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The Portland Tribune
Thursday, April 11, 2013
A2
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get his considerable support.
But Torres says it’s unlikely
he’ll find that candidate in Ore-
gon. He calls himself “a middle-
of-the-road Republican.” He says
Portland is too liberal for him.
Yet when Torres owned a di-
rect-mail company in San Fran-
cisco in the 1970s heworked cam-
paigns for Dianne Feinstein and
HarveyMilk. He lists concern for
the poor and children along with
good law enforcement among
the issues he most cares about.
So his brand of conservativism is
nuanced, to say the least.
Torres says most of the finan-
cially successful Hispanics he
knows are more conservative, as
a group, than their non-Hispanic
Portland counterparts. He says
it’s hard to find a local politician
with similar views. That’s part of
what keeps him on the sideline.
But that’s not all.
A few years ago, the Hispanic
Metropolitan Chamber, a local
organization that helps Latino
businesspeople network with
each other, invited Torres to a
meeting, but it did not go well.
“I said, ‘Don’t you ever again
dare introduce me as a Hispanic
male,’ ” Torres recalls. “I’m an
American.”
Assimilation is another issue
about which Torres cares deeply.
He says talking about Latinos as
a separate voting or education
bloc holds them back. He was in-
vited once to talk to a group of
Hispanic students and says he
refused unless non-Hispanic stu-
dentswere included in the group.
“It’s just degrading,” he says.
“The segregation bothers the
hell out of me. It makes us look
like a bunch of poor idiots.”
Consider how Torres runs his
Beaverton warehouse. He has
hired huge numbers of Latinos,
somewho can barely speak, read
or write English, much less use a
computer. He tells them up front
that they are not allowed to
speak Spanish on the job. All
eventually learn to read and
write English and become com-
puter savvy.
Latino political power? “May-
be we don’t need it,” Torres says.
“Maybe we don’t have as many
problems as Laredo (Texas).
Maybe they ought to look at us
and say, ‘Why don’t (they) have
political noise here?’ ”
Not at the table
George Puentes, 65-year-old
founder of Don Pancho Authen-
tic Mexican Foods, is among Or-
egon’s most financially success-
ful Latinos and, unlike Torres, he
has been politically involved. He
served on the SalemCityCouncil
and lost a run for mayor of Sa-
lem. When George W. Bush
came calling, Puentes became
active as a donor and organizer
of Latino Republicans.
In fact, Puentes attended the
White House Christmas party
during the Bush administration.
But he’s been politically quiet
lately. Like Torres, he feels the
Oregon climate a bit frosty. And
with liberals and conservatives
polarizing, he says, it becomes
harder for Latinos to organize as
a bloc.
“If you’re more on the conser-
vative side, you don’t want to
show your political stripes,” Pu-
entes says. “It might affect your
business. It might affect your
standing. There isn’t safety in
numbers in being a conserva-
tive.”
Gale Castillo, president of the
850-member Hispanic Metropoli-
tan Chamber, acknowledges the
lack of Latino politicians, espe-
cially noticeable since Latinas
Maria Rojo de Steffey and Sere-
na Cruz Walsh left the Mult-
nomah County Commission last
year. There are no Latinos on
Portland’s City Council or on the
county commission.
In Hillsboro, where nearly one
in four residents is Latino, only
one of seven City Council mem-
bers is Latino. More than half of
Cornelius’ residents are Latino,
but that town has one Latino
council member.
Latino voter registration and
turnout in Oregon historically
has been low, even when com-
pared to Latino participation in
other cities. When Castillo ar-
rived in Oregon in 1970, about 2
percent of Oregonians were La-
tino. Now that number is close to
12 percent. That’s a relatively
unestablished Latino population,
Castillo points out.
In terms of po-
litical organizing
and accumulation
of wealth, Portland
is “at least 25 years
behind California
or Texas or Arizo-
na or New Mexi-
co,” she says.
“We have mid-
dle-class Latinos,
but not everyone
who is middle
class wants to step
up, especially in
these times,” Castillo says.
Carmen Rubio says Latinos
here are organizing effectively
on a grassroots level. Rubio
served as community affairs di-
rector under Portland Mayor
Tom Potter and then as a policy
director for City Commissioner
Nick Fish. She left that position
in 2009 to run the Latino Net-
work, a nonprofit that pushes
government to pay more atten-
tion to Latino concerns.
Rubio lists the 2009 renaming
of 39th Avenue to Cesar Chavez
Boulevard as a political victory
for Latino organizations. She
says Portland Public Schools’
new racial equity policy is a
huge achievement that was
greatly powered by pressure
from Latino nonprofits.
Yet the contro-
versy about the Ce-
sar Chavez Boule-
vard led to Rubio
leaving a City Hall
pos i t i on
t hat
brought her access
to power. She re-
calls receiving hate
mail about the pro-
posed name change
that forced her to
realize the lack of
acceptance Latinos
still faced in the
Portland area.
Government and the political
parties here take Latinos for
granted, Rubio says. That leaves
nonprofits as the alternative to
affect political change. Both the
Latino Network and the Hispanic
Metropolitan Chamber are run-
ning programs to develop Latino
leaders.
“I left City Hall because I was
really tired of seeing that we
werenot at the table,”Rubio says.
Those grassroots efforts are
having an effect, says Marissa
Madrigal, chief of staff to Mult-
nomah County Commission
Chair Jeff Cogen. Madrigal says
there have been four major pro-
tests organized outside the coun-
ty building this year, and two,
both focused on jailing of illegal
immigrants, were Latino domi-
nated. She says the local Latino
community’s political clout was
greatly responsible for the recent
proposal by the Multnomah
County Sheriff’s Office to not jail
many undocumented residents.
“The Latino community shows
up to the budget meetings and
testifies in greater proportion
than their actual percentage of
the population,” Madrigal says.
Madrigal says she still finds
non-Latinos in Portland often
clueless about who Latinos are,
or what they want. Not long ago,
a colleague who needed “a per-
son of color” for a panel wanted
to ask her to participate, but
didn’t quite know how, Madrigal
says.
“They said, kind of like, ‘Can
you check that box?’ They need-
ed a person of color, and they
weren’t sure if I counted,” says
the light-skinned Madrigal.
Madrigal is politically savvy,
having successfully run cam-
paigns in Clark County before
managing Cogen’s campaign last
year. She says she could see run-
ning for officewhen her children,
now 3 and 10, are older.
Madrigal can also see where
some of her votes might come
from, with the latest census
count showing one in four Ore-
gon kindergarteners is Latino.
Twenty years from now, she
says, those kindergarteners will
be voters she might be able to
woo — if they identify them-
selves with Latino concerns.
Living in conflict
Umpqua Bank Executive Vice
President Rick Calero is another
successful young Latino who
could help Latinos flex their po-
litical muscle in the years to
come.
Calero, 33, was born and raised
in New York City, his parents
having emigrated from Puerto
Rico. He has also lived in Dallas
and Miami.
In New York, he saw Latinos
organizing around issues such as
bilingual education in the schools
and immigration support.
InMiami, he sawa Latino com-
munity dominated by Cuban im-
migrants organize around anti-
Castro sentiment.
In Texas, Calero says, cross-
border immigration is such an
immediate issue that Latinos
there naturally organized
Latinos:
Local Hispanics ‘live in conflict’
■
From page 1
TRIBUNE PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER ONSTOTT
David Torres here with Raul Vasquez, insists his many Latino employees refrain from speaking or reading in Spanish while on the job. The goal, he says is for them to be fluent in English.
“They said, kind
of like, ‘Can you
check that box?’
They needed a
person of color
and they weren’t
sure if I
counted.”
— Marissa Madrigal
See CLOUT / Page 3