A Note from the Editor

Is 2020 the Year (Finally) of the Latino Vote?

“Two things I never write & that I suggest you reconsider: minorities and non-white. One denotes a number *less than* half yet is deployed to describe people who are not white regardless of our numbers, making us permanently less than. The other defines us by what we aren’t. No.”

--Journalist Nikole Hannah Jones

In a recent tweet, read and shared nearly two million times, New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah Jones sums up what this issue of palabra. is all about.

Her words ring true for Latinos in the United States, a community of diverse ideologies and identities fast becoming the nation’s most important voters.

Yes, it’s been said, and said again. So, what’s kept it from becoming truth? What makes it OK, for example, for the leading Democratic presidential candidates to skip a recent Amnesty International forum on the pivotal issue of immigration, and not fear electoral backlash?

Maybe it’s The Gaze – the surveillance-like view from The Man, La Migra or the media – that’s long been aimed at Latinos and has defined our existence in the United States. As journalist Michelle Garcia writes in this, our second full issue of palabra, the “gazers” monitor Latinos as though we are still others in U.S. society. They rarely hear, understand or heed Latinos, despite our demographic clout. The result: the Latino vote remains underwhelming. Garcia argues forcefully that, in this important election year, it’s finally time for Latinos to re-define ourselves and our politics.

By 2060, Latinos will represent more than a quarter of the nation’s population. It’s going to be hard to marginalize the flood of cultural influence, and the Latinos who will chronicle the change. There are great Latino names emerging in the media landscape, but the U.S. publishing community still manages to find a way to keep them writing the footnotes, while it demands that readers all hail coddled work like American Dirt. In this issue we hear from two critical voices, writers in the middle of the debate that’s exploded around the controversial novel. Esmeralda Bermudez revisits a critical essay she originally penned for the Los Angeles Times. And, Laura Peña, a former prosecutor for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, shows us the impact American Dirt has had on her effort to tell her true-life story of transformation: from ICE attorney to defending immigrants and asylum seekers at the U.S.- Texas border.

For a glimpse of what Latino voting clout can produce, journalist Andrea Arzaba takes us to Reading, PA, a Latino and Democratic island in Pennsylvania’s conservative Berks County. In 2016, Berks voters helped send Donald Trump to the White House. But Reading’s population, like many other cities in the U.S. heartland, is overwhelmingly Latino and growing; and, today, it has Eddie Moran, the swing state’s first Latino to sit in a big city’s mayor’s chair.

Putting all of this into political context is Arturo Vargas, CEO of NALEO – the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials – in conversation with NAHJ’s Patricia Guadalupe.

With this issue of palabra., we illustrate the current landscape for Latinos in politics, and we explore the dynamic roles of members of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in society and in the media. We’re offering up words – palabras – that we believe can speed up the Latino evolution.

— Ricardo Sandoval-Palos, Managing Editor for palabra.