Street Journal’s

Sudeep Reddy (2011) similarly declared:

The Census Bureau has estimated that the non-Hispanic white population would drop to 50.8% of the total population by 2040—then drop to 46.3% by 2050. This demographic transformation—Latinos now account for about one in four people under age 18—holds the potential to shift the political dynamics across the country.

In this article, as with many others, the juxtaposition of these ethnoracial populations emphasized the political or electoral implications demographic trends. Another example comes from an NPR segment from April 2011 titled, “Hispanics Become America’s New

Majority Minority.” During the segment, guest speaker Ruy Teixeira, a demographer from the liberal Center for American Progress, commented on the impact of Latino population growth:

You know, obviously, it's going to change the culture of those places, just the sheer physical look of them, of course, in terms of diversity. But as we know also, that's going to shift the politics in these states and metropolitan areas in very significant ways because, essentially, you're replacing older white voters with younger Hispanic voters in these - in terms of the makeup of these states. And that's just going to make a big difference to their politics.

For Teixeira, the growth of the Latino population will “obviously” change locales and, as he emphasizes, the political landscape. Implicit in this quote, but rendered explicit

143 throughout the 2012 election, is the contrast between Latino Democrats and white

Republicans.

Even the satirical newspaper The Onion (2014) chimed in on the racial juxtaposition of Latinos and whites with its brief, “Hispanics Expected To Become

Majority Of U.S. Population By Middle Of Father-In-Law’s Rant.” Accompanied with a photograph of an old crotchety white man wearing a plain white polo shirt, the blurb reads:

WASHINGTON—According to a Census Bureau report released Thursday, Hispanics are now projected to make up the majority of the U.S. populace by the middle of local father-in-law Jerry Stambaugh’s rant. “We found that Latinos are on track to outnumber whites in this country as early as when Jerry starts in on how they’re taking all the jobs and how there are too many of them already,” said Census Bureau associate director for field operations William H. Hatcher Jr., adding that, if the pace of immigration accelerates, the historic demographic shift may even occur by the time the 58-year-old father-in-law’s tirade reveals Hispanics breed like rabbits and drain the country’s valuable resources. “Our research suggests that, further down the road, when he angrily launches into how things were a hell of a lot different when he was growing up, the Latino population may reach upwards of 55 or even 60 percent of the nation’s population. Even our most conservative estimates posit a Hispanic majority before Stambaugh declares how those people should just go back to their own country.” Experts further projected that no real Americans would be left in the country by the end of Stambaugh’s epithet- filled ramblings.

In its own way, The Onion plays with the anchoring racial juxtaposition of demographic change: white and Latino demographics. The piece not only satirizes Census Bureau projections and racist stereotypes of Latino hyper-fertility and foreignness, it also foregrounds white demographobia and anxieties about the future.

In the wake of the 2010 census, a cascade of coverage of white demographic decline has accompanied discussion of Latino growth. In each of the past four years, the media has fixated on a particular manifestation of white decline. The first of these was

144 coverage about the loss of majority status and the coming “majority-minority” future. For instance, the US News (2011) produced a handy list of the seven takeaways from the

2010 census. The fourth one carried the sub-header, “Becoming More Diverse (…and particularly, more Hispanic).” It read as follows:

The white, non-Hispanic segment of the population is steadily shrinking, and has dropped from 69.1 percent in 2000 to 63.7 percent in 2010. The Census Bureau predicts that, by 2050, white people will only make up 46.3 percent of the population. The burgeoning Hispanic population is one major reason for this projected shift—the Hispanic populace grew a staggering 43.1 percent from 2000 into 2010, and is expected to make up 30 percent of the population in 2050, up from its current share of 16 percent (US News 2011).

Evocative words such as “steadily shrinking,” “burgeoning,” and “staggering” accented the prose, which was followed by a link to a slide showing the cities with the largest

“Hispanic” population. Other examples include The Wall Street Journal’s (2011b), “The

U.S. Moves Closer to Minority Majority” and the Huffington Post’s (2012) “Census:

White Population Will Lose Majority in the U.S. by 2043.” Articulations of white decline, however, were not restricted to the long-term future.

The following year, in 2012, the media seized upon the findings of a Census

Bureau report on birth rates. “After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the

Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United

States,” read the opening paragraph of The New York Times (2012) article, “Whites

Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.” Sabrina Tavernise, the author of the article, described the event as a major milestone:

Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts

145 to restrict immigration.

It is notable here, as an example of frames of gravity, how the author placed demographic change on the same level of significance as events like the Civil War or the institution of slavery.

In USA Today (2012), the new census data was described as “a sign of how swiftly the USA is becoming a nation of younger minorities and older whites.”

Journalists Conor Dougherty and Miriam Jordan (2012) of The Wall Street Journal characterized the situation as a “demographic tipping point.” Similarly, CNN reported,

“White kids will no longer be a majority in just a few years.” As shown below, diverse visuals have been used to illustrate the decline white births, including video segments, such as ABC News’ (2011) coverage of the changing “face” of the Gerber baby. Unlike projections forecasting a “majority-minority” country by mid-century, public discourse on growth of nonwhite babies communicates demographic change as a pressing issue (or problem) of the present rather than of the future.

Other demographic “milestones” of white decline have occupied media discourse on demographic change. For instance, in 2013, population estimates released by the

Census Bureau and analyzed by the Brookings Institute led to articles on the death rates of whites, such as the Wire.com (2013) article, “White people problems: Census Finds more whites are dying than being born.” In June of that year, Washington Post journalists

Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik (2013) wrote:

More white people died in the United States last year than were born, a surprising slump coming more than a decade before the Census Bureau says that the ranks of white Americans will likely drop with every passing year… Although the percentage is small, several demographers said they are not aware of another time in U.S. history—not even during the

146 Depression or wars—when there was such shrinkage among the dominant racial group. No other group showed a similar falloff.

Similar to the above New York Times article, this Washington Post article draws on historical events (i.e., the Great Depression) to communicate the profound gravity of demographic trends. It further charges census statistics by noting that only whites experienced a “shrinkage”; other groups instead experienced growth and will experience growth into the future.

More recently, in 2014, media coverage took up new data that revealed that public schools are now nationally “majority-minority” or as put by The Economist (2014)

“American schools: The new white minority.” This news traveled across the Atlantic and appeared, for instance, in the BBC article (2014), “US schools to have non-white majority.” The topic was also explored extensively by the Pew Research Center, which analyzed Department of Education projections on the ethnic and racial composition of schools.

The racial juxtaposition of “whites” and “minorities” has pervaded media discourse in the wake of the 2010 census. Coupled with frames of gravity—magnitude, speed, and reach—coverage has frequently contrasted white demographic decline with

Latino demographic growth. As narrated above, the public has received a steady diet of

“milestones” of white demographic loss, offering evidence for one way in which media discourse has contributed to growing white anxieties about a “majority-minority” future.

In something of an open letter to white America, syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette

(2014) attempted to assuage white anxieties, but noted that “living in America at this moment means having to endure one terrifying story after another.”

147 These stories, however, were not only populated with narratives and characterizations; they were also full of images and graphics of diverse kinds.

Demographic visualizations in the press substantively reinforced or supplemented textual accounts, and contributed to the charging of census data. Therefore, to understand the broad contours and content of media discourse requires more than a textual analysis. It demands attention to the visualization of demographic change.

Demographic Visualizations

Media coverage of the findings of the 2010 census has included various kinds of visualization. Among the most prominent are photographs, cartoons, infographics, and maps. The messages inscribed and communicated by these distinct mediums provide further insight into media discourses of demographic change. Similar to textual narratives, these visualizations do not transparently and objectively communicate ideas about demographic change; rather they register and ramify ideas and assumptions about race and the future of the ethnoracial order. In this section, I will briefly review several examples of the media visualization of demographic change.

Photographs

Photographs have long been objects of interest for media scholars (Andén-

Papadopoulos, 2008; Gamson et al., 1992; Gürsel, 2012; Parry, 2011). Researchers concerned with media messaging and framing have argued that “photographs to a certain extent ‘speak’ a language of their own” (Andén-Papadopoulos, 2008, p. 8). With respect to the topic at hand, photographs that accompany media coverage following the 2010 census provide unique vistas into prevailing ideas of race and demographic change. As

148 Figure 2: Reuters, March 24, 2011 the next several examples illustrate, photographs were rich with meaning, often conveying messages beyond those in the text. In fact, they often communicate in a more explicit fashion longstanding representations and stereotypical tropes of Latinos and other nonwhite populations. For example, consider the photograph used in Reuter’s (2011) online article, “U.S. Hispanic Population tops 50 million,” which briefly lists the major findings of the 2010 census (see Figure 2). Located in between the headline and body of the article, the photograph shows a dense crowd of people hoisting dozens of Mexican flags at a protest or festival. Although there are several U.S. flags in the crowd, the eye is drawn towards an extremely large Mexican flag found at the top center of the photograph.

The caption notifies the reader that the photograph was taken during a “planned protest” in San Diego in 2006, five years prior to this article. While the rationale for selecting this

149 photograph is unknown to me, I should mention that the article was not about protests,

Mexican nationality, or San Diego. Presumably, the photograph was taken during a pro- immigrant rights protest, and perhaps appeared in media coverage about immigrant rights activism in the mid-2000s. However, its presence in Reuter’s article on the 2010 census stokes fears, whether intentionally or not, by discussing census data alongside all too familiar images of Mexicans and other Latinos as an inassimilable and un-American mob that will overrun the U.S. (Chavez 2008).

Photographs did not accompany all articles on demographic change; in fact, charts and maps were far more routine visualizations. There is one exception, however. Media coverage on the decrease of white births and “majority-minority” child population has frequently featured photographs. For instance, The Washington Post article, “Census:

Minority babies are now majority in United States,” included a photograph (see Figure 3) of a young toddler wearing a pink Dora the Explorer58 t-shirt standing beside her pregnant mother (Morello & Mellnik, 2012). While the photograph shows her pregnant stomach, the mother’s face is not shown. The photo caption reads, “Venus Perez, 3, stands in line with her mother Criseira Perez as she waits to check in for an appointment

May 16 at Mary’s Center in Washington. A new census report show a drop in white (non-

Hispanic) births to below 50 percent.” As with other photographs, the caption makes explicit the juxtaposition at play.

58 Dora the Explorer is a popular animated cartoon series on the Nickelodeon cable channel that follows the adventures of a Latina girl, “Dora,” and her monkey companion. It is the first mainstream animated children’s television show with a Latina protagonist. For scholarly analyses of the show, see Guidotti-Hernández (2007) and Masi de Casanova (2007).

150 Figure 3: The Washington Post, May 17, 2012

A similar image appears in the NBC News article, “Census: White majority in

U.S. gone by 2043” (Kayne, 2013). The photograph (see Figure 4) shows a baby boy held by his mother in a colorful children’s room. The mother stares directly to the right as the baby stares into the camera. These two photographs, and others like them, express ideas of hyper-fertility, which have been central to pejorative depictions of Mexican and Latina women for decades (Chavez, 2008; Gutiérrez, 2008). Noticeably, the mothers in both of these photographs are seen indirectly, with the face of one mother cropped out and the other features a profile shot.

Media coverage on the diversification of the student population was also regularly represented through photographs with non-white students. For example, the USA Today

151 Figure 4: NBC News, June 13, 2013

(2014) article, “White students to no longer be majority at school,” included a photograph of Latino and Latina kindergarteners. The photograph (see Figure 5) is given a long caption:

This photo taken July 21, 2014 shows teacher Jane Cornell working with young students on their storytelling skills during summer school at Mary D. Lang Kindergarten Center in Kennett Square, Pa. For the first time ever U.S. public schools are projected this fall to have more minority students enrolled than white, a shift largely fueled by growth in the numbers of Hispanic children. White students are still expected to be the largest racial group in the public schools this year at 49.8 percent, but according to the National Center for Education Statistics, minority students, when added together, will now make up the majority.

Coupled with the photograph, the caption juxtaposes white and Latinos students. The latter are depicted as fueling the historic majority-minority public school population.

Interestingly, white students are described as still the “largest racial group” in public

152 Figure 5: USA Today, August 9, 2014 schools, but are entirely absent from the photograph. In each of these photographs, the focus on non-white children communicates a darker future.

Cartoons

In the wake of the 2010 census, cartoonists have produced numerous renderings of the topic of demographic change. As with other visualizations, cartoons also engage in racial juxtaposition. Cartoons have a long history in the press, and have played a key role in the constitution of social problems. As Greenberg (2002, p. 182) states, “Political cartoons offer newsreaders condensed claims or mini-narratives about putative ‘problem’ conditions and draw upon, and reinforce, taken-for-granted meanings of the world.”

However, as some of the examples below suggest, cartoons can also problematize prevailing representations in the media, either through humor or satire.

153 Figure 6: “Minority Majority,” Mike Luckovich, 2013

In 2013, cartoonist Mike Luckovich published the cartoon, “Minority Majority,” in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (see Figure 6). The cartoon shows an anxious older white man outside of his home being addressed by three kids, presumably African

American, Asian-America, and Latino. The African American kid assures the white man,

“We want you to know we have nothing against minorities...” Notably, it is three non- white kids, together, who declare the white man a “minority” and express he has nothing to fear. The implicit backdrop is the historical treatment of previously “minority” populations by the formerly “majority” white population. To the left of the children, there is a newsstand and a headline that reads, “U.S. WHITE POPULATION DECLINING.”

What is interesting about this cartoon is its comment on press coverage of demographic

154 Figure 7: “White Babies Outnumbered,” Matt Bors, 2012 change. The cartoon is ambivalent about whether the source of the anxiety for the old white man is the presence of three nonwhite children or the media representation of white decline.

The second example similarly comments on press coverage, particularly the attention given to white/nonwhite birth rates (see Figure 7). Drawn by the nationally syndicated cartoonist, Matt Bors (2012), the cartoon features two Native Americans, a younger man smoking a cigarette and an older man, presumably the younger man’s grandfather, sitting outside of a trailer home somewhere in the Southwest. The young man is dressed in a grey t-shirt and black pants, perhaps suggesting greater integration in

“mainstream” society,” while the grandfather’s attire seems more traditional. On the radio, they hear the pronouncement: “Non-white babies now outnumber white babies in

155 Figure 8: Latino Demographics, El Machete Illustrated, 2011

America for the first time.” Upon hearing this, the grandfather points at his grandson and retorts, “Second.” He seems to want to communicate to his grandson that whites were not always the “majority.” This cartoon follows a rhetorical pattern of several cartoons on the topic of undocumented immigration. These cartoons suggest that European settlers once arrived without “papers” and therefore their descendants do not have the right to exclude new immigrants.

156 Figure 9: Lalo Alcaraz, 2013

The third example is from Eric Garcia of El Machete Illustrated, and it represents a more explicit attempt to satirize dominant discourses. The 2011 cartoon, colored in black and white, shows Uncle Sam and President Obama having a heated exchange over a map of the United States (see Figure 8). The map only has “Latinos” in the legend and the header reads “Population growth.” Shaded parts of the map (visualized as an expanding blob overtaking the country) include the Southwest, Florida, and parts of the

Midwest and Northeast. Commenting on the love-hate relationship with Latinos, specifically Mexicans, both figures are eating tacos. Uncle Sam charges, “If we don’t do something these people are going to be the majority someday!” A distressed President

157 Obama, smoking a cigarette right hand, retorts, “Don’t look at me! I’ve deported more of them in my first two years than W. Bush did in his two terms.” An ashtray full of cigarette butts can be seen, suggesting a long conversation. The cartoon makes an explicit connection between the practice of deportation and anxieties about the Latino growth.

The national syndicated cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz drew the final cartoon I will present. This cartoon, printed in 2013, shows two frightened and helpless dinosaurs watching a meteor come crashing down (see Figure 9). Trailing the meteor is the word

“DEMOGRAPHICS” and overlaying the larger dinosaur is the word, “GOP.” The message makes a clear analogy between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the extinction of the Republican Party. In making this message, this cartoon communicates the assumption that demographic change is destiny, an objective phenomena with the power to radically transform social and political reality.

Infographics

Like photographs and cartoons, “numerical pictures are not clear glass windows.

They color and refract what comes through” (Espeland & Stevens, 2008, p. 425).

However, unlike those other mediums, statistical visualizations are often understood as non-ideological and “transparent,” beneficiaries of the historically accrued “trust in numbers” (Porter, 1996). The scholarly literature on statistics or censuses has devoted little attention to the graphical visualization of statistics. One exception is Mara

Loveman’s (2014) recent work on census making in Latin America. Reviewing the tables produced by census administrators, Loveman notes, “The tendency to list ‘white’ first in statistical tables reflected the unstated but pervasive assumption that whites naturally belonged at the top of the racial hierarchy” (p.181). Loveman argues that the presentation

158 Figure 10: “The New America,” The Economist, March 31, 2011 of statistics was linked to efforts to project particular ideas about the demographic composition and future of Latin American nations. “The implicit reinforcement of racial ideologies through the organization of statistical tables helped to bolster, in turn, the explicit arguments about racial demographic improvement as the path of national progress” (p. 186). The media infographics and charts reviewed below could be similarly read as articulating and supporting specific ideas and assumptions about demographic change, and specifically the juxtaposition of “whites” vis-à-vis other populations. The graphical visualization of demographic change took various forms, from bar graphs to pie charts to maps. A few examples should suffice to illustrate some of the visual styles employed in the press. Consider, The Economist infographic titled, “The new America,”

159 Figure 11: “Hispanics in the U.S.,” The Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2011 which illustrates the percent of ethnoracial demographic change between 2000 and 2010

(see Figure 10). The bar graph provides information for the major ethnoracial groups— white, black, Asian, and Hispanic—as well as an aggregate “minority” category, and contrasts data for “All ages” and “under 18 year olds.” The graph further provides the total population size for each ethnoracial category in 2010. At the most basic level, the graph endorses the idea of bounded racial groups, as it does not include a multiracial category. Notably, the inclusion of the “minority” category offers a visualization of the racial juxtaposition of “white” and “nonwhite” populations. The next example foregrounds the Latino population, but more specifically juxtaposes this population with the “white” population.

The Wall Street Journal produced the second infographic (see Figure 11). It is more simplistic than the previous one, owing to the fact that it presents less data and makes more use of the textual representation of statistics. The design is split in half by a dotted line. The left panel presents three statistics in a font size larger than even the infographic’s headline. As shown above, these statistics were ubiquitous in media

160 Figure 12: “Minority Report,” The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2012 coverage. The right panel includes two graphs about retirement accounts—the subject of the accompanying article—that juxtapose whites and Latinos.

Another Wall Street Journal infographic, entitled “Minority Report,” provides a more complex visualization of racial juxtaposition (see Figure 12). The description of the infographic reads, “For the first time, traditional ‘minorities’ in the U.S. have surpassed white non-Hispanics in the number of newborn births. A look at the changing U.S.” The

161 infographic uses several kinds visualization. Two “choropleth” maps59 are used to illustrate and contrast the “overall” and “under five” percentage of “minority” population across the country. On the top right hand side there is a time-series graph that illustrates the decline of “non-Hispanic whites” between 2000 and 2011. The graph highlights that in 2011 this population dipped under 50%. Below this panel is a bar graph detailing the size and percentage of each of the major ethnoracial populations. As with The Economist graphic discussed above, no space is given to the multiracial population. Although there is no uniform color scheme across the infographics produced in the wake of the 2010 census, the use of the color red to designate “minority” growth registers alarm.

While this brief review of examples of infographics is far from exhaustive, these graphs illustrate some of the ways demographic data was displayed. Some infographics foreground specific statistics, while others relied on colors and diverse forms of visual representation (e.g., maps, bar graphs) to express, on the whole, that the country is undergoing a substantial change. As with textual narratives and the other visualizations reviewed here, infographics also engaged in the racial juxtaposition of ethnoracial populations, and specifically communicated white demographic decline. Even where the

“future” was not explicitly invoked, notions of a darker tomorrow were implicit in these visual representations. Frames gravity, such as momentum and reach, were also inscribed

59 The choropleth map is one of the most common forms of visual representation in public circulation. This map “is made from pre-existent bounded areas over which a value is extended ("quantity in area"). This single value is assigned to an enumeration unit and is derived by taking a space (enumeration unit) and counting up all the items in that space and then making an average to represent the variation. This average is then extended over the entire space” (Crampton, 2009, p. 28). Essentially, these maps represent statistical data by shading a particular geographic region. Scholars have identified numerous limitations to this visualization, but its use is widespread (Tufte, 2001).

162 in the infographics through color schemes, the size of the statistics, and the arrangement of data.

Interactive Technologies

The demographic visualizations reviewed above incite readers to imagine demographic change as a polarized phenomenon, anchored principally in the contrast between “whites” and “Latinos” or “nonwhites.” These visualizations, however, are not simply objects of interpretation. Reflecting on the London Underground Map that assists

Londoners and tourists alike in using public transportation, Janet Vertesi (2008, p. 26) argues, “representations are more than passive illustrations or things-to-think-with, they are also things-to-act-with—and interact with—in subsequent access of the represented object.” Objects, however, possess different “affordances” (J. J. Gibson, 1979; see also

McDonnell, 2011; Stark & Paravel, 2008). Take, for example, photographic representations of demographic change. While a classroom entirely composed of Black and Latino children can be interpreted in variety of ways, current technologies do not allow readers to modify the photograph. Most infographics, although not all, are frozen; their elements cannot be moved. In contrast, major media outlets have also produced online demographic visualizations that readers can ‘play’ with. The kinds of play afforded by such visualizations differed widely, and also varied in terms of how much range users were given. Notwithstanding, these new technologies facilitated modes of

“material participation” (Marres, 2012) with demographic futures.60

60 Drawing on the pragmatic tradition and STS, Marres (2012) argues that increasingly participation in public affairs, such as environmental issues, has been displaced to private, individual practices, such as installing energy saving light bulbs. These forms of participation are material because they involve interactions between humans and devices of varying sorts.

163 Maps were the most common form of online interactive visualizations, produced by The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, among others. In recent decades, maps and map-making has received attention from scholars concerned with relationship between power and knowledge (C. W. Anderson &

Kreiss, 2013; Crampton, 2009; Harley, 1989; Urla, 1993). For instance, Benedict

Anderson (2006 [1983]) famously described the role of modern maps in the emergence of nationalism, particularly within colonial contexts. Anderson’s discussion is especially apropos due to its recognition of the relationship between the census and the map. For

Anderson and other scholars, the task of analysis is to treat maps as rich cultural artifacts rather than as transparent representations of statistical or geographical matters. Indeed, as geographer J.B. Harley (1989, p. 3) claims, this scholarship has focused on “metaphor and rhetoric in maps where previously scholars had found only measurement and topography.” Yet, as I discuss below, new technologies have also made possible new ways of interacting with maps and demographic futures. In the remainder of this section,

I will focus on new interactive maps.

Similar to print maps, online ones offered aerial views of the continental (and some cases non-contiguous) United States. One of the unique affordances of online maps is the ability to zoom into the map. This allows users to explore the demographic composition of their immediate locales or places they have visited. Take, for instance, the map produced by The Washington Post (see Figure 13). Users can insert the address or zip code for any place of interest. Integrating data from the past three censuses (1990,

2000, 2010), one can track in this map the percent of demographic change, ethnoracial population size, and family type, both at the county and state level. Despite these options,

164 Figure 13: “Mapping the Census,” The Washington Post, July 21, 2011 the map’s descriptive paragraph invokes the racial juxtaposition described in the previous section: “In Virginia, the Hispanic population is skyrocketing and the white population is dwindling.”

Interactive maps differ with respect to how explicit and how much of the future can be engaged. While The Washington Post map illustrated demographic change over the past several decades, it does not visualize the future, which remains implicit. In contrast, consider the USA Today map, entitled “Mapping the USA’s Diversity, 1960-

2060” (see Figure 14). Not only does it go further back in time than The Washington Post map, but it also goes forty years into the future, spanning a century of demographic change. Adopting a simpler color scheme—dark to light blues—the map allows users to

165 Figure 14: “Mapping the USA’s Diversity, USA Today, October 21, 2011 observe the diversification of the country as they move across the timeline positioned right underneath the map. On the right hand side there are two bar graphs connected to the timeline. The top panel breaks down rate of change by “white,” “black,” and “other” and second shows the “Hispanic share” of the national population. Each of these elements—the map, bar graphs, and timeline—gives visual representation to USA

Today’s “Diversity Index.” Elsewhere, USA Today defines this index as “the chance [on a scale of 100] that two people chosen randomly from an area will be different by race and ethnicity” (Overberg 2014). According to USA Today, the country’s diversity index has increased from 20 in 1960 to 55 in 2010. It projects a diversity index of 71 by 2060.

The degree of interactivity was greatest in the online magazine, the New Scientist, which boasts a readership of “3 million intelligent, highly engaged readers.” In 2012, just

166 Figure 15: “The changing face of America,” New Scientist, September 9, 2012 prior to the 2012 election, the New Scientist featured an article, entitled “America 2050:

Population Change Threatens the Dream.” The article opens: “Our exclusive analysis reveals huge inequalities between young Hispanics and aging whites—only by working together today can the US protect its future.” Of particular concern for author Peter

Aldhous is disparities in wealth and education between Hispanics and Whites. Midway through the article, a bolded line states: “See our interactive graphic: “The changing face of America” (see Figure 15).

The graphic is interactive indeed; viewers are instructed to “use play controls…to watch [the demographic] transition unfold, or jump into the future by selecting one of the listed years.” It features an age pyramid that emphasizes the familiar juxtaposition between “whites” and “Hispanics.” Although Black and Asian population is included, the article and the description of the graph focus almost exclusively on the former populations. Users can select ten-year intervals between 2010 and 2050 or press play

167 buttons to automate the movement over time. In addition, you can watch the future unfold along two scenarios—constant and high levels of immigration.

New technologies, such as those reviewed here, enable readers to interact and even ‘play’ with data (Perkins, 2009). As with other visualizations, interactive maps and graphs contribute to the reification of race and belief in the existence of discrete bounded

“races.” While I have not studied the actual experience of using these technologies, my analysis illustrates that these visualizations charge census statistics by providing a platform for participating in practices of racial juxtaposition.

Up to this point, this chapter has focused on media discourses and visualizations of demographic change. The preceding analysis offers an account of the broader discursive context in which Latino advocates inhabit, and to some extent, push against. In the next section, I shift attention towards the media work of national Latino advocacy organizations and examine their efforts to shape and intervene in public representations of Latino population growth.

Latino Boon and the Management of White Anxiety

Far from passive consumers of media discourses, national Latino advocacy groups have been actively involved in “classificatory struggles” (Bourdieu, 1991) over the meaning of Latino population growth, and by extension, demographic change. In ways similar to media representations, these political actors have also employed frames of gravity in their post-census discourse. However, unlike the media, they rarely engage in racial juxtaposition. Cautious not to enflame demographic anxieties, they tend to avoid explicit references or comparisons to other populations. They have instead sought to mitigate white demographobia by framing Latino demographics as a benefit rather than a

168 threat to the country. This effort represents a political attempt to redraw racial boundaries in the public sphere.

As active participants in the orchestration of the 2010 census, national Latino leaders eagerly awaited the publication of the data. Immediately following its release, they mobilized these new data to intervene in the highly contentious, partisan politics of redistricting. Anticipating the results of the census, NALEO executive director Arturo

Vargas (2011) expressed in a Huffington Post op-ed, “Latino growth across the country is expected to help certain states maintain their number of congressional seats, or minimize their losses. In other words, it is a win-win for the Latino community specifically and for the country as a whole.” In most cases, these expectations were confirmed months later by census data, although translating growth into congressional representation has been far from straightforward.61 As I discuss in greater detail in the next chapter, census data has also been used to advance their electoral and legislative agendas. For the moment, consider one example, the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda’s (2012) Hispanic

Public Policy Agenda, which received some media attention as it was released just prior

61 For example, a NALEO press release (among many produced as the Census Bureau made redistricting data available) asserted, “Florida gained two additional congressional seats as a result of its population growth. Latinos now represent 22% of the state’s residents and are the second-largest population group.” Similar kinds of claims were also made about several other states, including Texas, which added four congressional seats. Despite this, organizations like the Mexican Legal Defense and Education Fund, Latino Justice, and other Latino advocacy groups have struggled to increase the number of “Latino-majority” districts. With legal representation from MALDEF, for example, LULAC and several other organizations, such as the Texas chapter of the NAACP, entered a lawsuit against the Texas legislature for diluting the “voting strength of minority voters of Texas in violation of Sections 2 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act” (LULAC Plaintiff-Intervenor’s Complaint). In this particular case, this effort was ultimately unsuccessful, as the U.S. Supreme Court allowed revised maps produced by the Republican controlled legislature. For civil rights advocates, the challenges have become even greater in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision to strike down key aspects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

169 to the Democratic and Republican national conventions.62 Nearly 40 pages long, the report details NHLA’s major legislative priorities, such as economic development, health, civil rights, and immigration. Virtually each section was peppered with claims about

Latino population growth. The report’s most explicit statement of growth appeared in its opening message, written by Hector Sánchez, the current chair of the NHLA:

The Latino population consists of over 50 million individuals spanning the United States, Puerto Rico, and other territories. In the last ten years, Latinos represented more than half of the total population growth. This explosive demographic change signals a shift in community attitudes, political representation, and electoral power. Indeed, the Census estimates that by 2050 Latinos will comprise nearly one third of the entire nation’s population (National Hispanic Leadership Agenda 2012, p. 4).

As with media coverage, Sánchez does not merely cite census statistics; he charges them with characterizations, such as “spanning” and “explosive,” while invoking a dramatically different future. Directed primarily at Washington, D.C. legislators and political elites, the report aimed to move legislators to act in accordance with the demographic reality disclosed by the census. Yet, this is not the only audience of concern for these political actors. They also seek to shape public perceptions of the Latino population and its putative growth. Indeed, as we learned from Antonio Gramsci (1971), political struggle is also waged on the terrain of civil society—a chief conduit of which is the media.

National Latino leaders have actively mobilized census data in their press releases, quotes given to journalists, and op-eds. NALEO’s press releases, for instance, have described Latino population growth across the country as “key,” “pivotal,” “exceptional,” and “significant.” The day after the Census Bureau press briefing described above

62 NHLA representatives participated in both conventions, and presented their legislative priorities at the Democratic National Convention. Storms forced a cancellation of their presentation at the Republican National Convention.

170 NALEO circulated a press release with the headline: “Latinos Play Major Role in

Nation’s Growth.” Within its first two paragraphs, the press release summoned the statistics ubiquitously taken as the major findings of the 2010 census, such as the percentage of overall population growth accounted for by the Latino demographic (59%), the rate of Latino growth since the 2000 census (43%), the size of the population in 2010

(50.5 million), and the Latino percentage of the total population (16%). Taking stock of this growth, NALEO’s president Sylvia García was quoted in the press release: “The growth of the Latino community offers a great opportunity to strengthen our nation...these numbers show we are and will be an integral part of this great nation.”

These figures and articulations of growth have also been commonplace in public events attended by the press. During the 2012 electoral season, Voto Latino, for example, produced a slogan, “We are 50 Million Strong,” which was inscribed into business cards, online graphics, and banners. I first encountered the slogan at Voto Latino’s first annual

“Power Summit” in Los Angeles, mounted on 10 foot-tall vertical banners that have travelled throughout the country with Voto Latino organizers. Census statistics, in these cases, offered these leaders a sense of pride and potential, which they were eager to communicate with the public.

Articulations of growth and its association with emergent political power, however, were frequently nested within a broader set of narratives and understandings.

These meanings were advanced to challenge—often explicitly—dominant representations of Latinos as foreign and threatening. To gain insight into these rhetorical frames, I begin with a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Janet Murguía, the president and CEO of the

National Council of La Raza. The op-ed, published in April 2011, less than a month after

171 the Census Bureau press briefing described above, featured the headline, “Hispanic

Values are American Values.” This headline was supplemented with the following subtitle: “One out of every four children in America is Latino, and 92% of those children are U.S. citizens.”

Murguía began her commentary noting the “buzz” regarding the findings of the census, but she added that it only “confirms what the Latino community has long known:

The Hispanic population in this country has grown dramatically over the last decade.”

Indexing longstanding efforts by national Latino groups to claim national significance

(Mora 2014), Murguía claimed that Latinos have “now become an integral part of our national community.” However, she quickly followed this point by stressing the historical presence of this population. “It is important to remember that Latinos have always been a vibrant part of American history and culture.” As an example, she offered, “The first

Medal of Honor given to a Hispanic solider was during the Civil War.” This particular example does more than give historical grounding; it also communicates U.S. patriotism.

These assertions raise a question of audience. To whom was Murguía speaking?

Who were these messages of national significance but historical connection meant to move? “Like others who brought demographic change to America, our presence has stirred anxiety among some of our fellow Americans. A century ago, people expressed the same concerns about waves of immigrants from Italy, Ireland and Eastern Europe.”

These lines suggest that the audience is “fellow Americans,” specifically those that are anxious about demographic change. No concrete description of “fellow Americans” were given—although given the polarized nature of public discourse on demographic change—it is hard to imagine that “whites” were not key targets of her comments. Next,

172 consider the move to render contemporary anxieties with Latino growth commensurate with those once directed at migrants from Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe.

“As the number of Latinos grows, our fellow Americans need to overcome the natural human anxiety that accompanies change and look for common ground,” she continued. For Murguía then, at least publicly, anxiety about demographic change is

“natural.” “It’s time for people to stop thinking about Latinos as ‘foreigners,’ ‘aliens,’ or

‘others’ and start thinking of us as their fellow workers, classmates, colleagues, worshipers, neighbors, friends, and family.” Regardless of the social issue at hand, whether education or the economy, this population must be part of the conversation.

Murguía concluded her op-ed by insisting that similar to other “demographic shifts” in the past, Latinos will “benefit America.” As she affirmed, “Latinos reinforce traditional

American values of faith, family and love of country. And they will reinvigorate the economy with a much-needed influx of younger workers committed to hard work, entrepreneurship and service to our nation.”

In less than five hundred words, Murguía expressed, more explicitly than most, many of the major threads of the post-census discourse of national Latino leaders. While not entirely new, and certainly party to what scholars and social commentators have described as the “politics of respectability,” recent years have witnessed increasingly aggressive attempts by these political actors to cast this population in a “positive” public light—what anthropologist Arlene Dávila has critically described as “Latin Spin.”

Murguía was far from unique in couching Latinos as hyper-American. For instance, in a 2011 TEDx talk in Washington Heights, New York, Maria Teresa Kumar, the young president of Voto Latino, stated, “we exemplify the true America.” On what

173 basis does she make this claim? While Kumar described Latinos as young, hardworking, and entrepreneurial, she suggested that their most important attribute was their apparent belief in America. Where others have faltered, Latinos have not abandoned faith.

We have a lot people right now, a lot naysayers that America is on decline. I actually say that the Latino community is the silver lining of where we are going in the future. Because we’re young, we’re workaholics, and we believe in America when everybody else doesn’t. Despite our economic difficulties and educational needs, we profoundly believe in what America is and the possibility, that immigrant belief. It is because of that, that America’s best days actually lie ahead.

As I will discuss below, Kumar’s statements simultaneously laid claim to an “American” identity and asserted that this population represents a force of national rejuvenation. Her comments, as with those of others, expressed a vision of the future, a tomorrow in which

Latinos will play a pivotal but not threatening role. Arianna Huffington embraced this position in her address at NCLR’s 2012 conference: “50 million Hispanic Americans are a central part of moving us towards a more perfect union.” Syndicated columnist Ruben

Navarrette made a similar sentiment:

Where some Americans look at changing population figures and see calamity, I only see opportunity. This country continues to draw to its shores the determined and the daring, who come here—to the land of second chances—to reinvent themselves and, in the process, wind up remaking and revitalizing the country. That's not a threat to America. Quite the contrary. It's the very essence of America. Bring on the change.

Among national Latino leaders, in particular, such articulations were routinely bolstered by statistics revealing that that the majority of Latinos are U.S. citizens (and that those who are not, nonetheless, have strong affinities and loyalties to the country). In several interviews with NCLR advocates on their public relations work following the

2010 census, I was told that data on citizenship status were crucial to challenging media

174 representations. For instance, NCLR director of communications Miguel Molina, expressed:

These 50 million aren’t undocumented immigrants. They aren’t going to turn this country Spanish speaking. They aren’t going to do all these things they’re accused of. And we took that data…and create[d] messages that, you know, 70% of Latinos are U.S citizens.

Molina’s colleague, Ingrid Ramos of NCLR spearheaded the crafting of NCLR’s post- census messages. She recalled creating “message maps” with other NCLR staff in order to generate ideas that could “communicate who we are as Latinos and break a lot of these general types and change the media perceptions.” She feared that if NCLR was not proactive, “people [were] going to be like, ‘oh my god, there’s such a huge Latino population. It’s terrible; the country is going to fall apart.’” One of the “positive” stories they developed centered on the youthfulness of the Latino population, and specifically, how it would replenish the U.S. labor force. But, as Ingrid reminded me, this population was not only young; it was also overwhelmingly composed of U.S. citizens. In her words,

“93% of all Latinos under 18 are born in the United States.” This figure and the point it was mobilized to communicate were repeated, for example, in several documents produced by NCLR, including a factsheet on the growth of the Latino electorate discussed in the next chapter.

As already intimated, national Latino advocates did not simply describe Latinos as “American,” they also, and perhaps more importantly, wanted to communicate that

Latinos were good for America, and still further that the future of the country was tied to the future of this population. As declared in the opening lines of a 2011 NCLR brief:

Latinos have been part of the American fabric since the birth of the country and will play an essential role in the progress of the nation…The expansion of this vibrant population in major cities, suburbs, and rural

175 areas is a boon, as Hispanics increasingly contribute in essential ways to the economic, social, and political life of the country and to its future well- being.

The NHLA’s policy report discussed above made a similar point: “The Latino community exists as an integrated and interconnected part of this nation. Latino priorities are, by definition, the priorities of the United States as a whole.” Even President Obama, speaking at the 2011 NCLR annual conference, told the audience, “Your country needs you. Our American family will only be as strong as our growing Latino community.”

These words—unlike his words on immigration reform—were greeted with strong applause.63

At its core, these articulations attempted to communicate that Latino population growth is collectively advantageous, and therefore should not be a source of worry or concern. Rather than engage in racial juxtaposition, they sought to convince that Latino demographics have a universal benefit. This assertion was also commonplace among liberal researchers and advocates outside of the national Latino advocacy network. For instance, Sam Fulwood, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP), shared his thoughts with me in an interview. Sam Fulwood, a former journalist, has written extensively on issues of race, inequality, and politics, and is one of the founders

63 President Obama has not returned to speak at NCLR since this speech. Since then, Vice- President Joe Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Michelle Obama have spoken in his stead. During his 2011 keynote address, several audience members challenged President Obama’s refusal to issue an executive order ceasing deportation. Playing with the Cesar Chávez quote, which the 2008 Obama campaign appropriated, the crowd began to repeatedly chant “Yes you can!” In response to the chants, he responded, “Believe me—believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you. Not just on immigration reform. But that's not how— that's not how our system works.” Yet despite these words, on two occasions, public pressure and political expediency seem to have moved Obama to undertake executive action on immigration. These actions were the executive order, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), issued in summer 2012 and its expansion in November 2014.

176 of CAP’s Progress 2050, an initiative seeking to educate the public about the benefits of demographic change. Speaking about public reactions to population trends, he commented:

It is not a threat… Diversity makes us stronger and we should embrace it rather than trying to reverse it. We cannot stop the demographic forces that are let loose on this country. What we want to do is understand it, keep people from being afraid and then develop policies that work to the advantage of everybody.

Fulwood’s remarks were echoed by several national Latino advocates. In our interview,

Ingrid Ramos, for example, expressed that her goal was to “assuage the fears that people have around changing race and ethnicity issues.” She distinguished between “anxiety” and “animosity,” describing the latter as “people that are hostile and hateful.” Ingrid noted that NCLR’s efforts were directed at those with anxiety, which she described an

“emotion that people want to resolve.” Other advocates similarly noted their focus on those they might be able to convince.

As seen in Murguía’s op-ed, demographic anxieties were often described as

“natural” responses to change. Speaking in NALEO’s Los Angeles headquarters, Arturo

Vargas, for instance, asserted this as we discussed public perceptions of the Latino population. NCLR’s Director of Civic Engagement, Clarissa Martínez, a highly respected advocate on the Hill, told me, “it’s okay to feel anxious about change; we all do. It’s a human thing.” Martinez believes that the U.S. public sphere is missing a space of dialogue for the “majority of Americans,” who according to Martínez are not “nativists.”

As evidence, she cited recent opinion polls indicating growing public support for immigration reform.

177 To connect with non-nativists, some Latino advocates believed it necessary to avoid resting too heavily on statistics, as figures could easily spark anxieties and antagonisms. LULAC’s Brent Wilkes, for example, stressed, “you don’t want to just hit them with the demographics because…you want to show that real humanity and make that human connection.” For him, the most effective way to minimize apprehensions was to anchor discussions in everyday life, such as by encouraging the public to consider their

Latino neighbors and coworkers. As Martínez described it, the goal is show the Latino population as part of, rather than “separate” from the rest of the country. “Latinos work shoulder to shoulder with members of sister communities…same as any other worker they work hand-in-hand with.” Drawing lines of similarity, she noted, “issues that

Latinos are concerned about…are very similar to equally situated folks in the American community.” In her view, a distinctly “Latino agenda” does not exist, although she recognized that, “as with any community, people look more intensely at one issue or another based on their situation and their perspective.”

Demographobia hangs over national Latino advocacy, establishing parameters about how and in what ways demographic change and Latino population growth can be discussed in public. These political actors, as detailed above, express profound awareness about the ways in which the population they speak on behalf has been imagined in the media and the wider social imagination. Their comments reveal anxiousness about the anxieties of whites, although it should be noted that “whites” are rarely explicitly mentioned. Instead, Latino advocates prefer to speak about the “public” or “fellow

Americans”—another sign of the contemporary dominance of colorblind and post-racial ideologies in public discourse. Even when implicit, it is clear that these actors seek to

178 challenge prevailing assumptions about Latino foreignness and dangerousness. As I have reviewed in this section, they have challenged these assumptions by presenting Latinos as

“American” and essential to the future strength of the country.

This depiction is anchored in a set of representations that anthropologist Arlene

Dávila has critically characterized as “Latino Spin.” For Dávila, a centerpiece of Latino

Spin is framing Latinos as the quintessence of “Americanness”; or in her words, “more

American than ‘the Americans’” (p. 3). In her analysis, she describes how political parties, marketing agencies, and advocacy groups have increasingly cast “Latinos as bearers of the same values revered and promoted by America.” Dávila cautions against the uncritical endorsement of seemingly “positive” representations of Latinos as hardworking, socially conservative, religious, and patriotic. She contends this move limits

“values to conservative ‘model minority’ qualities, while reinforcing hierarchies of belonging by legitimating who is the rightful owner of whatever is regarded as

‘American’” (p. 61). It is impossible to know if this discursive strategy—fraught with the embrace of narrow and essentialist representations—will ultimately diffuse demographic anxieties. But what seems certain is that national Latino advocacy will continue to mobilize these ideas and data in hopes of minimizing white demographobia.

Conclusion

The publication of data from the 2010 census provoked debate and discussion about demographic change. As illustrated here, censuses have not only powerfully shaped individual and group identities through practices of categorization (Loveman, 2014;

Nobles, 2000; C. E. Rodriguez, 2000), but also popular understandings about the country’s past, present, and future ethnoracial composition. Seized upon by the press,

179 census data have been widely taken as further confirmation that the country is undergoing a seemingly unprecedented, irreversible, and inevitable demographic and cultural transformation.

This chapter has explored and examined media discourse in the wake of the 2010 census. Scholars of race have devoted considerable energy to the relationship between race and media (Hall, 1995; Jacobs, 2000; Logan, 2011; Lule, 1997; McConnell, 2011; van Dijk, 1991). Contemporary media discourse is rarely populated with openly racist renderings of demographic threat, as once was commonplace during the late 19th century and early decades of the 20th or even just decades ago (c.f. Santa Ana, 2002). Yet despite the dominance of “colorblind” ideologies, the media continues to contribute to white demographobia by charging statistical knowledge. I focused on two methods that have affectively charged census data. The first method, “frames of gravity,” qualifies quantitative data through characterizations such as “skyrocketing” or “huge.” The second method is the racial juxtaposition of “whites” and “Latinos” or “nonwhites.” I argue the practice of routinely contrasting these populations, both in text and graphic, generates the impression that demographic change is a zero-sum game with inescapable future winners and losers. Again, while mainstream media outlets rarely cast “Latinos” and “minorities” overtly as a threat—a commonplace depiction within nativist and white supremacist websites—frames of gravity and racial juxtaposition express and stoke growing racial anxieties. On a routine and ongoing basis, the press continues to actively report on new

“milestones” of white decline, supplying readers with a steady diet of narratives and visuals about a rapidly approaching “majority-minority” future. Interestingly, white preoccupation with demography has itself become an object of media attention. Several

180 recent studies on white attitudes about the future and demographic change, conducted primarily by psychologists, have received coverage in the press (e.g. McElwee, 2014).

To be sure, media narratives and visualizations on demographic change cannot be separated from the wider ensemble of meanings and institutional arrangements that sustain “race” as an organizing principle of U.S. society. The U.S. racial order— composed of symbolic and social boundaries—is a historical formation that scholars have argued is undergoing and has undergone change over the past several decades. While much scholarly and journalistic work has stressed the “objective” power of demographic trends, the preceding pages suggest that “demographic change” has become a key vector around which political and cultural struggles over racial boundaries are being fought.

Racial projects working in and through the media are active protagonists engaged in an unfolding dialectic between historically cemented investments in and contemporary interventions over the assembled meaning of race. This process, as I show here, has involved charging statistical projections of the future in particular ways. By charging statistics, racial projects have helped to produce statistical effects, such as demographobia and aspirational visions of the future.

Within this discursive and political context, national Latino spokespersons have engaged in temporal politics over the future. In this chapter, I specifically analyzed the insertion of alternative depictions of Latinos and Latino population growth into public discourse. I argue that these temporally and affectively inflected rhetorics were circulated, at least in part, to assuage white demographobia and foster different emotions about projected futures. As detailed above, these political advocates have employed frames of gravity to dramatize the growth and size of the Latino population. But they have nested

181 these pronouncements within an ensemble of representations of Latinos as hyper-

Americans with the capacity and commitment to rejuvenate the country. One of the consequences of this strategy has been to embrace a narrow definition of “American” identity and a replacement of a more “rights” based agenda with one anchored in sanitized notions of “diversity.” And yet while their concern with the problem of demographobia has shaped their public pronouncements and rhetoric, national Latino advocates have not entirely abandoned efforts to capitalize on demographic growth. As I explore in the next chapter, they turned to the 2012 election as a stage on which to demonstrate the “power” of the Latino vote in that election and for elections to come.

182

CHAPTER FIVE

Demonstrations of Power: Statistical Awakenings in the 2012 Election

When is a minority no longer a minority? When those in power make our issues a priority? Well here’s the lead story America: There’s already 50 million Latinos here and counting, Hi Majority! —Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Found in Translation”

Introduction

It was a seasonally warm October morning when the leadership of El Movimiento

Hispano (the Hispanic Movement) hosted a press conference announcing the launch of their get-out-the-vote operation in Central Florida. With the 2012 presidential election rapidly approaching, El Movimiento Hispano—a joint project of the League of United

Latin American Citizens, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and the

Hispanic Federation—entered into a grid of nonpartisan and partisan campaigns targeting the region’s growing Latino population. The press conference, held in a small classroom located in the Orlando satellite campus of the Puerto Rico-based Ana G. Méndez

183 University, included remarks from several local persons, including the Florida state director of State Voices, a representative of the Orange County Board of Elections, and several local community leaders.

The press conference began with opening remarks from the president of the

Hispanic Federation, José Calderón, a Nuyorican in his mid-forties. Speaking to a few news cameras and about twenty people in the audience, Calderón stated:

We have 52 million Latinos across this nation. You hear about Latinos everywhere you go. People are very excited. We are a young, dynamic, and growing community. It is a community that will continue to grow. We are very fertile. We like babies, and that is a good, good story.

As he said this, he cracked a smile, as several in the audience chuckled. Soon after, his tone became more serious:

One of the things that is critically important, as you are hearing about the Latino movement and growth, [is that] none of that matters, none of that matters if we don't exercise our right to vote, which is why we are here with some of the national leaders.

One of the national leaders Calderón was referring to was Brent Wilkes, the executive director of LULAC, scheduled next to speak. Seamlessly, Wilkes picked up where his colleague left off.

We want to make sure that the turnout of Latino voters in this election cycle is a historic turnout… We think that [when] the pundits look at what happened after the election they will realize that not only did the Latino vote make a huge difference but that it will continue to make a huge difference [in] every election from here on out.

Wilkes’ remark succinctly articulated the objective of El Movimiento. As framed by these political actors and their counterparts in other national Latino advocacy organizations, only electoral participation could transform raw demographics into political power. This idea was, perhaps, most provocatively expressed in a bilingual PSA

184 premiered that morning. Titled, “Found in Translation,” the PSA was written and performed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the young Tony award-winning composer and lyricist of the Broadway hit, In The Heights. Looking directly into the camera against a black backdrop, Miranda begins with the series of questions that serve as the epigraph to this chapter.64 Interweaving population statistics and dreams of political recognition gained at the ballot box, his rhythmic monologue sought to motivate Latinos to vote in the election. Only this act could give an answer to the question, “When is a minority no longer a minority?” In short, when they vote.

From this perspective, the 2012 election presented both an opportunity and a challenge for this racial project. The challenge was, above all, to successfully mobilize

Latino voters en masse. If the challenge was successfully met, these political actors believed they could achieve not only an electoral influence commensurate with the present, but also the political might this population is projected to possess in the future.

At stake in the election was, therefore, the prospect of laying claim, as Wilkes put it, to

“every election from here on out.” In other words, the 2012 election was approached, I argue, as an opportunity to publicly demonstrate that the future had, in a sense, arrived— a future in which this population had already realized its political power, and therefore could not be ignored or taken-for-granted.

Drawing on the notion of demonstration, a concept given specific meaning within science and technology studies, this chapter explores the orchestration of a public demonstration of the future. This particular manifestation of temporal politics—shaped, to be sure, by the wider discursive context described in the previous chapter—was

64 While Miranda’s monologue is primarily spoken in English, the PSA features Spanish subtitles that do not exactly follow the English oration.

185 rhetorically empowered by statistical projections about the Latino electorate. While the previous chapter documented how demographic futures were textually and visually inscribed in public discourse, the present chapter analytically focuses on the statistical effects generated by the circulation and political deployment of electoral projections.

My research reveals that three figures were particularly central to this demonstration. The first statistic, produced months before the election, was the projection that 12.2 million Latino/a voters would participate in the election. The second statistic was the claim that 50,000 Latino/a citizens turn 18 every month and will continue to do so into the future. The third statistic was the figure that, for the first time in U.S. history,

Latino voters accounted for 10% of voters in a national election. Immediately following the election, this statistic came to punctuate the idea that the Latino vote was decisive, and that a new day in U.S. ethnoracial politics had been realized.

In turn, I narrate the circulation and uptake of each of these figures. As detailed herein, the life courses and effects of these statistics were far from straightforward. As they traveled, the figures experienced moments of uncertainty, ambiguity, and contestation, to which national Latino leaders responded with defensive stances and a redoubling of their efforts to demonstrate the future by awakening a collective political subject—the so-called Latino “sleeping giant”—in the present. Notwithstanding, this goal proved elusive for various reasons, not the least of which were the vulnerabilities of the statistics themselves and the unrealized expectations they generated.

Public Demonstrations

Social scientists, particularly those working in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, have been fascinated by the parallels between “science”

186 and “politics,” and the traffic between these apparently different worlds (Jasanoff, 2004;

Latour, 1990; Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). One parallel is the shared reliance on “public proofs” or “demonstrations.” Beginning with the pioneering research of Shapin and

Schaffer (1985), a growing body of research has produced a “sociology of demonstration”

(e.g. Barry, 1999; Laurent, 2011; Marres, 2012; Rosental, 2013; Stark & Paravel, 2008).65

In this scholarship, the meaning of demonstration is broader than its common association with protests and rallies. Indeed, such political acts are considered just one of many kinds of demonstration. This chapter explores an attempt to demonstrate a particular ethnoracial future in the present.

Although they may have numerous uses and effects (c.f. Rosenthal, 2013), demonstrations are, above all, acts of showing and witnessing. The power of demonstrations, if successfully orchestrated, resides in their “capacity to enhance perception and to constitute new perceptual objects” (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, p. 36).

Michel Callon (2004, p. 123) provides this definition: “Demonstration, as the origin of the word indicates, makes visible for an audience, constructed contemporaneously with the demonstration, an object about which a discourse is articulated.” Bourdieu similarly writes:

[t]he political field is one of the privileged sites for the exercise of the power of representation or manifestation [in the sense of public demonstration – tr.] that contributes to making what existed in a practical state, tacitly or implicitly, exist fully, that is, in the objectified state, in a form directly visible to all, public, published, official, and thus authorized (Bourdieu cited in Wacquant, 2004, p. 6).

65 Although I focus on the literature related to demonstrations in politics, I should note growing interest in the role of demonstrations and experiments in economics. See, for example, Mitchell (2005) and Callon (2007).

187 To render visible in this context is not simply to shed light on something already there, but rather it is to constitute a given phenomenon so that it can be seen. Demonstrations are performative; they enact realities, rather than simply describe or reflect them. It is due to this capacity to summon entities or problems into existence that makes demonstrations a powerful “tool of persuasion” (Stark & Paravel, 2008). Demonstrations have a tendency to “black box” their own conditions of possibility, a development that encourages the belief that what was demonstrated is the “passive result of holding a mirror up to reality”

(Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, p. 23).

Demonstrations involve not only the construction of an object, but also an audience. Once again, Shapin and Schaffer (1985) are instructive. They note that the generation of “facts” (the primary purpose for scientific demonstrations) is contingent not only on “their actual performance but essentially upon the assurance of the relevant community that they have been so performed” (p. 55). Audiences are not an undifferentiated mass; some witnesses are deemed more “trustworthy” and legitimate than others. Determining who is qualified to serve as “witness” is one way even the most putatively “scientific” demonstration is political (Barry 1999). Closed room or laboratory demonstrations, such as those traditionally examined by STS scholars, differ significantly from those that take place in the public sphere. This is not to suggest that the wider public interacts in an unmediated fashion with public demonstrations, but that the relationship between the demonstration, demonstrators, and audience is generally more complicated.

In any case, experts and authorized entities powerfully shape whether demonstrations are validated (Glaeser, 2011)—even though it is an empirical question how and in what ways

188 this influence is generated and sustained. As my analysis will show, contestation can weaken the validity of a demonstration.

STS scholars have noted that demonstrations have a future-oriented character.

Following Thrift and French (2002), who have maintained that public demonstrations offer a “promise” rather than “proof,” Marres (2012, p. 125) argues, “ontologies performed with the aid of demonstrational devices must be categorized as ‘aspirational’ ontologies.” In a related vein, Barry (1999, p. 77) has highlighted that the suffix “demo,” among various connotations, also “implies provisionality.” As in a music demo, a demonstration is “a display of the possibility of a real object, rather than its actualization.”

In the case examined here, the demonstration promised an ethnoracial “future” in which the Latino population had realized its potential. This demonstration involved the mobilization of statistical projections as the discursive arm of an on-the-ground voter operation coordinated throughout the country.

Mobilizing the “Latino Vote”

Inspired by their collaborative efforts to mobilize Latinos to participate in the

2010 census, national Latino advocacy organizations entered the electoral season with hopes and strategies of increasing their political power. They began to gear up for the

2012 election in the months following the release of 2010 census data. Each of these organizations—collaboratively or independently—diverted resources and energy to voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts. These “civic engagement” campaigns were coordinated with the assistance of new technologies and databases composed of census statistics, voter files, and commercial data. It is no exaggeration to state that electoral work—and not just in the case described in this chapter—is saturated with statistics and

189 data of diverse kinds.66 Political scientist Ricardo Ramírez (2013) characterizes these efforts as forms of “proactive mobilization”—“elite-sponsored activities targeting barriers to Latino civic and political incorporation, which consists of both electoral and nonelectoral participation” (Ramírez 2013, p. 8).67 Proactive mobilization began, depending on the organization, as early as January and as late as October and were primarily, although not exclusively, focused on “battleground” or “swing” states with a large or rapidly growing Latino population, such as Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, and

Florida. Civic engagement work was also done in states where these organizations have established roots, such as Texas and Pennsylvania, or states believed to be on their way to becoming swing states, such as Arizona.

As nonpartisan efforts, Latino voter work aimed to convince potential Latino voters to vote on behalf of the “Latino community” and the issues that mattered to them.

In the words of one spokesperson, “We don't tell people who to vote for and we don't make endorsements. Instead, what we are endorsing is for you to become an empowered

American voter and for our community to solidify its role as a voice that matters in our political process.” In an October 4, 2011 interview in Latina magazine, Voto Latino’s president, Maria Teresa Kumar commented, “What Latinos need to realize is that 2012 is an election that’s personal. It’s not about a candidate, it’s about the issues…” (Ocaña

Perez, 2011). NCLR’s president Janet Murguía similarly told the Los Angeles Times,

“We will be voting for ourselves… We will be enhancing our own ability to create the

66 I prefer to describe politics as saturated rather than driven by statistics because this neither minimizes nor overstates the presence and impacts of statistics on political life. 67 A rich body of research, conducted primarily by political scientists, has attempted to not only explain the factors that influence the partisan affiliations of Latinos, but also the variable efficacy of GOTV strategies. For analyses of this latter concern, see Garcia-Bedolla and Michaelson (2012) and Ramírez (2013).

190 power and the clout that will ultimately turn the policies we want to see change.”

(Becerra, 2012a). In making these claims, national Latino leaders also stressed their nonpartisan orientation. A pamphlet produced by El Movimiento Hispano read:

Do your research on both candidates and both party sides. What matters is that we let our voice be heard. We fought for the right to vote so we need to take advantage of it now, not later, NOW. We are 50 million strong and we can be a deciding factor on this election and in the future.

Mi Familia’s director Ben Monterroso made similar points:

As the Latino population grows, so too does the potential for political strength. But politicians only listen to those who vote. That is why we are working across the country to register and mobilize Latino voters and to remind them that their ability to influence the policy agenda will only grow if the Latino voices are heard through their votes. Our work is not just the 2012 elections, but to build the foundation for greater voter participation in future elections and at the policy tables.

Although the lines between partisan and nonpartisan electoral work are never as clear or consistent as often claimed, it is worth noting here that nonpartisan Latino voter campaigns should not be dismissed outright as veiled partisan operations.68 Rather, it is important to recognize that nonpartisan efforts can, and in this case did, have a distinct agenda. If we adopt a reductive account of nonpartisan endeavors, we flatten important differences. Most pertinent to this discussion is the fact that nonpartisan campaigns are not, by definition and legal statute, oriented towards specific candidates. In this way, nonpartisan campaigns differ from Jeffrey Alexander’s (2010) cultural sociological account of partisan campaigns as struggles to transform candidates into ideal “collective representations.” To the contrary, national Latino civic engagement campaigns—armed

68 Field observations conducted in Florida prior to the election revealed that GOTV coordinators and canvassers were extremely vigilant against partisanship. During door-to-door visits, in fact, canvassers adamantly refused to give endorsements, even when repeatedly asked by potential voters. While it is possible that canvassers were performing nonpartisanship in my presence, I have no reason to believe this is the case.

191 with statistically informed narratives—sought to enact a different collective representation: an awakened Latino “giant.” Notwithstanding their distinct organizational and political signatures, these elite actors sought to demonstrate a collective figure powerful enough to decide the presidency in 2012 and for decades to come.

To these ends, national Latino leaders, with support from the Ford Foundation and other philanthropic institutions, formed the “National Latino Civic Engagement Table.”

The “Table,” as participants referred to it, was founded by MFV, NCLR, Voto Latino,

NALEO, and the Center for Community Change, which is not a Latino-focused organization, but has connections with immigrant organizations around the country. By

Election Day, LCLAA, LULAC, and the Hispanic Federation had joined the Table collectively as “El Movimiento Hispano.”

In a moment in which resources are relatively scarce for voter registration and education, and several non-Latino mainstream organizations command much of the existing funds, national Latino groups viewed the Table as a way to pool resources and coordinate logistics. A key objective, expressed by several organizers, was to avoid repetition or mismatches between goals and organizational capacities. Attempts were made to tap into the strengths and expertise of the specific organizations. For example,

Voto Latino was seen as the group most effective at reaching and mobilizing Latino

“millennials.” NCLR, perhaps the organization with the most experience in voter registration, launched its “Mobilize to Vote” campaign in several locations, but as in previous elections, its main site was Central and Southern Florida. The SEIU-funded Mi

Familia Vota emerged in the 2012 election as a key player due to its successful voter registration work in Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado. As in past elections,

192 NALEO coordinated a national call center. It also conducted small GOTV operations in several states. As described in the opening of the chapter, LCLAA, LULAC and the

Hispanic Federation jointly coordinated civic engagement campaigns, hosted public forums, and produced several PSAs.

These efforts to demonstrate Latino political power were hampered by a series of new voter laws, which Latino advocates insisted were aimed at suppressing the Latino and African American vote. A NALEO report (2012) found that over 800,000 Latino voters were placed at risk by new measures. In interviews, several leaders made explicit connections between voter purges, the reduction of early voting days, and demographic fears among Republicans. The Florida field coordinator of the Movimiento Hispano campaign put it in these terms: “One out of every four black persons in the State cannot vote… That is how you maintain control of a browning nation. Like that’s it in a nutshell.”

Finally, throughout the election season, national groups produced and disseminated knowledge about the Latino vote and population. Ubiquitous within civic engagement campaigns and the public pronouncements of Latino spokespersons, statistics were regularly drawn upon to contest popular representations of the Latino vote and population, and, as I elaborate below, to demonstrate the future in the present.

Projections and Potentials

Nearly eighteen months before the election, NALEO released projections for national Latino voter participation at a breakfast plenary during its annual conference.

The date was June 23, 2011 and the location was San Antonio—home to the Democratic

193 twin dynamo, the Castro brothers, who had just entered the national political spotlight.69

Over a hundred Latina and Latino elected officials from around the country were in attendance for the day’s opening session, sponsored on this occasion by BP America and

Wal-Mart. Held months after the release of the results of the 2010 census, the session carried the title: “Latino Political Power—Turning Numbers into Clout.”

The conversation began with opening remarks from the session’s moderator,

Monica Lozano, the Chief Executive Officer of ImpreMedia, a media company that owns several major Spanish-language newspapers. Her remarks centered on the census and specifically the role of NALEO and other Latino media and advocacy groups in achieving “historically high” Latino participation rates. As described in Chapter Three, national and local Latino advocacy groups undertook the challenging task of convincing

Latino census takers to be willfully seen by the state precisely at the moment that the emergent “homeland security state” (Gonzales, 2014) was augmenting operations against undocumented immigrants. However, by this moment in time, public debate centered on the demographic knowledge produced by the census rather than on the complex and contentious period of enumeration responsible for its production. Indeed, Lozano enthusiastically noted how the size and growth of the “Latino demographic” revealed by the census was being “heralded by virtually every media outlet in America.” She continued:

The Wall Street Journal’s front page captured the sentiment with the headline “Latinos Fuel Growth in a Decade.” And if any of you saw that front page, there was a map and over the map the headline “Los United States.” And as we all know, it wasn’t just in the traditional urban centers

69 The Castro brothers are Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and the current U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Joaquín Castro, a Texas congressman. The Castros have emerged as the Democratic counterpoint to Republican Latino and Latina figureheads, such as Florida Senator Marco Rubio and New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez.

194 like Los Angeles and Houston and New York; it was all across America and in the communities like Akron, Nashville and Indianapolis. Latinos are changing the face of America.

As narrated by national spokespersons, the demographic dispersal of the U.S. Latino population was almost as astonishing (and celebrated) as the numeric size and rate of growth. In the course of research, I have been frequently told that the census, perhaps for the first time, revealed a national population—despite their often open acknowledgement that the vast majority of this panethnic population is concentrated in ten states (Ramírez,

2013). For many Latino leaders, but particularly those at the helm of national organizations, the question of translation, that is, how to translate or convert Latino demographic growth into greater political (and economic) influence, continues to be— despite numerous attempts—of paramount importance. And it is this question to which

NALEO’s opening plenary was oriented.70

As noted above, among Latino/a political elites, the answer to this riddle is electoral.71 It is within this context that NALEO’s projections were developed and circulated. After her brief remarks, Lozano then invited Arturo Vargas to come to the podium.

70 NALEO is, to be sure, not unique in this regard. Voto Latino has hosted several “Power Summits” in recent years and the respective annual meetings of NCLR and LULAC routinely feature sessions on Latino political empowerment, which, explicitly or implicitly, take as their point of departure the vexing question of demographics-to-power translation. 71 That elections are understood and articulated as the answer is, of course, not surprising for a number of reasons, not the least of which includes the political orientation of national Latino civil rights groups. As Cristina Beltrán (2010) argues, “Contemporary Latino politics has shifted toward the electoral realm, with advocacy groups and politicians focusing on electoral politics and questions of representation. In other words, when speaking of Latino political interests today, we are more likely to frame the discussion in terms of the ‘Latino Vote’ rather than social movements and grassroots activism.” Moreover, the emphasis and reliance on elections also indexes growing frustrations and cynicism about the impact of traditional demonstrations and protests to secure immigration reform. Reflecting on the mass mobilizations for immigration reform organized around the country between 2006-2008, a LULAC member expressed to me, that while marches were important and necessary, they were ineffective; only the vote could demonstrate power. I encountered similar commentary at various other points while in the field.

195 Vargas, a respected expert on redistricting, began his PowerPoint presentation with a reminder of the “impact of Latino voters” in the previous two elections and primaries. The audience greeted with applause his assertion that NALEO’s projection for the mid-term elections was off by only one hundred thousand. The Latino vote, he continued, helped the Democratic Party maintain control of the Senate—citing the razor thin reelection of Nevada Senator Harry Reid as proof. Shifting from voter turnout to the election of Latino officials, he mentioned the election of several Latino Republicans, including Senator Marco Rubio and the new governor of New Mexico, Susana Martinez.

He then commented that she was the “first Latina ever elected governor of any state,” a point arousing more applause.

Shortly after, on the seventh slide of his presentation, Vargas unveiled NALEO’s national projection for the 2012 election. “Nationally, we anticipate that 12.2 million

Latinos will go to the polls next November, that’s a 25% increase in voters from 2008 and we will become 8.7% of the national share of all voters.” The magnitude of the projection was given meaning in relation to the percentage of growth and voter turnout.

On the screen, the audience observed state-specific projections for the Latino vote in

Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Texas, where the Latino vote was projected to increase between 14% to 38%. The focus, however, remained on the national figure.

As intended, NALEO’s national projection was quickly picked up by the media and eventually became a fixture in public debate about the “Latino vote.”72 The following

72 As noted in Chapter two, the existence and interest in statistics about the Latino electorate is a historical development, aided by the institutionalization and popularization of the panethnic category “Hispanic/Latino” and the formation of a knowledge production industry focused on “Latinos” and their economic and electoral preferences (Dávila, 2001, 2008). In the political

196 day FOX Latino (EFE, 2011) and CNN (Valdes, 2011) respectively ran the headlines:

“Record number of Latinos expected to vote in 2012” and “Latino officials see big

Hispanic vote in 2012.” As these headlines suggest, attribution was uneven. Sometimes, especially at the beginning, NALEO was credited with the projection, and other times no specific credit was given. For instance, just days before the election, NCLR’s president

Janet Murguia (2012c) wrote the following in a Huffington Post op-ed: “As the fastest- growing group of voters in the country, Latinos could make the difference in several key battleground states in the closest presidential election in years. An estimated 12.2 million

Hispanics are expected to go the polls on Tuesday.” As Vargas readily admitted in an interview, the projection became “conventional wisdom,” repeated so often that it became, in his words, a “fact.”

In addition to being picked up by the media, NALEO’s voter projection also circulated through civic engagement campaigns. While conducting fieldwork, I encountered the figure on several occasions. For instance, prior to Election Day, Mi

Familia Vota and the Florida New Majority staged a small rally in the parking lot of the

Southeast Branch Public Library, located just miles from the Orlando airport, in an area densely populated by recent Puerto Rican migrants. On this cloudy day, public libraries throughout the state were transformed into “early voting” polling stations. Several hundred feet from the library and a major thoroughfare crowed by partisan campaign signs and workers holding large posters, Nilda, a Florida native in her mid-twenties, convened canvassers and volunteers. While her admitted political passion was

field, Latino-targeted polling has grown exponentially since the 2004 presidential election, the election which controversially found Latinos moving closer to Ronald Reagan’s famous assertion that “Hispanics are Republican. They just don't know it yet.” See Dávila (2008) for a discussion of the 2004 election.

197 environmental issues, Nilda was consistently energetic when discussing the 2012 election.

Although she did not have much prior experience speaking at public events, Mi Familia

Vota’s voter registration coordinator seemed to relish these opportunities. With a bullhorn near her mouth, Nilda shouted, “We’re going to make history, right!” Her exhortation was met with spirited endorsement, as bodies drew closer and hands clapped.

As she continued, Nilda elaborated what kind of history was to be made.

12.2 million Latinos! We are going to show the world, because everybody is looking at us today. The I-4 Corridor...[we are] the determining factor of the presidential election. We’re going to mobilize our people. We’re going to go and vote... We’re not going to let these people tell us who we are and what we’re going to do! No, we’re going to take action…

After this brief pep rally, the group marched in close vicinity to the library, passing by partisan workers distributing campaign literature for local, statewide, and national races.

For the remainder of the afternoon, canvassers went door knocking in their respective

“turfs,” encouraging voters to take advantage of early voting.

The 12.2 million projection, however, was not only invoked in public rallies, it also appeared in the civic engagement literature produced by these organizations. For example, just days before the election, Mi Familia Vota produced a colorful, bilingual comic that was distributed in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Florida

(see Figure 16). The comic features a two-parent, middle class Latino family and addresses issues of apathy, voter suppression, and community empowerment. Along with the phrase “sleeping giant,” the comic also employs NALEO’s projection. At one point in the story, the wife/mother remarks, “¡Yo siempre he votado desde que me mudé de Puerto

Rico a los Estados Unidos, y ahora vamos a poder ir juntos gordito! Se espera que más de 12 millones de Latinos salgamos a votar en estas elecciones” (I have always voted

198 Figure 16: “Mi Familia” Comic Book, Mi Familia Vota, November 2012 since I moved from Puerto Rico to the United States, and now we are going to be able to go together! It is expected that more than 12 million of us Latinos will vote in these elections). In the end, the entire family, even the initially cynical youngest son, participated in the election.

Equipped with this projection, national Latino advocacy groups began to tout the decisiveness of the “Latino vote.” It helped them secure funding and attract greater media attention, but it also raised pressure for them to turnout the vote. Indeed, the figure

199 became—whether intended or not—the public metric by which partisan and nonpartisan observers would determine whether the so-called Latino “sleeping giant” actually awoke in the election.

NALEO’s projection gave a concrete numerical representation to ideas already in circulation about the potential impact of the “Latino vote.” Indeed, following the census, political pundits, campaign strategists, and the media once again began to actively discuss

Latino voters, who were described not only as the “fastest-growing” segment of the electorate but perhaps equally important, as a key “swing vote.” Thus long before a single ballot was cast, the “Latino vote” was projected to play a “decisive” role in the upcoming presidential election. TIME’s March 5, 2012 front cover most firmly, if controversially, stated this point. 73 For the first time in its history, the cover featured text in Spanish. The issue title read: “Yo Decido. Why Latinos will pick the next President” (see Figure 17).

TIME’s editor Richard Stengel (2012) described Latino voters as “America’s New

Decisionmakers.” Employing several statistics, he stated:

Nosotros Vamos a decidir. We will decide. That has been the presidential- election mantra of Latinos all across the U.S. And it's hard to argue with the premise. The numbers alone tell an amazing story. Nearly 10% of all voters in 2012 will be Hispanic, up 26% from four years ago. One of four newborns in America is Latino, and those births now account for more than half of U.S. population growth. Hispanics make up 16% of the population today and will account for close to a third of all Americans in 2050.

73 TIME magazine’s “Yo Decido” cover sparked considerable controversy not only in claiming a specific group as the election’s deciding factor, but also its inclusion of a Chinese-American among the twenty faces that adorn the cover.

200 Figure 17: “Yo Decido,” TIME, March 5, 2012

Within the magazine’s lead article, written by journalist Michael Scherer (2012), attention was given to the potential partisan implications of Latino demographic and electoral boom. Political pundits and consultants from both major parties also took up this assertion, consistently arguing that victory would escape Republican candidate Mitt

Romney if he failed to capture a substantially larger percentage of the Latino vote than his colleague garnered in the 2008 election. Just weeks before the election, President

201 Obama confidently commented off record (or so he thought) to an Iowa newspaper: “A big reason I will win a second term is because the Republican nominee and the

Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community” (Becerra, 2012b). In fact, the Obama campaign drove this message home in a t-shirt that quoted TIME magazine’s cover line.

Even still, claims about the impact of Latino voters carried more than a hint of uncertainty. Arturo Vargas and other leaders acknowledged that, despite their projections, about half of all eligible Latino voters would likely not participate. To a great extent, discussions about the Latino electorate were followed, or better, haunted by the question, would the so-called “sleeping giant” finally awaken, once and for all? For decades, one of the running themes (or jokes) in U.S. national politics has been the apparent failure of the

“Latino vote” to realize its political potential. As the election drew closer, figures showing disparities in voter participation between Latinos and other ethnoracial voters were commonplace, as were frequent charges that the Latino voter was inconsistent, only showing up occasionally. For instance, in the Huffington Post, staff writer of the National

Journal Janell Ross (2012) commented, “The strategy will boost Latino voter turnout in swing states, but won’t likely expand Latino political power or engage more Hispanic voters.” The “sleeping giant,” she insisted, would likely not awaken in 2012. Political theorist Cristina Beltrán (2010, p. 4) has rhetorically asked: “What are we to make of this

202 Latino Leviathan, this narcoleptic colossus that seems to periodically stir only to fall back into civic obscurity?”

It was precisely against the characterization of an unrealized, and thus wasted, potential that NALEO and other national advocacy groups inserted the 12.2 million-voter projection and other statistics into public discourse. But unlike other forecasts, such as the claim that the country will become “majority-minority” by 2050, the voter participation projection was viewed as far from inevitable. Ironically, the near future seemed more precarious than the distant future. Leaders were confident that voter turnout would increase just by virtue of electoral growth, but this was—in their mind—not enough. Instead, what they desired and sought to demonstrate publicly was a political awakening with ramifications into the future. Only such an awakening in the present could turn “numbers into clout” and bring, in effect, the future into the present.

In short, NALEO’s projection was made public and circulated widely. It was used in civic engagement campaigns and taken up by the press, eventually becoming a “fact” that raised expectations about the Latino turnout, which as I discuss later would not be met.

Growth and Groupness

With the NALEO projection, Latino advocates named an electoral impact in the short term. This figure was part of and contributed to growing consensus that the Latino

203 vote was going to be crucial nationally, but especially in contested states. In the course of the electoral season, other statistics came into circulation that pointed beyond the 2012 election. Among national Latino groups, one statistic, above others, came to project the

“power” of the Latino vote not simply in November 2012, but for the statistically foreseeable future. The statistic in question claimed that every month 50,000 Latino citizens turned eighteen and thus became eligible to vote. This figure has its origins into two reports produced by the Pew Hispanic Center in 2011 (Lopez, 2011; Lopez & Taylor,

2011).

National Latino groups communicated and narrated this figure in a variety of ways. For example, Voto Latino produced a series of graphics displaying “facts” about the Latino electorate, among which was one that read: “50,000 Latinos Turn 18 Every

Month in the United States” (see Figure 18).

During interviews with several civic engagement coordinators, this figure was also cited. For instance, when I asked Camila, the statewide coordinator of NCLR’s civic engagement operation, to describe strategies she employed to motivate potential voters, she commented, without prompt, that: “[When] I would talk to my team this year…I would also [mention] how every month 50,000 Latinos that turn 18 every month and from here on till 2050 or something like that and these are eligible voters.”

Camila and other field coordinators and canvassers were clear that the citation of this figure (as well as other themes of growth) was just one of several motivating tools.

Given the quick pace of canvassing, where every second counts, and canvassers are evaluated per door knock and every conversation had, they preferred to stick to “bread and butter” issues, such as public services, employment opportunities. Take, for instance,

204 Figure 18: “Fact: 50,000,” Voto Latino, 2012 a quote from Angela, NCLR’s Central Florida coordinator, in an interview conducted a month before the election. In this quote, Angela discussed the motivational limits of narratives of growth.

It depends. If you tell that to a person that’s undecided about whether they are going to vote for, that helps. But if you talk to someone who doesn’t want to vote because they’re frustrated, they don’t care…about the democratic system… That type of line that we are more or more, that we have the power to decide, they don’t care. It’s not that they don’t care, but they don’t feel connected to that. Because it is not their priority. I mean I don’t [care] if we are the large group of Latinos. Who pays for my milk? Who pays for the eggs? Who takes my mother to the hospital? Who pays my light bill? Trust that’s what we get in the streets everyday… But when someone is almost motivated to go out to vote and all they need is a final push. Then you use that type of message, communication, discussion, where you can connect and motivate them. This why you need to come out and vote. You know your vote is important, but this is why you need to go out to vote.

205 While it is critical not to overstate the use of statistical projections or even ideas of growth in interactions between civic engagement operative and voters, the figure of 50,000 new voters was widely in circulation, particularly among the leadership of civic campaigns. In my interview with Eddy, a postal worker and leader of the Orlando chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American

Advancement, it was clear that the figure undergirded his conviction that “the future Hispanic president is already born and I think that before I die I would see one, because the Hispanic population in the United States is growing, and it’s growing fast and it’s going to grow more.” He expressed this point in relation to the U.S. labor movement.

I think it’s 50,000 every month for 18 years. One thing that hits me really hard is I think about the labor movement that happened ‘20s and ‘30s and without the changing demographics in America, without the immigrants working in industrial jobs and unionizing and really making the movement. The New Deal wouldn’t have happened, all these amazing things that happened in the ‘30s and ‘40s wouldn’t have happened

Along with these local citations, national Latino leaders frequently, almost ritualistically, uttered this figure in press conferences and briefings. Just like the NALEO projection, it also appeared ubiquitously in news coverage.

During the electoral season, the National Council of La Raza produced a factsheet to give a clear indication of the ongoing growth of the Latino electorate. The title of the factsheet was “Latino Children Will Add Nearly 15.8 Million Potential Voters to the

Electorate” (Benitez, 2012). Drawing on American Community Survey and census data, the document began by asserting that Latino children count for almost 25 percent of all

U.S. children, and that an “overwhelming majority” of these children—some 93%—are

U.S. citizens. Tracking the number of Latino children at every age between 1 and 18 and

206 what year they will turn 18, NCLR analysts concluded that “between 2011 and 2028, an average of 878,000 Latino citizen children will turn 18 each year, and by 2024 that number will reach one million annually.” This factsheet elaborated on the figure of

50,000 and projected the number of each new cohort of 18-year-old Latino voters.

Perhaps following its genre, this factsheet did not express the substantive import of this electoral growth. But the message was clear: the “Latino vote” was going to be decisive long into the future.

Other NCLR documents (as well as those produced by other organizations) did insert this statistic into narratives and more explicitly normative discussions about the

“Latino demographic.” For example, an NCLR blog posting on May 23, 2012 read:

If you’re a Latino in America, the future appears to be a grim one, but being the resilient and optimistic people that we are, it’s important to remember that we have the power to do something about it. We have the power of the vote. And with 50,000 Latinos turning 18 every year for the next 20 years, those votes have awesome potential to translate into power.

These sentences appeared after an opening paragraph describing the impact of the foreclosure and economic crisis and the emergence of anti-immigrant legislation and practices. To address these and other issues, the blog post urged Latinos to register to vote. In clear terms, the vote was cast as the primary, and perhaps, only mechanism to convert future demographic “potential” into present political “power.”

Both the NALEO projection and the claim of 50,000 new Latino voters assume, at a foundational level, that the Latino population is, in fact, a group rather than a mere statistical artifact. Although scholars have long noted that the uptake of pan-Latino categories as personal and collective identities should not be taken-for-granted (c.f. De

Genova & Ramos-Zayas, 2003; J. Flores, 2000; Itzigsohn, 2009; Rodríguez-Muñiz,

207 2010), this population is often described as a “community” in the strong sense of the term.74

In The Trouble with Unity, Cristina Beltrán (2010, p. 4) argues that the depiction of the Latino electorate (and by extension the broader population) as “fundamentally passive, forever new, and perpetually emergent” is an effect of the firm assumption that

Latinos constitute (or will soon become) a coherent and stable community with shared interests; in short, the idea that “Latinos” are, in fact, a “group” or at least a group-information. The desire for national recognition, particularly among Latino elites and political entrepreneurs, she argues, has led to an obsession with unity, even in the face of evidence suggesting otherwise.

In April 2012, just as civic engagement campaigns were getting underway, the

Pew Hispanic Center released a report titled: “When Labels Don’t Fit: Hispanics and

Their Views of Identity” (P. Taylor, Hugo Lopez, Martínez, & Velasco, 2012). The report found that “nearly four decades after the United States government mandated the use of the terms ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ to categorize Americans who trace their roots to

Spanish-speaking countries, a new nationwide survey of Hispanic adults finds that these terms still haven’t been fully embraced by Hispanics themselves.” Journalists seized upon the Pew Hispanic report and interpreted its findings as a challenge to the common sense idea that “Latinos” were a group. For example, Los Angeles Times journalist Paloma

Esquivel (2012) reported on the Pew study. “Only one-quarter of those polled used the

74 In the case of the panethnic formation of “Latino” and “Hispanic,” it has become increasingly difficult talk about this population in a crudely homogeneous fashion. In fact, as Arlene Davila (2000) shows, institutions that have long invested in unitary representations of Latinos and Latinas, such as the media and corporations, have more become attentive to national heterogeneity (i.e. Mexicans versus Puerto Ricans), generations (i.e. first and second), and regions (i.e. Southwest versus Northeast)—even if these representations are no less stereotypical and essentialist.

208 terms Hispanic or Latino most often, while about 21% said they predominantly use the term American. Most of those polled did not see a shared common culture among

Latinos—as sometimes is assumed by politicians courting a voting bloc.” Instead of one cohesive group, the article told there were “dozens of nationalities.”

The media’s emphasis on this kind of finding (and the corollary finding that

Latinos also don’t identify as American) is not out of the ordinary. In her analysis of

Latino-targeted polling, Dávila (2008, p. 52) found that the media tends to run with

“counterintuitive discoveries,” even if in some cases these do not reflect broader trends.

With the election on the horizon, the Pew’s descriptive statistics seemed to call into question the very concept of a “Latino vote” and consequently the “future” Latino advocates sought to demonstrate in the present. As a result of this media spin, national

Latino leaders were forced to reaffirm the “groupness” (Brubaker, 2002) of the Latino population and electorate. A clear example of this affirmation can be found in an online forum created by Pew Hispanic to gather thoughts and reactions to the report from

Latinos and Latinas in the public eye. Among these were national spokespersons, Arturo

Vargas and Janet Murguía, who took the opportunity to stress the existence of this panethnic community, even if some of its putative members expressed distance from the category.

The title of Vargas’ (2012) response succinctly captured his argument: “Labels

Aside, Latinos Share Common Values.” In it, he wrote:

I fully respect the individuality and self-identification they express, yet I have come to understand that what brings these people together is not a religion, a language or even a culture. In each community I have observed common values: love of family and community, and optimism in life. I also have come to understand that what often binds diverse Latino national origins in this country is how they are treated and regarded by the non-

209 Latino majority; this often serves to bring Latinos together in common cause.

Vargas departed, on the one hand, from a number of dominant characterizations of

Latinos as bonded by language and culture, and on the other hand attempted to introduce alternative sources of commonality. He cited both family and “optimism in life,” as well as implicitly gestured towards the anti-Latino sentiment in the country that has presumably united this population “in common cause.” Vargas acknowledged internal diversity, but refused to conclude that this invalidates the existence of a Latino community.

In her response, Janet Murguía (2012a) also advanced an alternative reading of the findings. She began by noting that the Pew report actually shows that people are now

“more comfortable” with panethnic categories, when compared to the results of the 1990

Latino National Political Survey—the first attitudinal survey of the U.S. Latino population. She then went on to argue that political unity on the issue of immigration provides a concrete counterpoint to the media’s interpretation of the data:

On paper, immigration is not an issue that affects Puerto Ricans or Cuban- Americans much. But are there any stronger voices for immigrants than Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a Puerto Rican congressman from Chicago, and Sen. Bob Menendez, a Cuban-American senator from New Jersey? And isn’t it a Cuban-American U.S. Senator, Marco Rubio, who is trying to save the Republican Party from themselves on this issue?

In both responses, we see attempts to argue that something holds the Latino community together, in ways that ethnic identity preferences do not entirely capture.

Within the 2012 electoral season, national Latino spokespersons were involved not only in projecting what impact the “Latino vote” would have in this election and future ones, but also, as this discussion of the Pew report shows, in resisting characterizations and

210 statistics that called the “giant” and consequently its future dominance into question. This message was especially explicit in the official response of Latino Rebels, a popular alternative online media outlet, who also challenged the Pew Report.

Because the type of information Pew spewed out (yes, we have always wanted to use the verb ‘spewed’ next to ‘Pew’) did very little to what the BIG GOAL is now for the 50 million: true unity and true political power. (If indeed those are the goals that US Latinos/Hispanics truly want, which we think they do) (Latino Rebels, 2012).

Even still, whether or not the “Latino vote” actually exists as a coherent constituency, the fact remains that in contemporary elections, it is often taken as such.

And even when challenges are raised, whether internally or externally, there are relatively influential representatives that publicly attest and work to demonstrate its existence.

In short, the projection of 50,000 new Latino voters was deployed to claim growing influence. Its temporal arc reached further into the future than the NALEO projection, and as a result was less liable to being tested in the election. Notwithstanding, it was unable to escape the foundational question: Does the population this figure describes actually exist as a “group”?

Get-Out-The-Vote Interlude

After months of voter registration, door-to-door canvassing, and regular appearances in the press, the election was now just days away. National Latino civic engagement operations in Central Florida, where I was stationed, made their final push.

On Friday, November 2, I arrived at Mi Familia Vota’s office in the early afternoon, just as team leaders were wrapping up their preparations and canvassers were entering. In the office’s “war room,” Carolina, MFV’s sprightly local coordinator, was, as usual, fielding questions while rapidly typing away on her laptop. Carolina, who had a political career in

211 Venezuela but left disaffected by the Hugo Chávez regime, was seen as an effective leader by both her canvassers and supervisors. As I was scanning the hand written tallies from previous canvassing visits on walls of the room, a young Puerto Rican canvasser in his early twenties walked into the room. As he greeted team leaders one-by-one, he called out to Carolina and proudly announced he had gone to vote and while in the polling station had seen voters carrying MFV literature. His news drew applause from some of the team leaders and earned him a firm hug from Carolina. Shortly after, Carolina told me that they were expecting a visit from Eliseo Medina, Ben Monterroso, and several other

SEIU representatives.

Medina was in Orlando to assess MFV’s field operation. While considered an influential Latino leader in Washington D.C., he carries himself without any pretension. I noticed him alone, looking a map of Orange County, and approached him. Medina, who is in his early 60s and has decades of experience working partisan and nonpartisan campaigns, told me that he felt a lot of “enthusiasm” and “spirit” among MFV’s Orlando canvassers. For him, this was a sign that canvassers did not view their work simply as a job, but rather that they were motivated by a personal commitment. “This is not about a person or parties, but our future.” In our conversation, Medina framed the election as a way to send a message to politicians on the Hill, who as he put it, have “smoke in their heads.” While he does not say it explicitly, this message was primarily about immigration reform. “Out of sight, out of mind,” he continued. I asked what would make this election different from past elections. With reserved confidence, he replied that following the election they would cease making “moral” appeals. The results of the election would make clear that to the major parties that their “political futures” hang in the balance.

212 Moments later Ben Monterroso approached us to inform Medina that they were set to begin canvassing, but first they wanted Eliseo to say a few words to the canvassers.

A few minutes later, MFV coordinators began asking canvassers and phone bankers to convene in the lobby of the office. Standing shoulder to shoulder, there were some twenty-five workers present to hear from MFV and SEIU’s leadership. Heeding

Monterroso’s request, Carolina first introduced SEIU leader Rocio Sáenz. Sáenz described MFV as “creando un movimiento” (creating a movement). She claimed that with every door knocked “¡nos va dar poder, ese futuro!” (will give us power, that future). She ended her brief remarks by claiming that their efforts were going to make

“history.” Moved by her words, the young canvasser who had just earlier announced he had voted let out a cheer.

Now sporting a MFV t-shirt over his dress shirt, Medina began his remarks by stating that MFV’s get-out-the-vote efforts were based on a “compromiso con nuestra comunidad” (a commitment to our community). Picking up on a point made by Sáenz, he declared, “vamos hacer la historia” (we are going to make history). Attentive canvassers listened to him relate to their door-knocking experiences, reminding them of his previous visit and the “calorcito (heat)” and “los perritos (the dogs)” they had endured. This description made a few canvassers chuckle.

“Cambio es dificil (change is difficult),” he acknowledged, but with struggle

“vamos a ganar” (we will win). Mentioning his visits to other MFV’s operations, he asserted that their efforts were creating connections throughout the country. “No hay un gigante dormido… Ellos los despertaron” (There is no sleeping giant… they have awoken it). He was not explicit about the “they” he was referring to but those present

213 seemed to understand just fine. This “giant,” he added, are not all immigrants, yet all have the same desires for their own families. And while the public rarely distinguishes between different Latino groups, they are all told, together, “[you] don’t belong.”

In the conclusion of his brief speech, Medina shifted from a critique of the ways that Latinos are lumped together to a reflection on his relationship with Cesar Chávez, the famous Mexican-American labor leader. Describing canvassers as “authors of change,” he modified Chávez’s famous slogan and urged them to “make it so it’s not ‘Sí se puede,’ but ‘¡Sí se pudo!’” on Election Day.

Days later, less than eighteen hours before the polls were to open, I spent time with the canvassers of the National Council of La Raza. It was about 2:30 in the afternoon and by now NCLR’s small second floor office was bodied with canvassers, hired to mobilize Orlando’s growing Latino electorate. The office, as it was normally at this time, was abuzz with activity. In one room, several canvassers were completing an assignment from the national headquarters, passed down by Angela, NCLR’s Orlando coordinator. With a camera phone in hand, they video recorded each other respond to a series of questions about their experience as canvassers. Others were busy gathering canvassing materials, including election literature, clipboards, pens, water, and most importantly, assigned iPhones storing vital voter data, digital maps, and long memorized scripts. Similar to their counterparts at MFV and El Movimiento Hispano, NCLR’s canvassers had become a tightknit grouping over the past several months. I overheard jokes and laughter, excerpts of conversations about kids and health, and somber reflections that their time together was coming to a close.

214 Angela stepped out of her office and greeted her teams. She gestured for them to gather around. The twenty or so canvassers, divided among four team leaders, formed a rough circle around tables, chairs, and dividers. Angela never sent out her canvassers without a brief pep talk and a review of the day’s goals. This day was no different.

Although younger, and in some cases much younger than many of her employees, Angela had gained their respect and attention; they spoke highly and affectionately about her.

She began her election eve message exhorting them not to be “negativo.” She recognized their hard work, but made demands for a final push. “No es tiempo de chiste” (It is not time for jokes). Before her were Spanish speakers with variable command of English and time in the United States. Angela herself was born and raised in Puerto Rico, a lifetime that remained on her tongue.

As she spoke, her eyes scanned the room as she urged them to remember the

“supreción del voto” (voter suppression) and their original objective: to “sacar el voto”

(turn out the vote). Minutes later, she wrapped up the meeting with a request for volunteers to “adopt a precinct” when the polls closed. Expecting long lines, she asked them to do everything in their power to keep voters in line, even if that meant dressing up as “George Washington, a clown, or Barney.” After months of voter registration and door-to-door canvassing under the unforgiving Orlando sun, Angela did not feel the need to reiterate any further the stakes involved. She simply stated, “vale la pena” (it matters).

Although no elaboration was given and perhaps none was needed, clues were located throughout the office. In a small room, just ten feet or so away, for instance, there were several. On a handwritten poster—nested between a drawing of U.S. Supreme Court

Justice Sonia Sotomayor and a poster of Orlando’s official Hispanic Heritage Month

215 2011 celebration—were the words: “50 Millones de Hispanos, Solo Somos Fuertes Si

Votamos. En 2012 los hispanos representan el 10% del voto electoral” (50 million

Hispanic, we are only strong if we vote. In 2012, Hispanics represent 10% of the electorate). Once the meeting was adjourned, the canvassers and I carpooled to our respective neighborhoods and began our final hours of get-out-the-vote.

A “Giant” Awakens?

On Election night, I was with the canvassers of Mi Familia Vota in Orlando,

Florida. As I returned with Jesus and Pablo, with whom I had spent most of the day, the air of accomplishment in their headquarters struck me. The main room had been given an

Election Day makeover; there were red, white, and blue streamers everywhere and miniature American flags decorated a food table, around which hungry canvassers paced.

In the command room was Carolina boasting a bright smile as she exchanged tales with her group leaders. The evening was still young, the presidency far from decided, but the mood was festive and celebratory. Canvassers and their coordinators expressed confidence that they had made “history” and triumphed over apathy, misinformation, and voter suppression. Without the support of a single exit poll, they were convinced that

Orlando’s Latino voters had responded positively to their message and exercised their right to vote. For the moment, no greater validation was needed than the sight of hundreds of people assumed to be Latino waiting in line for hours to cast their vote.

As the evening’s celebration progressed, MFV’s election workers received what they took as statistical confirmation of their observations. Crowded around a large flat screen television rented especially for this occasion, they intently watched the post- election coverage. Cheers and applause erupted as journalists and political pundits began

216 to discuss the impact of the “Latino Vote” nationally and locally. Based on exit poll data, the media soon confirmed that Latino voters participated in higher numbers than in previous elections. By the following morning, these statistics had congealed into a narrative: the country’s fastest growing population and electorate played an important, if not the most important, role in the reelection of President Barack Obama. Fox Latino’s

(2012) post-election day article carried the headline: “Obama Victory Proof that the

Sleeping Latino Giant is Wide Awake.”

Days later, Fox Latino (2012) published another article, which more directly connected demographic change to the election results. Its headline read: “Latinos

Highlight America’s Changing Face.” The article, written by the Associated Press, began with this line: “It’s not just the economy, stupid. It’s the demographics—the changing face of America.” PBS NewsHour’s Ray Suarez (2012), wrote in Foreign Affairs that

Latinos were transforming the electoral map, a reality that makes it “impossible for

Republicans to win enough Electoral College votes to put a candidate in the White

House.” Washington Post editorial board member Jonathan Capehart (2012) titled his post-election commentary: “50,000 shades of dismay for the GOP.” In the press, national

Latino civic engagement projects were cited as one of the key drivers of the increase in

Latino voter turnout. For example, New York Times journalist Lizette Alvarez (2012) wrote, “But how Latinos got that message—the relentless call to register, to vote, to participate—was as important as the message itself: Hispanic television and grass-roots groups working together generated a civic campaign they called Ya Es Hora. Now Is the

Time.”

217 Immediately following the election, Latino leaders—embolden by the turnout— proudly signaled a new day in U.S. politics. NCLR’s director of civic engagement,

Clarissa Martínez told the press, “It’s unequivocally clear now that the road to the White

House goes through Hispanic neighborhoods.” Another leader commented: “That night people discovered Latinos as a political force.” The fall 2012 front cover of LULAC’s quarterly magazine did not mince words. Layered on top of a photo of LULAC staff fielding phone calls from potential voters needing assistance was the headline “Historic

Latino Vote Determines Election.” In its post-election press release, the organization stated, “Before the election, LULAC and our partners had predicted that a record 12 million Latino voters would cast their ballots in the 2012 Presidential race and, based upon exist polling, our prediction has been validated.” Brent Wilkes, LULAC Executive

Director further commented:

We knew there could be two stories out of this election. One could be the Latino vote fizzled and didn’t live up to its promise and another story could be the Latino vote surprised and again was a record historic vote and that it in fact was influential in battle ground states. And that is the story that came out. Because of that, we are now in the [political] position to able to achieve victory in a lot of other issues.

Triumphantly, Ben Monterroso, the head of Mi Familia Vota, told the press: “No more the sleeping Giant… The giant is awake” (Raisa, 2012). In an op-ed in the Huffington

Post, NCLR’s president, Janet Murguía (2012b) wrote:

Since election night, one topic of immense interest to me has dominated the news cycle: the impact of the Latino vote on the 2012 election. After years of being treated as one of the best-kept secrets in politics, the need to reach out to Latino voters has suddenly become the hot topic of conversation for people on both sides of the aisle—even Sean Hannity. It has all the makings of not only a political phenomenon but a cultural phenomenon as well. In fact, if this were a sitcom, it would be called “The New Normal.” And this “New Normal” is not just about 2012; for several

218 key reasons, our community’s clout is only going to grow in every election from here on out (emphasis mine).

Like many other Latino leaders, Murguía framed the election as not only historic, but also as indicative of the future. The country’s political landscape was never going to be the same: Latinos had achieved political recognition. Two months after the election, I returned to Florida to speak with several coordinators and canvassers involved in demonstrating what Murguía described as the “New Normal.” I was curious to hear how they were interpreting public discourse and what impact they believed the election was having. When I spoke to Carolina, MFV’s Florida coordinator, she expressed a similar sentiment:

I was happy. It was an unbelievable thing. I felt like... like we finally existed. They knew we were here. They could no longer ignore us... They are now there reflected in history, the numbers. They will always tell us that on November 6 of 2012, Hispanics said, ‘we live here and those of us here are voting.’ It was decisive. That day changed the attitude of all the candidates from all political parties of this country towards us. They now look at us differently. They now take us into account. They realized that- you now see people who had never in their lives approached them turning in immigration reform proposals. That’s a product of that. They realized that if they want to have a political project, in order to succeed, they have to have the Hispanic vote. Otherwise, they will not succeed. [It is] as simple as that.

Echoing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s PSA, Carolina described the election as rendering

Latinos visible in the public sphere, as proof that they not only “existed” but also that they could no longer be “ignored.” The election, she insisted, was as a major turning point, an interpretation validated by what was at the time a pronounced shift in rhetoric about immigration reform among Republican elected officials.

Indeed, national Latino organizations made explicit their intent to leverage the election turnout for immigration reform. Yet, they were impressed by how quickly the

219 national leadership of the Republican Party seemed to change its position and tone on this issue. SEIU’s Eliseo Medina recounted his impression following the election:

What I did not anticipate, I was hoping for but did not anticipate, was [its] huge impact on the Republicans. It was magnified by the fact that they weren’t expecting it. I’m a boxing fan, I don’t know if you are; they say the biggest punch is the one you don’t see, that’s the one that knocks you out. This guy [Romney] never saw it coming because they didn’t think enough of us to be able to understand that we would participate to that level… They were caught so unaware. All of a sudden they said, oh my God, what are we going to do?

As the year came to a close, there was a strong conviction that “comprehensive immigration reform” was only months away. The possibility of bringing millions “out of the shadows” and ending the legalized exclusion and marginality of the undocumented population seemed just on the horizon.

Discussions about the awakened Latino “giant” were anchored statistically and representationally in the figure of 10%. As touted by national Latino groups and circulated by the media, for the first time in U.S. history, Latino voters accounted for

10% of all voters. For instance, CNN (2011) reported following the election: “The sleeping giant has awoken: Latinos not only helped Obama win in key battleground states, but they made up 10% of the electorate for the first time.” Shortly after the election,

Presente.org, an online-based Latino advocacy group, produced and circulated a colorful infographic on the Latino electorate (see Figure 19). Among the statistics it presented was: “LATINOS were 10% of ALL VOTERS in 2012, up from 8% in 2004.” While the number was projected prior to the election, as the corollary to NALEO’s voter projection, it was after the election that this statistic emerged centrally, standing as proof of a new day in U.S. ethnoracial politics.

220 Figure 19: “The Latino Electorate,” Presente.org, 2012

And yet, the figure of 10% and the narrative of Latino awakening that it expressed came under attack at the very moment it was supposed to translate into legislative influence. Early on, but growing over time, voices began to challenge the idea that the

Latino vote was decisive. A few Republican pundits questioned the impact of the vote based on an analysis of the distribution of Electoral College votes, but this point did not get much public traction (although its influence within the party is unknown to me).

The strongest challenge came with the release of the Census Bureau’s voter data in May 2013. These numbers—widely considered the most accurate data on the election turnout—presented a different picture of the Presidential Election. According to this data, the Latino vote neither met the projection of 12.2 million nor accounted for 10% of the

221 vote. Days after its release, the Pew Hispanic Center revised conclusions they had previously drawn from exit poll data. Although they maintained that the Latino vote was impactful, this impact, Pew analysts admitted, was less than previously thought. In raw numbers, the Latino electorate had grown, but this was mainly due to a demographic, rather than political increase.

The findings of the Census Bureau and the Pew Hispanic analysis were picked up across the media and led to numerous articles with headlines such as “‘Record’ Hispanic

Voter Turnout In 2012 A Misnomer, Census Numbers Show” (Llenas, 2013).

Washington Post journalist Chris Cillizza (2013) wrote an article titled, “The Hispanic vote is a sleeping political giant. It might never wake up.” Cillizza charged:

…While the rapid growth of the Hispanic community is, without question, the demographic story of the last 10 years and the next 10 years, it’s less clear that Latinos are showing any signs of realizing the political influence that goes along with that population increase. Need one stat to prove that point? Hispanics comprised 17.2 percent of the nation’s population but were just 8.4 percent of all voters in 2012.

Along with these statements, some Latino leaders outside of the network of mainstream national groups charged that the projections were exaggerated. In a memo,

Antonio González (2013), president of the William C. Velásquez Institute, the research wing of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, openly criticized the

“awakened” narrative promulgated by national Latino organizations. “Contrary to the claims of hyper mobilized Latino participation in the Nov. 2012 elections the data show

Latino voter participation while continuing to grow apace consistent with historic patterns didn’t come close to post-election pronouncements.” González framed his memo as an attempt to “separate fact from fiction.” In response to these challenges, most national Latino advocacy groups have largely ceased using the 10% figure, but this

222 statistic, as well as the 12.2 million-voter projection, still surface occasionally. For instance, both statistics appear, unscathed, in a recent and widely circulated op-ed by

Loren McArthur (2014), NCLR’s Deputy Director of Civic Engagement, which begins with the line: “The 2012 elections were a powerful demonstration of the growing electoral influence of Latinos.”

From a different position on the political spectrum, some leaders and pundits of the Republican Party and the Tea Party began to quietly defect and, in some cases, openly contest the narrative of Latino ascendancy. These individuals instead developed a new narrative: Mitt Romney lost because of a decrease in the white vote. Conservative commentator, Sean Trende (2013), for example, argued in a four part series that appeasing Latinos and other “minority” voters (i.e. passing comprehensive immigration reform) was a fool’s mission. Rather, the objective should be mobilizing the apparently natural constituency of the Republican Party (i.e. whites). Of course, observers of the

Republican primaries and Romney’s campaign will recall that this strategy was already in full motion, and that it has a much longer history. However, this strategy has come under fire in recent years, but especially in the immediate wake of the 2012 election. While some influential voices within the Right have retreated from the post-election chorus of reformed Republicans, others continue to insist that demography will doom the party if it does not make some adjustments. The contention over the 2012 election even led Karl

Rove (2013) to publish an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “More White Votes

Alone Won't Save the GOP.”

It is not evidently clear to what extent the lack of consensus about the “Latino vote” and its impact on the 2012 election has contributed to the lack of progress on

223 immigration reform. Yet, already over two years after the election, there seems to be little indication that immigration reform—particularly as envisioned by national Latino organizations—will be achieved in the near future.

Conclusion

National Latino spokespersons and organizations worked to orchestrate a demonstration of the future that would undeniably illustrate the realization of long projected Latino political “power.” I show that this public demonstration was only temporarily successful, as the post-election consensus came under fire as new statistics emerged to somewhat destabilize the narrative of Latino “decisiveness.” To be sure, the idea, or better the conviction that the “Latino vote” will eventually assert its influence has not been entirely dismissed. Indeed, regardless of the actual turnout in the 2012 election, demographic projections are still widely taken as evidence that the power of this population will someday be realized; it is just a matter of time. While for the time being that future seems out of reach, Latino advocates are gearing up to transform forthcoming elections into ideal stages for the realization of the demographic future.

This chapter sheds light on the political deployment of statistical projections in electoral politics. In doing so, it contributes to recent research on social life and effects of statistics. Similar to the work of Espeland and Stevens (2008) and others, it reveals that what I term statistical effects takes considerable work—both at the level of categorical commensuration and efforts to secure public uptake. Key to the analysis presented here was the statistical creation of expectations about Latino voter turnout. As projections circulated, it became a “fact” that this constituency would decide the election and likely many elections to come. However, these expectations outstripped the capacity of national

224 Latino organizations to materialize the vote. Moreover, it illustrates that statistical effects have variable degrees of stability and permanence, and that the emergence of competing statistics can unsettle or destabilize statistical performances.

In light of the subject matter of the previous chapter, it is important to note that national Latino groups were not the only actors engaged and engaging in temporal politics. In fact, the theme of “demographic change” loomed heavily over the 2012 presidential election. Take, for instance, the election night comments made by conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Long before Obama was declared a winner, O’Reilly stated: “It’s a changing country, the demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore… The white establishment is now the minority.” On the other side of the ideological spectrum, some took the election (and its democratic coalition) as signs of an emerging “new majority.” In a sense, the 2012 election season became what Ann Mische (2014, p. 438) has recently termed a “site of hyperprojectivity,” that is, “arenas of heightened, future-oriented public debate about contending futures.”

Consequently, the 2012 election provided a productive vantage point from which to empirically study how political actors—such as candidates, partisan strategists, voter registrars, voters, and journalists—understood, represented, and contested demographic futures. This chapter, focused on national Latino advocacy, only details one set of stories about temporal politics of the demographic future in the 2012 election.

225

CONCLUSION

We, who have not received the gift of seercraft from the gods, do not have such knowledge. We do not even know what to wish and what to pray for. —Alfred Schütz (1959)

Temporal Tensions

In the wake of the 2012 election, national Latino advocates have continued to engage in temporal politics; the future is a source of inspiration against the backdrop of a challenging present. A month after the election, the heads of the leading national Latino advocacy organizations gathered at NCLR’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. to demand swift action on immigration reform. At this point in time, there was still widespread consensus that the Latino vote was decisive. In her opening remarks, Janet

Murguía insisted, “with the results of this election the political case has been made for a bipartisan solution to this issue.” Demands were placed on both major political parties and President Obama to make progress on the issue. Murguía continued, “And given the demographics, it is clearly in the best interest of both parties to do so as well.” Speaking after Murguía, Eliseo Medina spoke directly to national legislators. “In case Congress is hard of hearing, we want to remind the House in the Senate that our voices will become stronger and louder, now, in 2014 and well into the future.” Other speakers, such as

226 Maria Teresa Kumar, similarly urged legislative action in light of the future growth of the

Latino population and electorate.

We’re here to share that we’re coming back stronger because we recognize that our numbers are only growing on the horizon and we cannot wait to 2014 to make out voiced heard. We have time on our side, we have numbers on our side, we have allies on our side and we have individuals that are standing before you that work very hard day and night to make sure that we’re representing our community wisely.

Max Sevillia, from the Mexican Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) added: “Latino voter engagement will continue to grow in the coming years ensuring that the candidates who ignore the voting block will do so at their own peril.” These statistically informed claims about the future, articulated to realize politically aims, remain important tools for these advocates.

The preceding chapters track the role of demographic knowledge in the temporal politics of national Latino advocacy. In pursuit of political recognition, groups like LULAC and Voto Latino—as well as their counterparts in local settings around the country—invested heavily in the enumeration of the Latino population. A desire for data motivated them to engage in consent-building for the

2010 census. As detailed in Chapter 3, leaders worked aggressively to transform indifference into interest, arguing that participation would ensure greater access to sorely needed federal resources and increase political representation. They also attempted to assuage frustrations with the “race” question and minimize distrust and fear in the census, particularly among undocumented individuals. Finally,

Latino advocates raised a public challenge against a boycott demanding immigration reform before enumeration. In Chapter Four, I described how anxieties over white demographobia have impacted the ways in which these

227 political actors talk about the Latino population and its demographic growth. In the previous chapter, I narrated how national Latino organizations and spokespersons used statistical knowledge in effort to demonstrate the “power” of the Latino vote in the 2012 election and going forward. Together, these political efforts were orchestrated to resolve what advocates consider the major paradox haunting Latino politics: the documented (and projected) growth of the U.S.

Latino population has not resulted in greater political influence and recognition, and has even, to the contrary, contributed to a more precarious, marginalized state.

Indeed, the inability to convert growth into power remains a defining preoccupation and frustration for these spokespersons. After a period of consensus, the

2012 election seems to have only temporarily demonstrated the “power” of the Latino vote. As described in Chapter Five, their public demonstration began to unravel at the very moment it was supposed to translate into political influence. When we look closely we find that the mobilization of statistics created expectations that the mobilization of voters could not meet. However, this was not merely a logistical problem. It was also, I contend, rooted in a temporal disjuncture between the present and the future.

To render this disjuncture more clearly visible, I would like to briefly reflect on two dominant characterizations of the Latino demographic that pervade the empirical content of this dissertation and much public discourse. The first characterization is the

“sleeping giant,” which has been used by the media to describe this population for decades.75 This metaphor simultaneously signals size, cohesion, and an ironic (or perhaps

75 I should note that Latino leaders are somewhat ambivalent about the phrase, “sleeping giant.” While some leaders do use the phrase, others are critical of it. For example, during her speech at the 2014 LULAC National Legislative Conference and Awards Gala, Texas State Senator, Leticia Van de Putte commented: “I was recently asked by a media person that I really liked, about the

228 tragic) inability to act. Sleeping giants have potential power; but this power cannot be realized in the present state of slumber.

The second characterization has only appeared explicitly in several recent articles and commentaries, although my research suggests its underlying meaning is quite pervasive. It is captured in the phrase: the “law of large numbers.” In a series of essays,

Henry Cisneros, former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban

Development under the Clinton Administration, has made explicit use of this phrase. In a

2009 op-ed, Cisneros wrote:

The concept of the ‘Law of Large Numbers,’ as it applies to the Latino population of the United States must and will result in extraordinary changes in our society as a whole… quantitative changes inevitably bring forth qualitative changes… Latinos will move the national averages in almost every measurable category of American life—economic, social indicators and educational attainment (Cisneros, 2009).

While Cisneros’ description of the ‘law of large numbers’ departs from the meaning given by statisticians, it is a clear example of the conviction that Latino demographics will “inevitably” bring about societal change. Unlike the “giant” metaphor, the “Law” characterization does not rely on whether the “giant” awakens and exercises its latent political and economic power. Here lies the critical difference. Though both stress demographics (i.e. ‘giant’ and ‘large numbers’), the “sleeping giant” hinges on the dream of a collective subject able to induce itself into action. In contrast, “large numbers” treats

word, ‘when are we going to have Latinos participate in the numbers that we know that we can.’ And he referred to, again, the word, ‘sleeping giant.’ Now, I have always found that rather offensive. It reminds me of the little statues that I saw as child, the man who was in a white traje and he’s got a sarate, and he’s got a sombrero and he’s kind of laying down. And for some reason they always have a bottle of beer or tequila at his side. You know the statue, right? It reminds me of that, and it portrays that we’re lazy, that we don’t care, that we’re taking a siesta. So I told him if he said sleeping giant one more time I was going to throw my chancla (slipper) at him.”

229 Latino demography as an objective force, irrespective of whether this population develops a group consciousness and mobilizes itself accordingly. Once it surpasses some unspecified numerical threshold, Latino demographics will become increasingly a matter of destiny.

Although its explicit use is not as popular as the “sleeping giant” metaphor, I believe it is no less influential. In 2009, The Economist, for instance, published an editorial on the “Hispanicisation of the America” with a headline that read: “The Law of

Large Numbers.” The article concludes with a quote from Arturo Rodríguez, who was described as the “president of the (very Hispanic) United Farm Workers union and son- in-law of César Chávez.” Rodríguez, we are told, recognizes that Latino population growth is causing anxiety among whites, but cautions against a backlash because, as he put it, “In the long run we’ll win… Why? Because we have the numbers.”

Throughout this dissertation, there has been a complicated interplay between notions of the “sleeping giant” and the “law of large numbers,” that is, between a sense that the Latino population can already exert influence (if it awakens) and a sense that the realization of this influence is evitable. For example, in the previous chapter, NALEO’s

Latino voter projection of 12.2 million expressed a vision encapsulated in the metaphor of the “giant,” while claims about the ever-growing Latino electorate—such as the statistic that 50,000 Latino citizens turn 18 every month—stem from a view approximating Cisneros’ assertion. I should note here that when census voter data challenged somewhat overdrawn conclusions about the electoral power of the Latino vote in 2012, leaders retorted that—despite the lack of mobilization—the “Latino vote”

230 nonetheless had an impact on the outcome. As evidence for the ‘large numbers’ thesis, they insisted that raw growth rather than an awakened constituency made the difference.

By contrasting these two characterizations and their respective temporal registers,

I argue we can see a perhaps unresolvable tension—a tension between a politics oriented towards the present that requires a possibly impossible task (i.e. awakening a subject whose very existence is uncertain) and a politics oriented towards a future considered inevitable but always too distant. This tension, while pervasive, was most clear in the

2012 election. As previously stated, national Latino leaders sought to persuade that the future was, in a sense, already or almost here. The operative assumption being that in this imagined future, this population commands the recognition and influence desired and needed to address contemporary marginality. But the success of this demonstration demanded that Latino individuals and communities—regardless of their diverse inclinations, aspirations, and orientations—awaken in a very particular way: Latinos and

Latinas must march to the polling station (and fill out the census), for if not, the future would remain in the future and the present would remain, lamentably, the present. Indeed, as Janet Murguia once instructed a room full of NCLR affiliates: only a high voter turnout in 2012 would “accelerate” the inevitable.

Revisiting the Scholarly Debate on Demographic Change

Scholars have, as I noted in the introduction, actively debated about the future of the U.S. ethnoracial order. Some scholars argue that the country is moving towards a

“post-racial” future (Hollinger, 2011; Prewitt, 2013) while others charge that race will continue to be a stratifying principle into the foreseeable future. Among this latter group, there is disagreement over whether the future ethnoracial order will be structured by a

231 tripartite racial system (Bonilla-Silva, 2004; Golash-Boza, 2006) or a binary one based on a black-non-black division (J. Lee & Bean, 2012; Warren & Twine, 1997). Despite the fruitfulness of this debate, and the need to continue theorizing the racial future, I argue that scholars have largely ignored the ways in which imagined racial futures are shaping the present. My objective was not to refute or take sides in the debate—although I am less convinced by the post-racial position—but rather it was to make the case that our scholarly debate must take seriously the contemporary politics and knowledge of demographic change.

The case study of national Latino civil rights advocacy provides entrée into the broader temporal politics of demographic change. This requires, as I have endeavored to do in this dissertation, investigating the social and political life of demographic knowledge, and specifically, the ways in which racial projects are mobilizing statistically projected futures in the present. Ever since the 1960s, civil rights organizations and leaders have relied on statistics to tell the story of inequality and discrimination; they continue to serve this function today. But the analysis I have presented suggests statistics do much more work than that. Specifically, demographic projections provide instruments for making claims on the present in light of the seemingly inevitable demographic tomorrow. At stake here is the desire for political recognition, and the prospect of elevating the position of this panethnic population within the U.S. ethnoracial order. As I show, the specific rhetorics about the future expressed by these political actors are calibrated against growing anti-Latino and immigrant sentiments (Chavez, 2008; R. D.

Flores, 2014; Gonzales, 2014), which I argue are anchored in a historically cemented white “sense of group position” (Blumer 1958). It is, therefore, no surprise that racial

232 politics over the country’s future are sites of intense affects, from aspirations and hopes to anxieties and feelings of threat. Yet, within debates on the transformation of the ethnoracial order, these conflicts and their racial affects have rarely been subjects of analysis. More broadly, this analysis suggests the need for further exploration into the intersection between political imaginaries, affects, and futures.

Affect, Futures, and the Political Horizon

In a recent book, Arjun Appadurai (2013) reflects on anthropology’s lack of attention to the future. He writes, “Anthropology has had surprisingly little to say about the future as a cultural fact, except in fragments and by ethnographic accident” (p. 285).

Confined to a concern with “pastness,” anthropology “remains preoccupied with the logic of reproduction, the force of custom, the dynamics of memory, the persistence of habitus, the glacial movement of the everyday, and the cunning of tradition in the social life of even the most modern movements and communities…” (p. 285). His assessment, while directed at his discipline, very much applies to sociology. Like anthropology, sociology has traditionally not paid much attention to “humans as future-makers” (Appadurai 2013, p. 285).76 Indeed, as Ann Mische (2014, p. 437) has noted, “while there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources, content, and consequences of collective memory, the study of future projections has been much more segmented and fragmentary.”

Only recently has sociology begun to take seriously the future (e.g., Fine, 2009; Frye,

2012; D. Gibson, 2011; Mische, 2009; Tavory & Eliasoph, 2013). As with anthropology, this should not be taken to mean that sociology has entirely ignored the future. In fact, recent research has returned to the works of thinkers like George Herbert Mead (1932)

76 As this dissertation makes evident, people make futures with the active assistance of knowledge, technologies, and material objects.

233 and Alfred Schütz (1959; 1967) to constitute the “future” as a legitimate object of sociological research and theory.

This dissertation contributes to recent sociological and social scientific mediations on the future. It has, in its own way, shown concern with the question of how and in what ways imaginings of the future shape human action and understandings in the present.

Specifically, I have focused on the ways that ethnoracial futures, often understood as inevitable, have motivated and been mobilized by racial projects. Mische (2009, p. 699) reminds that it does not matter if future projections “actually” predict the future; instead what matters is the extent to which projections “lead people to act (or not act) in particular ways.” Yet, in contrast with the nascent “sociology of the future,” the analysis presented in the preceding chapters invites greater attention to the relationship between imagined futures and affects (e.g., hope and fear). Much of the recent sociological research approaches the future as a matter of cognition. Although Mische (2009; 2004) has commented on hope, her writings emphasize the cognitive structures of imagined futures, evident in her nine dimensions of projectivity: reach, breath, clarity, contingency, expandability, volition, sociality, connectivity, and genre (Mische 2009, p. 699-701). Yet, as Appadurai (2013, p. 287) has noted, the future is also “shot through with affect and with sensation,” capable of producing “awe, vertigo, excitement, disorientation.” Indeed, this dissertation illustrates that it is impossible to make sense of contemporary racial politics or even theorize the racial future without taking into stock the role of anticipations and anxieties over demographic change.

While Alfred Schütz has been a major influence on the cognition-focused sociology of the future, I believe his writings offer a sociological starting point for an

234 approach to the future more attentive to affect. In his classic essay, “Tiresias, Or Our

Knowledge of Future Events,” Schütz (1959) explores the kinds of knowledge human beings possess about the future. Schütz returns to the Greek myth of Tiresias, who in one version received the “gift of seercraft” from the gods after he was blinded upon seeing

Athena naked. As an embodiment of a rhetorical device common to Ancient Greek literature, Tiresias’ gift is a tragic irony; he can see into the future, but is blind to the present. Tiresias’ visions are neither illusions nor speculative, and are not even expressions of probability or chance—they are articulations of certainty. But Schütz’s essay is less about Tiresias than with the knowledge of the future possessed by regular people. His real interest lies in “the manner in which the commonsense thinking of ordinary men, leading their everyday life among their fellowmen, anticipates things to come” (p. 75). He therefore uses Tiresias as a point of contrast. Schütz distinguishes ordinary people from Tiresias in three major ways. First, unlike the seer, whose visions of the future are “independent of his pre-experiences,” the rest of us interpret our past, present, and future based on our “pre-organized stock of knowledge.” Second, the seer is

“unconcerned” with the future, while regular human beings are “eminently interested” in it. Lastly, Tiresias’ visions are private and inaccessible to others, while ordinary people’s knowledge of the future is intersubjective and publically available.

If our knowledge of the future is profoundly different from Tiresias, then what kind of knowledge do we have of things to come? Schütz describes two kinds of knowledge, both of which are rooted in our stock of knowledge. These two forms, as will become evident, are distinguished in terms of agency. Our first kind of knowledge of the future is one of the cornerstones of the cognitive approach discussed above. This kind of

235 knowledge addresses the future we believe we have some control over, in which we feel like we can intervene. For Schütz, all action is projective; meaning it involves actors projecting into the future a completed act, and then working backwards from that completed act to sketch the steps to be taken to reach that goal.77 By focusing on projectivity, recent research has been largely confined to what Schütz described as “the realm of future events that we assume can be influenced by our actions” (p. 88).

But what of the realm actors believe is beyond their control or influence? Here is where Schütz’s second kind of knowledge of the future emerges. Unlike Tiresias, we do not have knowledge of what is going to actually happen; all we can do is anticipate the future. This anticipatory knowledge pertains to knowledge about the future that we cannot control and that will eventually impose itself on us. Drawing on our stock of knowledge, we can anticipate certain things will happen, such as the assumption that the end of the workweek will bring the weekend. However, Schütz reminds that the future is ultimately a horizon of indeterminacy, which can only be validated once it materializes, or comes to pass, if it ever does. Thus, with respect to the future we cannot control, he writes we are “observers governed by hopes and fears” (p. 88).78

77 Although projection is an imaginative process, Schütz insists this process is structured by one’s stock of knowledge. This discussion was a major influence on Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) temporal reformulation of the concept of agency. They conceptualize agency as composed of three dynamically interplaying “temporal-relational contexts of action.” The first is the “iterational” or the habitual dimension of social existence, which provides stability and continuity. The second, the focus of this paper, is the “projective” or future-oriented element and the third is the “practical-evaluative” aspect, which refers to the human capacity to reflect and judge emergent situations. As described by Emirbayer and Mische, the projective dimension described by Schütz plays a unique role; it is the source of imagination and innovation. Projectivity represents the “creative reconstructive dimension of agency” (p. 984), which enables actors to creatively imagine alternative scenarios. 78 Schütz likens this state to an audience observing a play. We are interested in how the play is going to turn out, but merely watch an unfolding narrative, which we do not exactly know how it will end. But, using our stock of knowledge, such as rhetorical cues and genres, we anticipate (but do not know for sure) how the play will conclude.

236 Schütz’s discussion of Tiresias and human knowledge of the future raises a number of interesting questions. But most important for the preceding discussion is his alertness to affect. Different from Tiresias, who possesses “immediate and originary knowledge of future events,” and thus has no reason to fear or hope what lies ahead,

Schütz believes that regular human beings can only anticipate a more or less unknown future (p. 88-89). This indeterminacy, he argues, generates affects like hopes and fears.79

Unfortunately, Schütz does not dwell on his insights on affect, seeming more concerned with the agentic properties of the first kind of knowledge of the future. Lacking elaboration, Schütz tends to treat anticipation as a natural phenomenon, perhaps an innate capacity of conscious subjects. Yet, while this may be the case, this dissertation suggests that specific forms of anticipation are mediated by particular “problem-spaces” (Scott

1999), which bestow upon social actors historically grounded categories, preoccupations, and possibilities. As I have argued with respect to demographic change, white

“demographobia” is not an automatic response to the numerical growth of certain populations; rather it is a statistical effect sparked by racial projects mobilizing numbers and narratives to characterize “demographic change” as tantamount to the end of white civilization. Therefore, one of the major implications of this dissertation is the need to study how and in what ways affects are politically generated, channeled, and managed.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that affects and sensations also give

“various configurations of aspiration, anticipation and imagination their specific gravity,

79 An interesting question, which I do not pursue here, is how statistical projections—especially those treated as fact—figure in Schütz’s scheme. In this essay, he does not dismiss the possibility of scientific prediction, but positions it outside of the scope of his argument. What we see in the above empirical analysis is a situation where political actors possess what seems to be Tiresias- like knowledge of the future, and yet are still governed by hopes and fears, as Schütz suggests ordinary human beings are.

237 their traction, and their texture” (Appadurai 2013, p. 287). Affects thus are not simply the outcome of political processes, but can intervene on the political horizon, that is, understandings about what is “politically possible, desirable, and necessary” (Gould 2009, p. 3). Hope in the demographic future led, for example, national Latino leaders to actively work on realizing those projections in the present. As quoted in the opening lines of this dissertation, when Janet Murguía addressed the attendees of NCLR’s 2011 conference, she declared that the future was “ours to achieve.” Murguía expressed, “ I don’t want to wait for the inevitable demographic tide to bring our community to shore.” Her optimism in that perhaps utopic future where Latinos are no longer a “minority”—in the sense of marginal and taken-for-granted—has led her and her colleagues to work towards that future. Consequently, we might do well to examine the dialectics between the political generation of affects and the effects of those hopes and fears on the political imagination.

Towards a Sociology of Temporal Politics

To conclude, this dissertation also opens up grounds for the sociological study of

“temporal politics,” defined as the use of temporality as an instrument and stake of political struggle. While developed to understand struggles over demographic change, I believe the concept could be profitably applied to other cases where temporalities are being intentionally politicized. An obvious case is climate change, a topic with profound planetary implications, where science has achieved consensus, but the future in question remains uncertain and disputed in the public sphere. In this regard, it is quite different from demographic change, which has come to be taken as inevitable. Here, an analysis of temporal politics could focus on the ways that uncertainty, rather inevitably, are generated through the politicization of knowledge about the future. An existing example

238 of this kind of research is the work of Javier Auyero and Débora Swistun (2009), who have studied the production of “doubt” in circumstances of environmental suffering.

The concept of temporal politics could help us locate diverse scholarly works that have been, to some degree, attentive to the politics of time, but which have not interacted or cross-pollinated. The scholarly research on “invented traditions” and collective memory, as I note in Chapter One, is full of examples of the political use of temporal representations. How do these studies differ from more future-oriented politics? Or more broadly, we might ask what kinds of conditions or constraints different temporal representations place on their politicization. Olick (1999, p. 381), for instance, asserts,

“past meanings are malleable to varying degrees, and present circumstances exploit these potentials more or less.” For Olick, the meaning of the past is not wholly determined by the instrumental aims of the present, but rather is a negotiated accomplishment. While one can argue that the “past” carries some weight that must be wrestled with, what about the future, a field of imagination by definition indeterminate? As noted above, recent sociological research on the future and temporal accounts of agency (e.g. Emirbayer and

Mische, 1998) tend to approach the future as a site of creativity and improvisation. And yet, certain imagined futures, such as those discussed here, are, more or less, viewed as fixed and inevitable. Ultimately, further theorizing and empirical research is needed to better understand how different temporalities impinge upon or enable specific manifestations of temporal politics. In fact, we are currently without a compendium of case studies of temporal politics across different time periods, substantive concerns, and kinds of tactics. I believe such an effort could generate important insights about different

239 ways in which political actors have use the “past,” “present,” or the “future” to structure social relations and intervene in political life.

The particular approach I have charted in this dissertation pays close attention the role of statistical knowledge, processes of circulation, affect, and political imaginaries, in order to understand how visions of the so-called “Browning of America” are understood, felt, and actively brought to bear on our ethnoracial present. Although the future remains open, we can rest assure that temporal politics will always be on the horizon, and therefore deserving of sociological investigation.

240

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