Nov. 26, 2001, 9:28AM

Hispanic voters moving toward a new political era

By LORI RODRIGUEZ
Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle Minority Affairs Writer

In the Los Angeles mayoral election last summer, the New York contest two weeks ago and in Houston's ongoing fight for the city's top job, Latino candidates have gotten within striking distance of making history.

Former California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa was vaulted into the L.A. runoff by fellow Mexican-American voters. Bronx President Fernando Ferrer's racially charged Democratic primary tussle with Mark Green pushed droves of Ferrer's fellow Puerto Ricans into the Republican column and sealed the election for Republican Michael Bloomberg.

And on Nov. 6 in Houston, Orlando Sanchez, a first-generation immigrant from Cuba and a Republican, drew more than 60 percent of the mainly Mexican-American and historically Democratic Latino electorate in his bid to be the city's first Hispanic mayor.

From the venerably Mexican-American barrios of the east side to the more integrated Latinos in middle-class enclaves, a majority of Hispanic voters shrugged aside partisan ties and political ideology to cast a vote for ethnic pride, for La Raza.

"Some of them considered the politics, saw the last name and said `that's good enough for me,' " says University of Houston political scientist Adolfo Santos.

"Sanchez certainly let everybody know that he's a Republican and conservative."

On the brink of becoming the nation's largest minority and already the largest ethnic group in Houston, Hispanics are shambling somewhat disjointedly toward are moving toward an inevitable political day in the sun.

On each coast and in the new South, three rising politicians from vastly divergent backgrounds and with different coalitions have signaled that the sleeping Hispanic giant is no longer slumbering.

"We're on the cusp of assuming what everybody said was in our cards," says Tatcho Mindiola, director of the University of Houston's Center for Mexican-American Studies.

"There's Republican vs. Democratic in the mayoral runoff, Hispanic vs. black, conservative vs. liberal and emerging power taking on established power. Sanchez has already wrapped himself in the flag, and patriotism is very big in our community."

"Even if Sanchez doesn't win, it's a dramatic step forward," says Mindiola.

In the first flex of Hispanic muscle in the early 1970s, Mindiola served as Harris County chairman of La Raza Unida, a political third party forged from the ranks of disgruntled Hispanic Democrats. For decades, he has monitored the community's political maturation via exit polls in key races; the most recent was District I, Houston's first Hispanic-majority council seat.

Of 233 Hispanic voters in the district surveyed on Election Day, 62 percent voted for Sanchez, 25 percent chose Brown and 11 percent went with Councilman Chris Bell, who was eliminated from the runoff. More tellingly, in a city where the mostly Mexican-American Hispanic political establishment energetically opposes Sanchez, 72 percent of Hispanics voting for Sanchez identified themselves as liberal or moderate Democrats.

"District I tells us that party loyalty doesn't mean a damn thing when you get to vote for one of your own," says Mindiola. "It tells us we don't care what our leadership is doing, we're going to vote for a cousin.

"You can say the voters are uninformed, but that is somewhat insulting. Most of the voters in District I are high school graduates and more than 40 percent have some college education.

"I'm going to assume that they know who they're voting for and why."

Mexican-origin Hispanics still are the bulk of the local Latino population. But 2000 Census figures released this year showed that the non-Mexican proportion of the state's Hispanic population, primarily Central and South Americans, more than doubled from 10.3 percent of Texas Hispanics to 24 percent.

In Harris County, the proportion of Mexican Hispanics shrank from close to 80 percent to less than 73 percent, a drop mirrored throughout the region.

"Hispanics are not emerging politically as one powerful monolithic force," says University of Houston immigration expert Nestor Rodriguez. "But those are the signs that a group is emerging; it expresses its identity and power in different ways.

"You see the Orlando Sanchez leaders out there. They have a Hispanic background that is genuine even if they may have limited involvement with parts of the Hispanic community.

"But they also have other identities, like conservative and Republican, so conservative and Republican voters can identify with them and also feel that they're supporting diversity."

In the last week, Brown campaign signs calling Sanchez "anti-Hispanic" popped up across the city and, upon protest, were pulled down. Leading up to the Nov. 6 election, the word "Republicano" defaced Sanchez signs throughout the barrios.

Most of the few elected Hispanics in Houston are Democratic Party loyalists strenuously supporting Brown; the mayor's chief Hispanic political consultant also works for the Democratic National Committee.

"There's a challenge here to the established Mexican-American political structure because they have been the pioneering Hispanic political culture," says Rodriguez. "The first council member was Ben Reyes; the first school board members all were Mexican-Americans.

"There's a sense here that that's the structure that's going to set the political agenda for Hispanics."

But the demographics of the Hispanic community are relentlessly shifting; diversity within the group is the new order.

"Even among Mexican-origin people, there's a growing sense of a wider and more global Latino identity, a sense that we're not just Mexican-Americans and we don't have to support just a Mexican-American," Rodriguez says.

Mindiola, himself a Mexican-American, is empathetic; change is the only constant but it can come hard. "There's a hunger, a starvation, for one of our own to score a major victory; for our community to begin asserting ourselves at the polls and finally dispel the old stereotype that we don't vote," he says.

"But some of the the Democratic Latino leadership think that all the carrying of the ball down the field, the filing of lawsuits, has been done by Chicanos and now it may be a Cuban carrying it over the goal line.

"Obviously, the leadership is out of sync with voters on this one because the leadership endorsed Brown and the voters went with Orlando. Liberal and moderate Democratic Latinos did not seem to have any problems voting for a Republican.

"This is an ethnic pride thing."

Rodriguez, who has studied the city's successive immigrant waves for decades, agrees that a shared heritage factors in, but only partially. "Some Latinos authentically share Orlando's conservative Republican philosophy," says Rodriguez. "They're not just seeking to vote along ethnic lines; their philosophy is just as strong or stronger.

"You can't take the Latino vote for granted as being a Democratic vote. Now we're variable. We can go this way or that way.

"That makes it more dynamic, more risky and, especially, more colorful. We're not monolithic."

The national GOP's highest-ranking elected Latino, U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla of San Antonio, has endorsed Sanchez; that city's former Democratic mayor, Henry Cisnernos, has campaigned for Brown.

In the Los Angeles race, where leaders of a shrinking African-American community are concerned about holding on, blacks nixed Villaraigosa in favor of new Mayor James Hahn, who is Jewish.

In New York, Ferrer's black support during the Democratic primary was used by the Green campaign in race-baiting literature and ultimately led to the Latino defection to Bloomberg.

A preliminary analysis of Houston's Nov. 6 vote by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials shows that in precincts that were 70 percent or more Hispanic, 56 percent of voters supported Sanchez, 29 percent Brown and 14 percent Bell.

In the weeks leading up to the election, NALEO mounted a major voter mobilization drive. Regional director Hector de Leon believes that the final analysis will show Hispanics cast 12 percent to 14 percent of the total votes.

"That record level of participation is a glimpse of the future," says de Leon. "It means that all future citywide candidates must develop a strategy to target Hispanic voters."

According to a precinct-by-precinct analysis by University of Houston political scientist Richard Murray, Hispanics were an estimated 12.6 percent of the total 288,037 votes cast on Election Day, or 36,220. In 1997, when former Councilwoman Gracie Saenz was running for mayor, they were 10.3 percent. Two years ago, Hispanics were 9 percent of the total vote and, in the 2000 presidential election, 10 percent.

Murray says the increased participation is part of a steady, if gradual, improvement. "If you had a Hispanic candidate that was more supported by the Democratic establishment, you'd probably bump that up to 14 or 15 percent," says Murray.

"With Sanchez, a lot of the more traditional Hispanic participants aren't particularly enthused, but there are a lot of new voters who are interested."