The infamous wall at the U.S.-Mexico border was visible in the distance at Joe Orduño Park in San Luis, Ariz., and the sun was just beginning to set beyond it when the organizer of the music festival climbed onto the stage on an evening in October.
Esau Torres, co-founder of the group Grita. Canta. Vota., which translates to Shout. Sing. Vote., talked about the famous musical artists that would be playing that evening. Then he told the crowd of about about 5,000 that this was much more than a concert. “The festival,” he told them, “ has the power to change the future of the state of Arizona.”
By the time the evening was over — and artists such as Juan Olivas, Las Marias and the corrido group T3rcer Elemento, had played — about 1,000 people, mostly Mexican Americans, had registered to vote, organizers said.
It was a performance that the founders of Grita. Canta. Vota. have tried to repeat again and again around the country in the months leading up to this presidential election.
The Latino population in the United States now numbers more than 60 million, nearly 20% of the population, according to a 2021 report from the Pew Research Center. Though the number of Latino voters has grown accordingly, Latinos also have lower election turnout rates than white, black or Asian voters.
“In the 2020 election, Latinos had the lowest voter registration among racial and and ethnic groups at 61.1%,” noted political strategist Mike Madrid in his book “The Latino Century.”
That’s where Grita. Canta. Vota. comes in — a nationwide campaign taking an unconventional approach to voter registration. The group seeks to use the popularity of regional Mexican music to get out the vote, intergenerationally.
To do so, it has teamed up with acts that appeal to young people, such as Xavi, Eslabon Armado and Chiqui Rivera, as well as some that might appeal more to their parents and grandparents, such as Los Tucanes de Tijuana and Banda El Recodo.
They have staged a series of concerts, eight in all, in Illinois, North Carolina, California, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, with the goal of getting more people to cast ballots. They also set up tables at other concerts to register potential voters.
The places they’ve been: concert venues, college campuses and even jaripeos and charreadas across the United States.
The term Latino is an umbrella term that captures many different ethnicities across Latin America, and for that reason the “Latino vote” is difficult to define, and is especially difficult to predict. And, due to rising population numbers — especially in swing states — they will be determinative in this election. If they vote.
Many political organizing campaigns, whether party based or nonpartisan, have targeted Latinos as a whole, with messaging that has treated Latinos as a monolith. But Latinos come from many different cultural backgrounds, so a monolithic message does not speak to all Latinos, if any.
Continue to read the full story in Los Angeles Times’ De Los page.
A version of this was also featured in NPR’s All Things Considered.