Title: A Brief History of Latino Voting Rights Since the 1960s
Headings: A Brief History of Latino Voting Rights Since the 1960s
A Brief History of Latino Voting Rights Since the 1960s
Content: Even still, our enfranchisement is under perpetual threat by increased voting restrictions that impact Black and brown populations the hardest. Here, a look at Latino voting rights in the US, from preserving suffrage in the 1960s to defending it today. On August 6, 1965, at the height of the swinging sixties, a time of youth-led cultural and political upheaval and change, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law, a treasure of the civil rights movement, enforced the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments – which granted citizenship to anyone “born or naturalized in the United States” and prohibited states from disenfranchising voters “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” respectively. While the act intended to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans in particular from employing their right to vote, the law was far-reaching, securing this right for most racial and ethnic minorities, including English-speaking Latinos in the southwest, northeast, and southeast. In 1974, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, the first and largest non-partisan Latino voter participation organization in the US, started operations, with founder William C. Velasquez, and other Mexican-American political activists, discovering early that, despite the achievements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there remained barriers – particularly, language – for Latino voters preventing them from exercising their right. While the Voting Rights Act of 1965 included a section that ensured that people educated in US schools that were predominately taught in a language other than English – for instance, island Puerto Ricans – could not be denied the right to vote because of their inability to read, write, understand, or interpret material in English, Spanish-speakers in the contiguous US, including mainland Boricuas, were often still discriminated against at the polls. This changed on August 6, 1975, exactly one decade after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when, following several court battles on behalf of Latino-Americans, President Gerald Ford amended the act to also end discrimination against so-called “language minorities.” Protecting the voting rights of Latinos, as well as non-English-speaking Asian Americans and Native Americans, made it possible to translate registration materials into other languages and strengthened the political power of communities of color. The voting triumphs of the 1960s and ‘70s saw a backlash a decade later when President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981.