In politics, ethnic diversity poses a more complicated equation
By Deepti Hajela/AP
Kwong Hui knows that reaching as many voters as possible is a key to winning the City Council seat in Manhattan’s First District this year.
So, there he was at St. Teresa’s Church, listening to the Spanish-language Mass, hoping to introduce himself to members of the Latino community. And he did — to the Puerto Ricans who attended that service.
Then, he sat through the next Mass, because that congregation was predominantly Dominican.
Welcome to New York City politics, new millennium-style, where increasing diversity is translating into more — and more narrowly defined — ethnic groups. As those groups start to exercise their political power, politicians are learning that building ethnic coalitions is that much more challenging and necessary.
“No one community can claim a dominance ... You have to build allies across the board,” said Hui, who’s running for office in a district that also includes Chinese, Jewish, Italian, Irish, Polish and Bangladeshi communities.
New York’s diversity — in which broad racial and ethnic groups encompass dozens of smaller, often disparate communities — is unlike any other place in the country, said Raphael Sonenshein, a political scientist at the California State University at Fullerton.
Still, he said, the city’s experience in race and politics is a harbinger of trends that will be seen elsewhere in the nation. “The politics of black and white, which had been stable and predictable in many communities, is going to become less predictable,” Sonenshein said.
He pointed to the Los Angeles mayoral race between Antonio Villaraigosa and City Attorney James Hahn as an example. While Villaraigosa tried to build a coalition of Latinos and liberal whites, Hahn won with the support of blacks and conservative whites — two groups that had been on opposite sides for years.
In New York, Democratic mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer is counting on a coalition of Latino and black voters in his bid for the party nomination. But demographic changes over the past decade have made it a more complicated equation for Ferrer, who is of Puerto Rican descent.
In 1990, census figures showed there were just under 900,000 Puerto Ricans in New York, making up more than half of the city’s Latino population.
By 2000, the Puerto Rican population dropped to under 790,000, or about 37 percent of Latinos. Meanwhile, other Latino communities, such as Dominicans, have grown.
The change has been occurring in other groups in New York as well, with the Asian racial category including relative newcomers such as Bangladeshis. Black no longer means just African American; it also covers immigrant communities from all over the Caribbean and Africa.
Of course, demographic change doesn’t automatically translate into political change, some experts said. They pointed out that many immigrant groups are still newcomers, and have lower rates of voter registration and participation.
“I think a lot of it is going to depend on the level at which these groups register to vote,” said Steven Cohen, director of the Executive Masters of Public Administration Program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Such diversity can mean elected officials from formerly sizable communities, such as Puerto Ricans and African Americans, have less secure bases than they once did, said John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
“Their natural constituencies are narrowing; they have to recast themselves. And that’s not the easiest thing to do,” he said.
An example is last year’s Democratic Congressional primary between Rep. Major Owens, born in Memphis, Tenn., and City Councilwoman Una Clarke, born in Jamaica. The former allies, both black, engaged in a heated race that highlighted tensions that can exist between immigrant communities and native ones, even when both communities belong to the same racial category.
At one point, Owens attempted to have Clarke kicked off the ballot, alleging she had voted in an election before becoming an American citizen. He later withdrew that challenge, which Clarke said was a “desperate attempt to falsely disparage me and, by extension, all immigrant Americans.”
And politicians won’t be able to assume that all the concerns of one community are shared by others, organizers said. For example, immigration is an issue that affects Dominicans, who have to become naturalized, but not Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens.
All that complexity can make the creation of lasting multiethnic coalitions a difficult proposition, said Marion Orr, assistant professor and chairman of the political science department at Brown University.
“I think it makes it more challenging to pull and keep coalitions together,” he said.
As more and more communities become politically active, campaigns will likely have to change to keep up.
“The campaigns will really have to do extensive work within the communities,” Orr said. “They will have to put men and women on the ground to learn exactly what the issues are.”
That makes it harder, but makes the democratic process fairer, said Sonenshein.
“It’s a healthy state. You want people to reach out,” he said. “It gives everyone some bargaining power.” |
