The Silent Minority Plans a Rebellion

Latinos are the power in America’s West that could decide the election in Obama’s favor – provided they actually vote.

The situation in the Wild West is serious. More serious than ever. A lot of folks in the small northern Colorado town of Greeley will tell you that. Here, where the Stars and Stripes flies from every other porch and the faint odor of cow manure permeates the town, covering the well-tended lawns like a cowboy’s dirty blanket, you can’t help but notice that rebellion is in the air.

There, for example, is Tom Selders, the quiet gentleman with a silver-gray mane of hair and laughter lines around his eyes. For nearly 62 years, the businessman sporting the Rotary Club pin in his lapel has belonged to the red-staters, i.e., the Republicans who virtually rule this flat part of Colorado they call “God’s country”. Selders served as mayor here and says, “Being a Republican around here sort of goes without saying.” Then he grins mischievously, takes a sip of coffee and says, “Meanwhile, I’ve registered as a Democrat and I’m voting for Obama.”

Then there’s Sylvia Martinez, who lives in the eastern quarter of Greeley. That is to say, she lives there where the asphalt on the roads is rougher and the white paint is peeling from the small, wood frame houses. Here, one-third of Greeley’s darker-skinned residents live, those who work as day laborers gathering onions and sugar beet during the harvest season. These are the Latinos who go to work every morning in the gigantic meat processing plants at the edge of the city and spend their day cutting up sides of beef. Sylvia Martinez, mother of two and an untiring activist in her Latino neighborhood, is really fired up today because she thinks now is the moment for big change: “This time we can stop the Republicans,” she says.

At the beginning of the week, Martinez tanked up with the power of that optimism that has kept her going for months. The power that enables her to get through the twelve and sometimes even fourteen hour days as a volunteer for the Obama campaign. A representative of the agricultural worker’s union has come to Joe’s Garage, the backyard Democratic headquarters in the Latino quarter. He has come to drill into the volunteers the thought they’ve already long ago put up on the walls: “The road to the presidency runs right through Greeley.”

Between the buckets of paint and the workbenches, the union rep gives a breakdown of why, especially here in a hard-core, conservative part of America’s West, they will be the deciding factor in the race to the White House. “In order for Obama to win, we have to conquer Colorado. And to win Colorado, we have to start right here in this county,” the union rep from Denver argues. Everyone nods in agreement, and a smile sweeps across Sylvia Martinez’s face at the back of the hall as he concludes his rule of three by saying, “And in order to win here, we have to get out the Latino vote.”

Never before have America’s Latinos felt so powerfully courted, especially in America’s West. Of course, many white voters in states like New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado, states that all went Republican in the 2004 election, are tending toward the Democrats as well. But despite the anger against George W. Bush, despite all the frustration over the war in Iraq and the economic crisis at home, Obama’s lead is only slight. In Colorado, for example, the black Senator’s advantage in most polls among white voters fluctuates within the margin of error. Only among Latinos is there a clear trend: two of every three Coloradoans whose parents or ancestors immigrated from Mexico or Central America express a clear preference for Obama.

A silent revolution via postal voting

Right now, nobody in the state knows how many votes this will amount to on November 4th. Too many Latinos have never registered to vote and far too many registered Hispanics haven’t bothered to vote in the past. “That’s what’s going to change this time,” Sylvia Martinez believes. And that’s what she’s working to accomplish everywhere. That was her purpose in assembling the whole family in her living room on Wednesday. The little sisters, the favorite cousins, the silent brother-in-law and even her mother are seated on the sofa, watching the TV debate between Obama and McCain.

Sylvia’s prospective sister-in-law, Carmen, admits to skipping many past elections. “It wasn’t until Sylvia got me going,” she shyly admits, that her outlook changed. Now, she proudly says, “I nagged both my brothers into registering.” That’s the first step, and the second step is about to be taken. The television debate is hardly finished before Sylvia pushes the vote by mail applications out on the dining room table. Her mother is first to take one: family name, first name, address and Juanita Martinez seems relieved to have all the paperwork behind her. She gives her daughter a kiss and says, “I’d never in my life” vote Republican, “but too often in the past I haven’t bothered to vote at all.”

Colorado has registered 21,700 new voters this year. In Weld County alone, the large country to which Greeley belongs, 2,000 were registered and nearly half of those eligible have since applied to vote by mail. Both figures are an indication that the Obama campaign’s efforts to mobilize Colorado’s so far silent minority are succeeding. Like most Latinos, whoever works for an hourly wage can’t afford to take time off work to stand in line at the polling station on the first Tuesday in November. Voting by mail, agrees Sylvia Martinez, is “the best way for our silent revolution to succeed.” If she’s right, the underdogs of Greeley will become the king makers of Washington.

Former mayor Tom Selders isn’t convinced. He’s been burned before: “When it came down to it last time, the Latinos stayed home.” It’s exactly one year since a Republican replaced him in office. He “showed too much sympathy for brown people.” At least that’s how an anonymous contemporary observer of Greeley history put it in recounting the incident that put Greeley on the national map during the 2006 election: Immigration police had lined up outside the meat packing plant and arrested, jailed and eventually deported 265 illegal workers. At the invitation of religious solidarity groups, Selders traveled to Washington a few months later in order to testify about the inhumane treatment of those arrested by the authorities. All hell broke loose among Republicans and Selders ended up being replaced by a beefy ex-police officer who isn’t plagued by so many scruples.

Selders whispers when he talks about that “terrible time” and also when he recalls that as a typical young man of the time, he didn’t have much to do with “those people”. He says that East Greeley was like a foreign country to him. In those days, window signs often proclaimed “no dogs, no Mexicans” and Latinos were only allowed in the municipal swimming pool the day before the pool was scheduled for cleaning.

Since then, of course, a lot has changed. “Not even many Latinos have grasped how strong we’ve become,” laughs Sylvia Martinez. “But that’s going to change on November 4th, too.” She admits that she and the people in her neighborhood let Tom Selders down in the last election, but she’s “absolutely certain” that it will be different this time around. “Viva Obama!” Where does this confidence come from? “Sometimes I don’t know myself,” Sylvia says. “But sometimes confidence is all we have.”