Voices: Getting young Latinos to the polls

Corrections & clarifications: An earlier version of this story misidentified the university attended by Mario Salinas. 

HOUSTON – Anyone pondering the future of the Latino vote in the USA – in this election or those to come – should meet Mario Salinas.

Salinas is an energetic 35-year-old activist in the Houston area with a pronounced stutter, an ailment brought on by complications at birth. The speech impediment, however, doesn’t stop him from speaking to students – sometimes a handful in a hallway, other times entire auditoriums full – on the importance of registering and voting.

His focus: Latino students. Salinas, a staffer at the non-partisan Mi Familia Vota and fourth-generation Mexican-American, travels tirelessly from school to school in the Houston Independent School District, a sprawling area with 215,000 students, 62% of them Hispanic, urging 18-year-olds to register and vote.

On a recent reporting trip to Houston, I got a chance to meet and shadow Salinas on one of his school trips. What struck me, besides his endless enthusiasm, is how non-partisan and pragmatic he was. He never tells students who to vote for, never mentions candidates. Instead, he talks stats: Nearly half of Houston’s 2.3 million residents – or 44% -- are Hispanic. Yet, only one of its 16 city council members is Hispanic.

“Politicians are not saviors – they’re servants,” he tells the students. “Question is: Who do they serve?”

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The Latino vote has gotten increased attention this election year, as inflammatory remarks by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are expected to motivate more Latino voters to go to the polls. A record 27.3 million Latinos will be eligible to vote on Nov. 8, with millennials accounting for nearly half (44%) of those eligible voters, according to the Pew Research Center.

The question remains: How many will actually vote? Part of the challenge of getting Latinos to vote is that nearly half of them live in California and Texas – states that are reliably blue and red, respectively, and where presidential candidates don’t spend a lot of time and money.

But a surprisingly tight race in Arizona, home to large numbers of Latinos, and the way immigration has played a central role in the current campaign could drive more Hispanic voters to the polls than expected, says Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew’s director of Hispanic research. “We could see something new this year,” he told me.

That’s the short-term. For the long-term, let’s return to Salinas.

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Thirty-five years ago, Salinas was born technically dead, revived and diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Doctors told his parents he would never walk or talk. Continually, he proved them wrong. In grade school, he fought to get out of special education classes and be allowed to attend classes with everyone else, despite his speech impediment.

After years of speech and physical therapy, he graduated from high school, then from the University of Houston-Downtown with a degree in interdisciplinary studies and a minor in sociology. He worked for the city for a few years, then turned his attention to Latino voters. Salinas noticed how some of the Latino communities he knew and loved were ambivalent about politics. So, he zeroed in on Latino millennials.

At a recent visit to Sharpstown International School in West Houston, which is majority Hispanic, Salinas set up a table with piles of voter registration forms and pens. With the help of student activists, he wrangled students and registered one after another, signing up 29 new voters in 45 minutes.

He often shares his story with students, telling them them everything: the bad birth, the school, the struggle to be treated equally.

"I had to constantly speak up and speak out and say, 'I deserve the same opportunity as everyone else,'" he says. "In a way, that's what the Latino community, as a whole, needs to do. We have the numbers. We just have to learn to take action."

Salinas recognizes the madness and poison of this election, its reality-TV veneer, and how it may motivate more Latinos to go to the polls. But he’s less interested in what happens next month than in the long-term trends. Research shows, he says, that voters who participate in three elections in a row, tend to become lifelong voters.

“Hopefully, this is the election that makes them cast that first vote,” he says. “After that, we’ll make sure they keep coming out.”

Jervis is an Austin-based reporter for USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter: @MrRJervis.