Public Engagement and America's Growing Latino Population

Public Engagement and America's Growing Latino Population

Introduction

By Alison Kadlec, Director of the Center for Advances in Public Engagement (CAPE)

Understanding the barriers to, and opportunities for, more empowered participation of Latino populations in this country is a pressing need facing advocates of citizen-centered politics, community organizers, and deliberative democracy researchers and practitioners alike. If we, in our many intersecting fields in the democracy movement, are unable to support and encourage robust participation in public life by the largest and fastest growing minority group within our population, the quality of life, in and of our democracy, more broadly, is necessarily diminished.

In this working paper, we seek to gain a better understanding of what we as public engagement practitioners, and others in the field overall, might do differently to make more robust Latino participation in community engagement initiatives a reality.

While we focus here on what can be learned from a small selection of cases, we hope that our reflections will pave the way for a more robust discussion among both community organizers and deliberative democracy practitioners about ways to ensure real access and inclusion of Latinos in collaborative problem-solving and community-building work around the country.

It is important to note at the outset that there are a number of open questions that require far more focused exploration by a wide range of researchers and practitioners than has heretofore been pursued. These questions include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

1) How are opportunities for, and barriers to, participation in public life shaped by the irreducible diversity of the communities that fall uneasily under any single heading such as "Latino" or "Hispanic?" This point is underscored by the established fact that few people identify with either of these terms, tending instead to identify with a specific country of origin for self or family.

2) How do the experiences of foreign-born Latinos and first- or second-generation Latinos differ, and how do those different experiences shape people's attitudes toward participation in public life?

3) Given that nearly half of all foreign-born Latinos are in the United States without legal authorization and most do not have recourse to becoming fully included in our country’s national life, how can deliberative democracy practitioners work alongside political activists to help create and improve spaces for meaningful participation of these marginalized populations?

4) What must be done to ensure that deliberative democracy practitioners and researchers understand, appreciate and learn from the existing forms of participation and engagement that are already embedded in the fabric of various Latino communities (but which remain under the radar for most "mainstream" deliberative democrats)?

We do not pretend to have answers to any of these questions, but we feel strongly that they must be asked and we are certain that the answers must be collaboratively generated. We also believe that the Latino experience in this country, by virtue of its intrinsic complexity, requires that we expand our thinking about the relationship between race, ethnicity, group identity and public participation.

It is our hope that this piece helps spur conversation among and between advocates of deliberative democracy, community organizers, and political activists concerned with ensuring that Latinos in this country have a place at the table and a role in shaping our collective destiny.

Click here to download the full text of this paper (in pdf format), and then please join the conversation on this page, where you can post your comments and ideas.