Hispanic Vote Finally A Force In Local Election
West Wendover voters made history twice Tuesday by electing two Latinos (Saul Andrade and Gerado Rodriguez to the city council.
When they join councilman Izzy Gutierrez in two weeks the city, West Wendover will have an Hispanic majority on the council reflecting the ethnic make up of the city again for the first time in history.
“It is a great thing,” Andrade said.
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For over thirty years West Wendover’s Latino population has hovered between 55 to 65 percent of the population. Yet invariably come local election time Spanish surnames were a rarity on the voter rolls and Latino candidates were rarer still on the ballot.
According to the latest census figures Wendover Latinos make up over 55 percent of the city’s total population, own over 35 percent of its small businesses and own about a third of all homes. However despite being in the majority just three self identified Hispanics have sat on the city council and just Mike Miera and Gutierrez won a seat in their own right. The dearth of Latino presence also extends to city jobs. There are no Hispanics among the city’s top administrators and department heads. Hispanics are also absent in the city’s front office and while a handful have been hired in the police force and public works department the number of Latinos working for the city is in no way proportional to their presence in the community.
The lack of local Latino political clout grows more apparent when it is compared with that of other ethnic groups. It would be almost impossible to imagine a city with 55 percent African American, Irish Catholic, Italian, or Polish majority with so little representation in local government.
The vast majority of West Wendover’s Hispanic community hails from the Zacatecas State in Mexico. Populated by a mostly rural agricultural class Zacatecas is one of the poorest states in Mexico with its chief export its people. And since the early 1980’s West Wendover has become the home to thousand of its sons and daughters.
According to some counts about half of the estimated 3,000 Wendover Latinos have since become American citizens and while that number may be an exaggeration even a thousand Latino voters could have dominated city politics since incorporation in 1991.
However until at least 2008 attempts to register Latino voters have been failures. The most spectacular debacle occurred in 2006 when a parade was held as part of a nationwide protest against an especially controversial new federal immigration law. While the march was almost universally attended by the local Latino population, just three registered to vote in a special tent erected at the end of the parade route.
But as immigration became more and more of a national and local issue the trickle of Hispanics registering to vote began to increase. Then in 2010 after a city wide raid by Immigration agents, West Wendover Police and sheriff’s deputies a steady stream of Latinos began registering to vote for the first time.
According to City Clerk Anna Bartlome and independent voter registrar Joe Luna well over half of all new voters in the last year were Hispanic and Latinos could account for almost 50 percent of the local electorate.
Like their Anglo neighbors Wendover’s Latinos are a diverse group. It is no longer a given that an Hispanic is necessarily a Roman Catholic. Nor is it true that a Latino is employed only at the bottom rung in the casino industry. Andrade is casino executive, Rodriguez is a postal worker, and gutierrez is a medical technician.
The reason why all three candidates were successful than previous Hispanic candidates may have less to do with having a name ending in a vowel, but rather their own beginnings.
Without exception all three councilmen grew up in Wendover. They are ‘home boys’ in the strictest definition of the term and thus they share a history and a story with every other Wendover resident whether Latino or Anglo. None of them claimed to represent the “Mexican” minority but rather campaigned on what their vision of Wendover was.
“I don’t think there is a big difference,” Andrade said. “We all want the same things for our community.”
It would not be unexpected if the new “Latino” majority acted like the old Anglo majority, that is not as a voting block at all but rather as a group of often argumentative individuals with strong and differing opinions on a whole host of issues.
But while the new city councilman will probably just as contentious with each other as their Anglo counterparts the influx of Hispanics to the local voter rolls may have turned the city from the typical rural Nevada red to a shade of purple at least on national and state wide contests.
While Wendover did cast most of its votes for Republican Mitt Romney it was by a much smaller margin than the rest of Elko County. According to the elko county clerks offices romney won almost 80 percent of the vote, in Wendover the GOP hopeful won just 53 percent. And in Wendover precinct 21, voters earned a third distinction in this historic election.
According to Elko county Deputy Clerk Brenda Rodriguez precinct 21 was the only rural Nevada precinct from the Washoe County line to the west to the Utah border to the east where Barack obama won 74 to 73.
“That was pretty remarkable,” Rodriguez said.
However if Latino voters continue to swell in numbers locally the remarkable may become mundane and what was the stuff of fantasy like a Latino mayor could become a reality in the near future.
