It’s hard to tell by looking at today’s headlines in the news media, but America is changing, and as always, it’s changing the most for the next generations. How that change looks, and how it happens, is largely up to people with vision. Not always powerful people in the traditional use of the word “powerful”, but people who are powerful because of the strength of their dreams and vision.
Cristina Tzintzun is the woman on the right in the picture above. She is the founder of JOLT, a voter registration nonprofit in Austin, that is focused on increasing young Latino voter participation. Cristina knows a few things: *Texas has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the country (3rd from last). *Nearly 40% of the state’s population is Hispanic, and are expected to become the majority as early as 2022, and maybe 2020. *In the next decade 2 million Latinos will turn 18, and 95% if them are U.S. citizens, eligible to vote. *Latinos have the lowest voter turnout of any ethnic group in Texas. *If the Latino majority-minority, soon to be majority in Texas, can be persuaded to vote in reliably large numbers (when they vote they generally tend to vote Democratic), they can, and will, shock the political system in Texas, and soon the entire country. There have been many articles on the changing demographics in the U.S. explaining why this will happen.
The political establishment knows this. Read ‘The trauma for a man’: Male Fury and fear rises in GOP in defense of Kavanaugh, that ran in the New York Times, October 1. (To date, it’s received nearly 13,000 comments, surely among the largest number of comments in the paper’s commenting history.)
If young Latinos can take Texas out of Republican hands, they will shift the entire electoral map of the country.
But there are challenges: The No. 1 reason Latinos don’t vote is their high level of cynicism: *most don’t know that their votes matter, *most don’t even know that they are the majority, or soon will be in Texas, *most don’t trust politicians, and *most don’t believe that their vote matters.
That kind of self-defeating thinking has to change if the future is going to change. Tzintzun and her fellow JOLTers intend to make that happen. It’s their dream, and their vision.
Read Tzintzun’s story here. Read how current Texas politics blocks Hispanic voting here.