Paul Bass Photo
Twenty Latino activists lined up to endorse a mayoral candidacy Thursday inside a Peruvian-owned Fair Haven storefront that wires money to homes throughout Latin America. Not one of the 20 activists holds elected government office.
Therein lies a tale about the first test of how New Haven’s fastest-growing population will become a force in city elections.
Thursday’s event took place inside Alberto Bustos’s travel agency on Grand Avenue. Latino activists gathered there to endorse the mayoral candidacy of Henry Fernandez. The crowd included immigration-rights and small-business activists hailing from countries like Colombia, Mexico and Argentina (as well as from Puerto Rico).
Melissa Bailey Photo
Harp with state Rep. Juan Candelaria at last week’s Latino endorsements.
The event came six days after a different group of Latino leaders gathered to endorse the mayoral candidacy of state Sen. Toni Harp. That event — also in Fair Haven, the heart of the city’s immigration boom — featured virtually every elected Latino politician of note in New Haven, from aldermen and a state legislator to the leader of a statewide Latino Democratic group and members of the Democratic Town Committee. Almost all of those officials hail from Puerto Rico and are veterans of, in some cases, more than three decades of New Haven elections. (The group also included leading Latino ministers from different Latin American nations as well as people active in immigration-reform efforts.)
Two different groups of passionate campaigners. Both after a prize: the estimated 12,500 (and growing) Latino voters in a city that has opened its arms to immigrants, where the official census counts (most recently 27 percent of the city’s population) can’t keep pace with the explosive population growth on the ground.
Whichever candidate prevails in the Sept. 10 Democratic primary, “the Latino community is the winner in this one,” observed Board of Aldermen President Jorge Perez, who was born in Cuba (and who supports Harp).
“This is the beginning of Latinos letting their power be felt. That’s what this is about. And what impact we’re going to have in future elections,” Perez said. “This is an indication that the Latino community is going through the same stages as other groups in the past that have made New Haven their home, maturing through the political process.
“It’s not who‘s showing up. It’s that they’re showing up and participating and letting their opinion be heard. They’re putting sweat and equity into that.”
The activists Thursday promising to put sweat and equity behind Henry Fernandez’s campaign found their way through causes and organizations with which Fernandez and Kica Matos (at the center of the photo at the top of the story), to whom he’s married, have allied themselves over the years, efforts that sprang up alongside the rise of New Haven’s Latin American-born community. Until this century, New Haveners of Puerto Rican heritage have dominated the city’s political and civic life.
One of those networks is Junta For Progressive Action. Once a leading Latino advocacy and service agency in town, it pretty much died out by the late 1990s. Then some community leaders on the Junta board — like Norma Francheschi, an Argentine-born storeowner who has served as an unofficial go-to problem-solver for Latin-American immigrant families — hired Kica Matos to revive it. The agency has now become a potent advocacy force of its own in immigrant rights campaigns. Francheschi joined the group endorsing Fernandez Wednesday. She spoke of his years running New Haven government’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), which worked with her and other Fair Haven merchants to revive the neighborhood’s commercial corridor. “Henry, the merchants of Fair Haven, we are with you!” Francheschi declared.
Also speaking for Fernandez was Matos’s successor as Junta executive director, Sandra Trevino.
Fernandez’s relationship with another endorser, retired Fair Haven principal and city school system instruction director Miriam Camacho, came through the youth program LEAP. Fernandez was the founding director of that agency. Camacho said she worked closely with Fernandez back then to find mentors for kids in trouble.
Others showed up because of Fernandez’s relationship with Unidad Latina en Acción, a high-profile community group that rallies for immigration reform and protests wage theft and police brutality. “Henry has been a good friend and adviser” on campaigns to establish an immigrant-friendly city ID card, resolve wage disputes with employers, and fight deportation efforts, said the group’s founder, John Lugo. (He’s pictured translating Fernandez’s remarks into Spanish at Thursday’s event.)
Click here to read a list released by Fernandez of 50 Latino supporters, including academics, business owners, faith based leaders and non-profit leaders.
One question is how much — and how soon — the growing immigrant community’s potential strength can translate into votes. While most of Fernandez’s supporters who showed up Thursday can vote, many immigrants cannot vote. Those pulling votes for Fernandez don’t have as many years of practice working elections or delivering constituent service that Harp’s seasoned elected officials and vote-pullers have. They do express passion and a commitment to work hard convincing fellow Latinos to vote for Fernandez. Isaac Montiel, a maintenance manager at the Orange LA Fitness who is here on a work permit, said he plans to do that. He and his mother Guadalupe Montiel (pictured with him) came to New Haven from Mexico six years ago. Isaac credited Fernandez for helping to bring Gateway Community College downtown as a former city development administrator. Isaac said he had to suspend his engineering studies for a while because the classes took place at Gateway’s North Haven campus. Now that Gateway’s downtown, he’s finishing up the degree, he said.
Hector Hernandez, who also came here from Mexico six years ago, said he, too, can’t vote, because he’s here on a visa. A cook at Bertucci’s restaurant in Orange, Hernandez was drawn into the Fernandez campaign through work with Lugo’s group. He said he hopes to become an American citizen; in remarks at Thursday’s event, Fernandez vowed to help people like Hernandez navigate that process when a new federal immigration law gets passed.
Fernandez promised Thursday to deliver other results to the Latino community, including:
• Help continuing to grow commercial corridors like Grand Avenue.
• Help fighting wage theft by employers.
• Closing the Latino achievement gap in the public schools. (Click here to read about that.)
• “Fairly and fully funding” bilingual education, and pushing a “dual language” approach that seeks to make Latinos fluent not just in English, but in Spanish too.
• Hiring a “diverse” City Hall team.
“Latinos have helped rebuild the neighborhood as business owners, as homeowners, as hard-working neighbors,” Fernandez declared. “I am not discovering Latino issues because I am running for mayor. I have dedicated my professional life to fighting for human rights.”
Click here to read the Latino platform Fernandez released.
“Like all communities, the Latino community is diverse. We’re very proud of the diversity of our support among Latinos and believe that grassroots leadership will help us carry out the Latino vote as well as votes across the city,” Fernandez said later in the day.
“We are very cognizant of the emerging [Latino] community,” said Toni Harp’s campaign manager, Jason Bartlett. “We have [supporters] in the Latino community who are active on the immigration issue and will go toe to toe with Henry.”
No reasonable outside predictions can be made about how the Latino vote will play out in this election. The Latino community, like any other, does not vote as a single bloc with a single political outlook, especially given the wide variety of backgrounds found within it. And no Latino is running for mayor this year. (Harp, Fernandez, Gary Holder-Winfield, Kermit Carolina, and Sundiata Keitezulu are African-American; Justin Elicker, the only Spanish-speaker in the race, and Matthew Nemerson are white.) The vote is up for grabs — and as the events of the past week demonstrate, candidates will work hard to grab it.