{"id":13493,"date":"2023-08-08T18:31:21","date_gmt":"2023-08-08T18:31:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13493"},"modified":"2023-08-09T22:19:33","modified_gmt":"2023-08-09T22:19:33","slug":"theres-no-playbook-for-what-alex-padilla-is-trying-to-do-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13493","title":{"rendered":"There\u2019s No Playbook for What Alex Padilla Is Trying to Do"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

California\u2019s new senator, who filled Kamala Harris\u2019s seat, is hoping to speak for his fellow Latinos. That won\u2019t be easy.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by  Christian Paz<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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Alex padilla was radicalized early. The young man was 21, freshly graduated from MIT with a mechanical-engineering degree, and he had returned to his childhood home in the San Fernando Valley to figure out his next step. From the television in the living room, Padilla heard a grim <\/a>voice <\/a>offer a warning<\/a>: \u201cThey keep coming.\u201d Grainy black-and-white video showed shady figures wading through cars waiting in line at the crossing in San Ysidro. \u201cTwo million illegal immigrants in California. The federal government won\u2019t stop them at the border, yet requires us to pay billions to take care of them,\u201d the voice added, menacingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWho is it that they\u2019re referring to? Latinos coming from Mexico to California to work?\u201d Padilla thought. \u201cThat\u2019s the big threat?\u201d The people in the ad could just as easily have been his family, so when the time came to protest anti-immigrant legislation in the state, he eagerly joined. Padilla and his mom gathered a group of neighbors to attend the massive 1994 demonstration in downtown Los Angeles against a ballot referendum that would limit immigrants\u2019 access to public services. In doing so, he put himself on a path that would lead him to the Senate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Memories of that segregated California still have an influence over the man now representing the country\u2019s most populous state. Padilla, who was sworn in on Inauguration Day, finds himself in a unique moment in Latino political history, both as the first Latino senator from California and as a first-generation Mexican American, an identity that\u2019s uncommon in the top levels of the U.S. government. (Padilla was appointed to finish Kamala Harris\u2019s term, which ends next year.) He came of political age while California was experiencing a rocky transformation from a Republican-dominated, majority-white state into a solidly blue state with a Latino plurality. Now he\u2019s in Washington as America undergoes a similar demographic change, with Black and brown Americans becoming bigger players in the electorate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Claiming a spot as a national Latino leader won\u2019t be easy. Latinos in the United States remain divided across class, education, nationality, and geography. The 2020 election reminded the country, and the Democratic Party, that while many of these voters share a language, not much else cuts cleanly across the Latino community\u2014even the term Latino<\/em> was invented rather recently<\/a>. That reality presents a major challenge for anyone hoping to speak for or to American Latinos. Any politician runs the risk of flattening the diversity of Latinos as he tries to reach as big an audience as possible, and a generic appeal to identity could turn off those who don\u2019t see themselves reflected in any one person. And to be clear: The audience Padilla is trying to reach is<\/em> big. Latinos are already the country\u2019s largest minority, and their share of the American electorate will continue to grow over the next decade\u2014a Latino becomes eligible to vote every 30 seconds<\/a>. Most of them are Mexican American, like Padilla himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Padilla told me that, through his work in the Senate, he wants \u201cto ensure that the American dream my family has experienced in the San Fernando Valley is still within reach.\u201d The past four years have tested that dream for millions, especially Black and brown Americans. Can Padilla convince them that the Democratic Party will keep it alive?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Padilla made two promises in high school that changed the course of his life. The first was to a family friend who\u2019d just completed his first year at MIT, and who pestered Padilla about applying to the elite school. Like Padilla, the friend was from Pacoima, a majority\u2013Mexican American, working-class neighborhood 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles. At the time, Padilla had his heart set on a university with a good engineering program near a beach, but the friend bothered him so much that he vowed to apply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there was the promise to his parents. \u201cI knew that if I got in, I needed to go,\u201d he told me in a recent interview over Zoom. \u201cYes, it was a chance of a lifetime for me to get a good education. But it would be the fulfillment of my parents\u2019 dreams. It\u2019s why they came to the United States.\u201d His parents, Lupe and Santos, a housekeeper and a short-order cook, respectively, feature prominently in the stories Padilla tells about his political career. (Lupe died in 2018; Santos lives in the same home that Padilla grew up in.) His voice thickened when he told me about how his dad would interrupt him late at night while he was working on school assignments to remind him of his duty to graduate college: \u201cMi hijo, cuando crezcas, quiero que trabajes con tu mente, y no con tu espalda.<\/em>\u201d \u201cSon, when you grow up, I want you to work with your mind, and not your back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of honor in manual labor, and I don\u2019t want that to be misrepresented, but that was his way of saying he wanted better for us,\u201d Padilla said. So when the time came to leave the Valley, he packed everything he had in two tote bags and flew to Logan International Airport to spend four years in a drastically less brown town: Cambridge, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MIT was where Padilla first encountered the striking diversity of the country\u2019s growing Latino population. In 1990, when he arrived, the school was overwhelmingly<\/a> white, which made befriending other Latino students an easy\u2014and necessary\u2014task. Padilla\u2019s dorm room on the second floor of Bexley Hall quickly became a spot for Puerto Ricans and Central Americans from New York and Cuban Americans from Florida to meet with Mexican Americans from Southern California. They talked about how different they were from their wealthy white classmates, and how they needed to band together to thrive in a white-dominated space. \u201cGod knows how many Latinos there were, but we would stick together, and it was actually pretty crucial because we couldn\u2019t just up and leave for home for the weekend,\u201d Xavier Velazquez, a childhood friend of Padilla\u2019s and his sophomore-year roommate, told me. During holidays such as Thanksgiving, Padilla and Velazquez would await care packages from home and share their tamales, nopal cacti, and jalape\u00f1o and piqu\u00edn peppers with other classmates. Long after getting the chance to move to a more spacious single room, Padilla continued living in the double in order to provide his friends with a gathering space, Velazquez said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The California that Padilla returned to after graduating was less inviting than the community he\u2019d built at school, and the state\u2019s political clashes would forge a new generation of young Latino activists. Like others of that generation, Padilla was galvanized by Proposition 187\u2014the referendum that he and his mother protested right after he left MIT\u2014as well as the openly anti-immigrant<\/a> reelection effort of then\u2013Republican Governor Pete Wilson, who boasted in ads of his attempts to punish undocumented immigrants. Proposition 187 would have denied public services, such as nonemergency health care and public education, to people suspected of being undocumented, and many Latinos, including Padilla, saw it as an attempt to scapegoat immigrants for the recession California had experienced earlier in the 1990s. Although voters approved the referendum, it faced swift challenges in the courts and was never implemented. It did, however, change California politics, by compelling Latinos to acquire citizenship, vote, run for office, and shun the state GOP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this was happening as Padilla was about to take his first step on the political ladder. He spent about a year at an engineering desk job before he started working in politics professionally, including as the campaign manager for Tony C\u00e1rdenas\u2019s state-assembly bid in 1996. He had a knack for connecting with constituents, C\u00e1rdenas, now a five-term U.S. representative from the San Fernando Valley, told me. Voters and campaign volunteers \u201csaw in me, and they saw in my general, Alex, themselves and their children and their community.\u201d (Earlier this year, Padilla crashed on C\u00e1rdenas\u2019s couch while looking for a D.C. apartment.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within just a few years, Padilla would run for Los Angeles City Council, and weave his youth, working-class background, and Latino identity into his pitch to voters and potential endorsers\u2014including labor unions, whose white bosses led a growing Latino membership. In the days after the September 11 attacks, Padilla, then the first Latino and youngest city-council president, served as the city\u2019s acting mayor, speaking to Los Angeles from the steps of city hall and giving TV and radio interviews in both English and Spanish. (Mayor James Hahn was stranded in Washington at the time.) \u201cHe had to rise to the occasion and provide a sense of leadership and guidance and comfort to the residents of Los Angeles, and the fact that he was able to do that in two languages was particularly impactful,\u201d Arturo Vargas, Padilla\u2019s longtime friend and the CEO of the NALEO Educational Fund, a Latino civil-rights group, told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 2006, Padilla was in Sacramento, where he would work for about 14 years as a state senator and secretary of state. Though a wide range of topics fell under his purview, voting rights and ballot access\u2014both of which are now core Democratic Party priorities\u2014emerged as Padilla\u2019s loudest areas of advocacy, and they\u2019ve remained so. As secretary of state, he ushered in same-day voting registration, allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister to vote online, and automatically registered Californians when they got their driver\u2019s license, among other measures. (He also welcomed national attention when he refused<\/a> to cooperate<\/a> with the Trump administration\u2019s first round of voter-fraud investigations, in 2017.)  Padilla \u201ctransformed\u201d the secretary of state\u2019s office, Mar\u00eda Teresa Kumar, the CEO and founding president of the activist group Voto Latino, told me. \u201cThe fact that 16-year-olds can preregister\u2014it\u2019s not small, because the majority of [those young people] are Latinos, Asians, and African Americans. He enfranchised them.\u201d Voto Latino ended up pulling its voter-registration efforts out of California because \u201cthe government did its job,\u201d Kumar added. Four and a half million more residents were registered to vote when Padilla left office than when he entered; now nearly 90 percent<\/a> of eligible Californians can vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Padilla said his experience running California\u2019s elections is behind his support for the election-reform bill H.R.1, a new Voting Rights Act, and comprehensive immigration reform. Those measures would expand the body politic by making the ballot box more accessible to Black and Latino Americans, and they\u2019d boost voter trust in the legitimacy of the political system, he argues. The system could then better reflect the diversity of Latino communities and their complex priorities\u2014a core aim of his agenda. And yet, in his effort to improve representation and expand voter participation, Padilla will run into familiar challenges\u2014and the perennial question of what Latino voters actually want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Democrats, stunned by Donald Trump\u2019s improved performance with Latinos in the November election, have directed renewed attention<\/a> to Latino voter persuasion and turnout efforts ahead of next year\u2019s midterms. But the simplest way to find out what Latinos want\u2014asking them\u2014is often overlooked when Latinos aren\u2019t in the rooms where conversations about Democratic strategy are happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Underrepresented in nearly every level of government and party politics, Latino politicians face notable obstacles when aspiring to a bigger spotlight, and have few models to follow when venturing into national politics. (Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas are prominent Latino leaders, but they\u2019re both Republicans.) Latino politicians are often pulled between the need to represent a politically neglected community and pressure by national media and party leaders to speak about \u201cLatino\u201d issues. They must talk about their identity without giving the impression that non-Latino voters are being left out of their vision. And they must be careful to avoid peddling an amorphous form of racial solidarity among people of color. \u201cI knew that a lot of people would think, Hey, if you were to release an immigration plan, people are going to think you\u2019re the brown guy doing brown things<\/em>,\u201d Juli\u00e1n Castro, then a Democratic candidate for president, told the late-night host Trevor Noah in 2019 about this struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s also the challenge of calibrating as broad a message as possible without flattening the needs and lived experiences of different communities. In the Democratic primary, Castro pitched<\/a> himself as a Latino trailblazer and highlighted<\/a> his family\u2019s activist and immigrant roots in an expansive appeal to Latinos, but he was never<\/a> able to build up enough national support, Latino or otherwise, to sustain his campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Padilla aims to build his national profile, he will have to wrestle with creating a message that sounds authentic enough to Latinos but is appealing to many more people, Lisa Garc\u00eda Bedolla, a political scientist and the dean of UC Berkeley\u2019s Graduate School, who has studied the importance of Latino political representation, told me. Racial or ethnic appeals for solidarity fall flat when they don\u2019t seem genuine or specific.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf he were just talking about being a Latino senator in the generic sense, and not grounding it in his particular story, then you do run the risk of people saying, \u2018Well, you don\u2019t speak for me,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cWhat he\u2019s going to be trying to do over the next few years is really demonstrate that he\u2019s not just<\/em> representing Latinos, but that he\u2019s representing a universal set of values that come from his Latino experience.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Padilla articulates those values and explains his personal story may determine how big and diverse his audience will end up being\u2014geographically, ethnically, and ideologically. He\u2019ll have to come up with a pitch that cuts across racial and class divisions, and \u201chighlight the fact that he sees inequities and policies through the lens of the disenfranchised, and use that as a way to build a coalition around ballot access and ballot reforms,\u201d Garc\u00eda Bedolla said. Because of his experience as California secretary of state, \u201che knows the voting-rights history of this country and the efforts to disenfranchise people,\u201d Laura G\u00f3mez, a Chicana scholar and professor at UCLA\u2019s law school, told me. \u201cThen, by virtue of having been to an East Coast school, he\u2019s been exposed to [other Latino groups], and he needs to continue to build bridges to Puerto Ricans and Cubans and Dominicans and other Latinos.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Padilla will also face a persistent challenge: being strategic when speaking about the border, undocumented immigration, and racism, which together are seen by many non-Latinos as the only \u201cLatino issues.\u201d \u201cThe challenge for Latino politicians has always been the ability to try to transcend their Latino identity,\u201d the conservative Latino political consultant Mike Madrid, who has known Padilla for decades, told me. \u201cThere\u2019s a set notion in this country of what Latino issues are,\u201d but more Americans should also see economic concerns, such as income inequality, poverty, and homelessness, as \u201cLatino issues.\u201d Recasting the immigration debate could help that shift: Though Padilla has already carved out immigration reform as one of his top priorities in the Senate, he is framing it as a pragmatic economic cause, not just a moral issue, saying he\u2019s open to piecemeal reforms such as his bill to grant citizenship to 5 million essential workers. Redefining the \u201cLatino issues\u201d label would not only help other Americans better understand what Latinos\u2019 real concerns are, but also improve Democrats\u2019 appeal to a broader swath of Latinos, including those who have drifted toward Republicans and who may not feel solidarity with the plight of recent immigrants or other people of color, Madrid said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though still solidly blue, the Pacoima that Padilla grew up in has plenty of those voters: The area trended<\/a> toward Trump in November. Over the past two decades, Pacoima has produced a new cohort of upwardly mobile, second-generation Latinos who aspire to the middle class\u2014much like the thousands of young Latinos across the country who are entering the electorate every year. Depending on their education and profession, these young Latinos may vote more<\/a> like white Americans<\/a>. Conservative and libertarian-minded Latino voters who supported Trump will test Democrats\u2019\u2014and Padilla\u2019s\u2014agenda, Daniel Garza, the president of the conservative Libre Initiative, told me. For these Latinos, progressive plans for economic and social reform aren\u2019t likely to resonate with their individualist values and entrepreneurial spirit. If Padilla and other Democrats try to use appeals to Latino identity to advance more liberal proposals, they may end up excluding a significant number of Latinos. \u201cWe\u2019re getting very sophisticated [as voters], and now when we go into the voting booth, we know what we\u2019re looking for,\u201d Garza said. \u201cThese failed ideas are not going to help Padilla. [Democrats] need something else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, Padilla\u2019s future (not to mention his party\u2019s) could hinge on whether he can help Democrats speak to voters attracted to the Republican creed<\/a> of individualism and economic opportunity. Becoming a senator is \u201ca tremendous opportunity, a responsibility, not just for our community\u2014especially for our community\u2014but to so many others like it,\u201d Padilla said. Padilla\u2019s first test at building an expansive coalition will be his 2022 campaign, which he launched last week and for which he enters the field as the favorite. He\u2019s already shown an ability to win statewide office (he won more votes than California Governor Gavin Newsom when they were both on the ballot for different offices in 2018), and he\u2019s planning to highlight his efforts to secure pandemic relief, improve the vaccine rollout in California, and make progress on long-term climate and immigration reforms (both areas that disproportionately affect Californians).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though he doesn\u2019t have a major Republican challenger yet, Padilla\u2019s conservative critics will likely try to tie him to the state\u2019s Democratic leadership, including Newsom, a close ally who is all but certain to face a recall election later this year. Fueled by<\/a> anger at Newsom\u2019s pandemic management and the state\u2019s unemployment crisis, the governor\u2019s opponents have collected enough signatures<\/a> to trigger a recall under the state\u2019s laws\u2014a vote that would happen this fall, as Padilla\u2019s 2022 campaign kicks into high gear. Padilla critics could also try to use his progressive policy positions, including his support for the Green New Deal and expanded voting rights, to paint him as a left-wing radical. During his 2018 campaign against Padilla, Mark Meuser, a Republican attorney, questioned whether the then\u2013secretary of state was allowing<\/a> noncitizens to vote, an unsubstantiated claim that Republicans often level<\/a> against Democrats<\/a>. Meuser told me that he hasn\u2019t decided if he\u2019ll challenge Padilla in 2022, but said he\u2019ll make a final decision after the potential recall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the time in our Zoom chat dwindled, Padilla and I talked a bit about his first election, for the city council\u2019s seventh district. Before starting his campaign, Padilla had sought out the counsel of his dad\u2019s brother, his padrino\u2014<\/em>a \u201ctypical Mexican man of few words\u201d\u2014who pressed him on why he was running. Padilla made his case, of the need to have the community represented by someone who knew it, who would patch up the potholes, update the local library, and listen to his neighbors\u2019 concerns. When Election Night rolled around, his padrino<\/em> missed the victory party because he had the flu, but Padilla went to see him the next day, jumping up and down and shouting, \u201cGanamos\u2014<\/em>we won!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a slow and steady tone, his padrino <\/em>replied, \u201cBueno, hijo, ahora hay que cumplir<\/em>.\u201d \u201cWell, son, now it\u2019s time to deliver.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Christian Paz<\/em><\/a> is an assistant editor at The Atla<\/em>ntic<\/p>\n\n\n\n

.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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