Supporters launch ‘grassroots’ bid to register Latino voters
About two dozen community leaders, barrio activists and former and current elected office holders gathered under a gazebo Friday at Plaza Saltillo in East Austin, exhorting Latino residents to make their votes count and to be counted in the upcoming 2010 census.
“This is really a grassroots effort we have here today,” said Marcelo Tafoya, the local League of United Latin American Citizens District 12 director, as supporters launched their campaign to register at least 600 new Hispanic voters in Travis County in time for the March 2 primaries. (Read my Friday story about the campaign, part of statewide efforts by the San Antonio-based Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) to add Latino voters ahead of the redistricting that will result from the census.)
Later, after a few invited speakers had their turns, Tafoya joked that “al estilo Mexicano (in the Mexican tradition) we’re going to open up the mike.” Few were bashful; one by one, virtually everyone on stage stepped forward.
Among them, Tafoya’s son Marcelo Antonio, targeted his message to younger Hispanics. Many, said the 28-year-old Web site developer, don’t bother to vote, yet they complain that East Austin does not receive a fair share of city and county services. “Your voice is not heard,” he said.
Like a number of others, Bruce Elfant, a Travis County constable who is the co-chair of the Austin/Travis County Complete Count Committee, emphasized the importance of the census. The counts are used as a benchmark for the distribution of about $400 billion in federal funds to communities each year — for education, public works, transportation and hospitals. They’re also used to redraw legislative districts and to determine the number of seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Elfant said Travis County is the largest county in the nation without a member of Congress whose job it is to represent only the home county. A complete count could change that, he said. “We’re a large enough county where we ought to have a representative who can spend a hundred percent of his or her time on Travis County.”
Luis Figueroa, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the organization is partnering with others across the state to create a Texas Latinos Complete Count Committee. The committee will work to ensure that the state’s Hispanic residents are accurately counted in the 2010 census.
According to the Census Bureau, 120 million U.S. households will receive census forms in mid-March. The 10-question form is the shortest in the nation’s history and takes about 10 minutes to complete, census officials said.
For more information about the upcoming census, visit www.2010census.gov. |
