Latinos running for office face roadblocks — even in blue parts of NC

There are more than 1 million Latinos living in North Carolina. Despite this, just 14 Latinos hold political office in the state. They are on school boards, in judgeships and on city councils.

To get more Latinos elected to office in North Carolina, the solution seems fairly straightforward: find more Latinos that want to run for office, and make sure Latinos vote. But even in blue pockets of North Carolina, such as Durham or Raleigh, there are hurdles to overcome.

Durham County has the most representation: two Latinas, Alexandra Valladares and Emily Chávez, serve on the school board, while Javiera Caballero sits on city council. Caballero was appointed to fill a vacancy on the council in 2017, and he ran for reelection in 2019.

During the election cycle, Caballero was met with political opponents — including Democrats — who questioned her right to run in the first place, due to her being born in Chile. Victoria Peterson, a fellow city council candidate and a registered Democrat, filed a complaint with the county board of elections, which it rejected. But it still occurred under the public eye.

“It was all in the news at the time,” Caballero says of the events. “It was crappy.”

Caballero has lived in the United States since she was 2 years old, when her father moved their family to Oklahoma so he could complete a PhD. She lived alongside other international families in student housing, including other Latinos. At six, her father completed his degree and moved the family to Rock Hill, South Carolina, which Caballero notes was still divided into Black and white communities.

“You had a very rude awakening when you were neither,” she says.

Caballero isn’t the only Latino targeted in Democratic spaces. When Alexandra Valladares ran for the Durham County School Board, she told INDY Week about a PAC endorsement where the votes needed to be counted twice because they were contested by an older white man, her opponent, who had been part of the PAC for much longer.

When she received the endorsement, multiple members of the Durham People’s Alliance (including former mayor Steve Schewel) campaigned for the incumbent anyway. He told the INDY he would assume “it was politics” if in Valladares’s position.

These microaggressions occur outside of Democratic strongholds, too. Most recently, NC House Representative Ricky Hurtado has been targeted by a political ad that doctored a photo of him so that his t-shirt said “Defund the Police.” In the original, Hurtado is wearing one of his own campaign shirts.

There are also ads attacking white democratic candidates using the same poor photoshopping technique. But Hurtado is running in Alamance County — a county whose longtime sheriff was sued by the Justice Department for the alleged racial profiling of Latinos less than a decade ago.

Nationally, the vitriol is particularly visible against candidates further to the left. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a U.S. representative from New York, was told to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came” by former president Donald Trump in 2019. In a recent GQ interview, she told the interviewer that her position in Congress has shown her “how deeply and unconsciously, as well as consciously, so many people in this country hate women,” particularly women of color.

On the other hand, Republicans have been recruiting Latino voters and candidates for years. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, two of the party’s 2016 presidential candidates, are Cuban American. In South Texas, six Latina Republicans made it to runoff elections in the 2022 primaries.

That doesn’t mean Latino voters are solidly Republican or solidly Democrat, as political pundits wanted to claim after the 2020 election. The politics of multiple country diasporas cannot be reduced to one party or another, especially when these countries have seen vastly different political histories and have put down roots in the United States on vastly different terms.

“You can’t assume they’re going to be Democrats,” Caballero says of national-level politics, “and you can’t assume they’re conservative just because you think they’re Catholic and pro-life.”

In North Carolina, time is perhaps the biggest barrier to more Latino political representation. Two-thirds of the state’s Hispanic population were ineligible to vote in 2020, either because they were under 21 or they were not U.S. citizens — which encompasses those without documentation, refugees, green card holders, and more — and the lack of mobilization among both parties in the state correlates to this. It’s part of why states with more established Latino populations, like Florida, Texas and California, have deeper political connections in both parties.

Latinos are not yet a strong political demographic here, and the lack of candidates shows that. But for candidates to win, there needs to be a shift in tone and a check on the discrimination we still too often see in politics and elsewhere.