Latino power shows at polls

9.14.2000 00:15

"It's electoral participation catching up to the shift in the demographics," says Providence
Councilman Luis A. Aponte.

By ARIEL SABAR
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Tuesday's primary elections drew an extraordinary number of Latinos

to the polls, a result not only of their surging numbers and clout here but of an
unprecedented get-out-the-vote effort, Latino activists and political experts said
yesterday.

Spanish-language radio stations trumpeted the elections for months, social-service

agencies signed up hundreds of new voters in just the past few weeks, and Latino-owned
cab companies shuttled dozens of people to the polls Tuesday, free of charge.

The state's first-ever Latino congressional candidate, Angel Taveras, a 30-year-old lawyer
with no political experience and a shoestring campaign budget, drew an astonishing one
in three votes in Providence.

Leon F. Tejada, 35, a computer systems analyst, defeated three-term state Rep. Marsha E.
Carpenter in the city's Elmwood section. Gonzalo Cuervo, a political newcomer, came
within 26 votes of displacing state Rep. Joseph S. Almeida, a first-term incumbent from
the Washington Park neighborhood.

And Juan M. Pichardo, 33, a patient advocate at Rhode Island Hospital who ran a savvy
and aggressive campaign, came tantalizingly close to upsetting state Sen. Robert T. Kells,
a retired Providence police officer and five-term senator.

Asked late Tuesday about the closeness of the race, Kells, who is white, was blunt: "The
diversity in the community had an effect."

A Journal analysis found that turnout in the city's Hispanic neighborhoods reached as
high as 38 percent in districts with hotly contested local primaries, dwarfing the statewide
turnout of about 15 percent.

Those numbers follow a decade in which the state's Latino population grew 50 percent, to
nearly 69,000 people, even as the state's total population declined slightly, according to
the U.S. Census Bureau estimates. To put it another way: Latinos made up 4.5 percent of
the state's population in 1990, but nearly 7 percent in 1999.
Despite Taveras's third-place finish and Pichardo and Cuervo's narrow defeats, Latino
activists said that the primary's turnout attested to the success of a dogged voter-
education campaign. It was also a harbinger, they said, of wider electoral success within a
few years.

"The giant is awakening," said Dr. Pablo Rodriguez, the chairman of the Rhode Island
Latino Political Action Committee. "I think the Latino community has finally found its
poltiical legs and people went out and voted. There are more candidates, better
campaigns, and just a general coming of age."

He said that his mother was beside herself as she voted yesterday at the Sackett Street
School, in South Providence, where the race between Pichardo and Kells made it far and
away the city's busiest polling place.

Cars spray-painted with campaign slogans idled down the gritty street, and knots of
campaign operatives shook hands and passed out colorful political fliers. "She told it me
it was like being back in Puerto Rico during the elections," Rodriguez said.

"It's electoral participation catching up to the shift in the demographics," agreed Luis A.
Aponte, who was elected in 1998 as the first Latino councilman in Providence. "I think
that Angel's election and his campaign in particular motivated many people to come out
and participate."

As she left the Sackett Street voting booths, Carmen Rosario, 30, a mortgage processor,
said that Taveras had something none of the other congressional candidates had: he grew
up in the neighborhood. "Angel's the man," she said Tuesday evening, after casting her
ballot. "He was born and raised here. He knows what we need."

The scene would have been out of place even a decade ago, when Latinos held no seats
on either the Providence City Council or in the General Assembly.

Anastasia Williams, who is Panamanian, became the first Latino state lawmaker in 1992.
And Aponte became the City Council's first Latino member six years later.

But Latino activists said yesterday that it wasn't until recently that community leaders
grasped the role even relatively small numbers of Latino voters could play in politics. A
watershed was a set of state and local elections in 1998 in which the Latino candidates
lost by painfully narrow margins.

"We learned from the last elections that a couple of voters can actually make a significant
difference," said Luisa Murillo, the executive director of the Center for Hispanic Policy
& Advocacy, a social-service agency in Providence that made interpreters available at the
polls. "That was the message this time: Your vote most definitely can count."

For the last five months, Poder 1110-AM, the dominant Spanish-language radio station,
has given large slices of airtime on its morning drive show to the nuts and bolts of
elections. The show's hosts took calls on the air from listeners with questions as mundane
as, "Where is my polling place?" The station also arranged for Latino-owned cab
companies such as Gonzales Taxi to ferry people to the polls as a public service.

"We're a music station, but we took a lot of calls from people," said the station's CEO,
Tony Mendez. "We explained the process."

In the congressional primary Tuesday, Taveras's odds-defying third-place finish was

further proof of Latinos' swelling power at the ballot box. Though just 3 percent of voters
in a poll late last month said they would support him, Taveras won four times that
percentage. He captured nearly 12 percent of the vote, edging out the better-known Kevin
J. McAllister, the president of the Cranston City Council.

More than half of Taveras's nearly 6,000 votes across the sprawling 2nd Congressional
District came from Providence, where he was within 175 votes of beating Secretary of
State James R. Langevin, the victor districtwide.

A remarkable 635 of his 3,000 Providence votes were cast at Sackett Street School, the
site of the hard-fought Pichardo-Kells race.

Though prickly about the label "Latino candidate" because of his desire to appeal to the
entire district, Taveras acknowledged yesterday that he spent significant time and money
courting the Latino vote. The son of Dominican immigrants, he did two dozen interviews
with Spanish-language radio stations and newspapers, bought ads on Spanish radio and
TV, and greeted voters at the city's Bolivian, Dominican and Puerto Rican festivals.

Taveras also tapped a network of Latino activists across the country for campaign money.
"It was very hard to raise money in-state, essentially because people felt I was a long
shot," he said yesterday.

Taveras said the phones were ringing yesterday with supporters urging him to run again.
Exhausted by the campaign, he said he wanted to rest for at least a week before even
thinking about his next move.

Still, he sounded almost giddy as he described the outpouring of kudos after the election.
"I'll tell you one thing," he quipped. "I've never been congratulated so much for losing."

He was not shy about casting his election bid, and Tuesday's turnout in Hispanic
neighborhoods, in historic terms. "It's a huge step in the right direction of becoming more
and more a part of American society," said Taveras, who has described his rise from the
Head Start program to Harvard University as an archetypal immigrant success story.

Despite what Latino leaders described yesterday as a banner day at the polls, some
worried that it might a fluke.

Census figures show that voter turnout among Latino Rhode Islanders has swung wildly
in recent years. In the 1996 elections, the year Latinos united to defeat U.S. House
candidate Joseph Paolino, a supporter of English as the country's official language of
government, nearly one in four Latinos 18 and older cast a ballot. Two years later, with
no such races to energize Latino voters, just one in 17 voted -- compared to roughly one
in two voters statewide.

For now, language barriers, an alienation from American politics, and the rigmarole of
registering to vote are still stumbling blocks for many Latinos, advocates say. And some
Latino leaders fret about the plan to downsize the General Assembly, a move that would
enlarge districts and thus make it tougher for minority aspirants to win seats.

Aponte, the Providence councilman, is buoyed by the primary elections but wonders
whether Latinos here have reached the political maturity to take part in elections that
don't as clearly touch on their interests.

"Will folks still come out and vote when there may not be Latino candidates running?"
said Aponte, an investigator for the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights. "That
is the longer, more telling dynamic."

-- With reports from staff writer David Herzog.

Primary aftermath: Get updated race results, complete Journal coverage of the election
and its impact, and more at:

Copyright © 2000 The Providence Journal Company

9.14.2000 00:07

Latino vote influences primary races in

Providence
Leon F. Tejada, who snatched the Democratic nomination in District 18 from incumbent
Marsha E. Carpenter, attributes his win to a heavy Latino voter turnout.

By MARION DAVIS
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Three of the five Democratic primaries in South Providence were so

close that many people yesterday weren't sure who had won: Did state Sen. Robert T.
Kells keep his District 10 seat? How about state Rep. Aisha W. Abdullah-Odiase in
District 19, or Rep. Joseph S. Almeida in District 20?

But when all the votes were counted -- including the mail ballots -- the three incumbents
were in, though their opponents all challenged the results yesterday before the state Board
of Elections.

Only state Rep. Marsha E. Carpenter, who has gained prominence for her fight against
gun violence, lost her seat in the primaries. Newcomer Leon F. Tejada snatched up the
District 18 Democratic nomination by 89 votes, or a 7.4 percent margin, according to
figures from the city Board of Canvassers.

Tejada will face Republican Ian O'Hara in the November election.

Carpenter has also challenged the primary results, according to Robert J. Fontaine,
executive director of the Board of Elections. She did not return a call from The Journal
yesterday.

Tejada made no bones about why he won -- the Latino vote.

At all but one of the District 18 polling places, Latino voters had not one, but three Latino
candidates on the ballot. Along with Tejada, there was Juan M. Pichardo, who was
challenging Kells in Senate District 10, and then the even higher-profile Angel Taveras, a
candidate in the 2nd Congressional District race.

Where one won, all three did well, a Journal analysis showed. On the left side of the
Sackett Street School, for example, Tejada got 61.1 percent of the vote; Pichardo
received 66.7 percent; and Taveras, 73.4 percent.

On the right side of the Casino in Roger Williams Park, by contrast, Tejada got 35.3
percent of the vote; Pichardo received 28.8 percent, and Taveras, 28.9 percent.

The results also roughly match the distribution of Latinos in the district -- the higher the
concentration, the better the Hispanic candidates did. The ethnic pitch was pretty
straightforward, too: Outside the polls, people were handing out fliers that urged, "Vote
Latino."

Tejada, who was born in the Dominican Republic and became a U.S. citizen in 1992, said
he knew from the beginning that "whoever wanted to win that district had to get the
Latino vote." He had a clear advantage, he said, because "we need somebody who can
speak in the same language."

A key part of his campaign effort was to register Latinos who had moved to Rhode Island
from other states and weren't yet on the voting rolls, or who had lived here for awhile but
hadn't registered.

Pichardo and Taveras were doing the same, he said, and between the three of them, "we
registered over 900 people."

Tejada had a strong foothold among the South Providence Latino community because his
Broad Street business provides a variety of services to them, such as translations and help
with immigration papers and taxes.

The local Spanish-language media -- radio stations such as Poder 1110 and 1220 "La
Inconfundible," and the newspaper Providence En Español -- gave all three Latino
candidates ample opportunities to reach their constituents, and they helped to educate
voters.

In Latin American countries, elections are traditionally festive and boisterous, "like a
party," Tejada noted, and on Tuesday, the Latino candidates also built on that, getting
people excited about going to vote.

Carpenter couldn't match that enthusiasm in her camp, Tejada said, because many people
in the district didn't know her.

"She's not in contact -- she's not down here," he said. Many voters with whom he spoke
thought he was running against Councilwoman Patricia K. Nolan, he added, because she
is the one they see in the neighborhood.

Nolan, who said Carpenter's defeat "breaks my heart," because they are friends and she
admires Carpenter's work, acknowledged that Carpenter wasn't as visible in her district as
she could be.

If Tejada could win District 18, why did Pichardo lose to Kells?

The race was painfully close. Pichardo actually won at the polls, with 1,179 votes to
Kells's 1,161. But Kells snatched up 119 of the 126 mail ballots cast, besting Pichardo by
94 votes in the end.

Kells will face Republican Sonya Zecchin O'Hara -- Ian O'Hara's wife -- in the general
election.

Kells attributed his victory to his "grassroots community organization," his three decades
in the neighborhood and his work as a Providence police officer (he holds the rank of
captain), and lots of hard work.

"We left no stone unturned," he said. "We did our homework, and I think we got an A."

Nolan, who backed Kells, said many people in the district were turned off by the large
amount of money Pichardo seemed to spend on the race, sending out numerous mass
mailings.

Pichardo also had the backing of Senate Majority Leader Paul Kelly, Nolan said, whereas
Kells supports Sen. William Irons, who is challenging Kelly for the leadership post. State
Senators Rhoda Perry and Maryellen Goodwin both worked at the polls on Pichardo's
behalf, Nolan said.

Both Nolan and Kells were critical of Pichardo's targeted appeal to Latinos. Kells said he
was "overwhelmed" by the Latino voter turnout, especially at the Sackett Street School,
where they showed up in droves. "I said, 'Oh boy.' "

But both Pichardo and Tejada said many Latino voters whom they had registered -- and
others who had been registered for years -- were turned away at the polls because
somehow they hadn't been put on the voting rolls.

Pichardo, who has requested a hearing before the Board of Elections with regard to the
District 10 race, said that was a key issue he planned to raise, because many Latino voters
were disenfranchised.

The third Latino challenger in the Assembly races -- Gonzalo Cuervo, a son of
Colombian immigrants who ran against state Rep. Joseph S. Almeida in House District
20 -- lost by an even narrower margin than Pichardo.

Almeida, who had the support of the city's only Latino councilman, Luis A. Aponte,
Ward 10, defeated Cuervo by 26 votes, or 430 to 404 -- a 3.1-percent margin. Neither
candidate could be reached for comment yesterday.

State Rep. Anastasia P. Williams, the only Latina candidate in the primaries who was
also an incumbent, won handily in the District 9 race, garnering 459 votes to challenger
Barbara Thurman's 219.

The only South Providence primary that didn't pit a Latino candidate against a non-Latino
was in House District 19, where two African-American women went head to head: state
Rep. Aisha W. Abdullah-Odiase and challenger Allene R. Maynard, who is active in the
Democratic Party and supported Kells.

Abdullah-Odiase defeated Maynard by 17 votes, 320 to 303. Maynard, who has accused
Abdullah-Odiase of living outside her district, said she was requesting a recount because
"I owe it to myself and my supporters," but she acknowledged that, despite a tough fight,
she had almost certainly lost.

"For all her million signs, though, I gave her a good run for her money, didn't I?"
Maynard said with a laugh.

Abdullah-Odiase will face Green Party candidate Paul J. Degaitas in the November
election.

Maynard attributed her loss to voter apathy, and she said Latinos may have also played a
role in her race, because Abdullah-Odiase set up a table in front of a Latino-owned
market on Broad Street over the weekend.

Reached at home, Abdullah-Odiase declined to discuss the primary results. Sounding

exhausted, she just told a reporter, "I have no comment right now. I just want some rest."

Copyright © 2000 The Providence Journal Company