Oregon Legislature reflects growing Latino influence, but will it last?

Two freshmen Latino legislators posted an unprecedented series of wins this year, including $46 million to extend the Oregon Health Plan to 17,600 undocumented children and prenatal and postpartum care to 48,000 undocumented women.

Rep. Teresa Alonso León, D-Woodburn, also succeeded with a measure requiring cultural competency for university and community college staffs. And Rep. Diego Hernandez, D-East Portland, guided through first-in-the-nation legislation requiring ethnic studies in public schools. 

That has many in Oregon politics wondering if 2017 marks a watershed moment for Latino influence in the state.

Latino legislators and activists have had occasional successes before, but never so consistently. “This was, by far, our best session,” said Ramon Ramirez, who has lobbied for Latino political and economic power for four decades.

Yet despite Oregon's Latino population growing 72 percent since 2000, to about 500,000, their representation in government lags far behind.

Latino lawmakers make up 4.5 percent of the Legislature, less than half needed to be proportional to the population.

Research in 2015 found only eight of 420 elected county and non-legislative state positions in Oregon were filled by Latinos, according to the nonprofit Women Donors Network.

Still, Alonso León said the 2016 campaign brought in one of the most diverse legislative bodies she's seen.

She and Hernandez were joined by other new lawmakers of color: Rep. Mark Meek, D-Gladstone, Rep. Janelle Bynum, D-Happy Valley, Rep. Tawna Sanchez, D-Portland, and Rep. Andrea Salinas, D-Lake Oswego, who recently replaced Rep. Ann Lininger. 

"So we're all brand new legislators of color and that's exciting because it's going to help bring a different perspective," Alonso León said. 

2017 success born of urgency

Cover All Kids passed with bipartisan support. Alonso León sponsored the bill, but she said she was in no way the bill's champion. 

The Oregon Latino Health Coalition started its push to provide health care to undocumented children more than a decade ago. 

In 2015, the House passed the measure on a 36-22 vote. The Senate Health Care committee advanced the bill with a “do pass” recommendation, but in the final budget reckoning, the effort slipped away with other dead bills. 

“We used that experience to lay the groundwork (for 2017),” said Linda Roman, a lobbyist for the Oregon Latino Health Coalition. Roman said they learned that not only did they need bipartisan support, they also needed support from both the House and Senate.

Alberto Moreno, the coalition's executive director, said the effort grew in political and financial support over the years, but it was the diverse freshman legislative body this year that got it passed.

"Honestly, Cover All Kids should have been passed a long time ago," Alonso León said. 

The bill's passage culminated years of work, including hundreds of Latino activists with the Latino Health Coalition working phone banks, urging constituents to call their legislators, countless conversations with legislators and massaging the bill to what it is today. It takes effect Jan. 1, 2018, providing health care to all Oregon children, regardless of residency status. 

Moreno said the bill's passage represents a cultural shift in the state. 

"There used to be a time as early as 2005 that when you walked the halls of the Capitol, you didn't see any people of color, but that is steadily changing," Moreno said. 

He said the Legislature's growing Latino influence allows lawmakers to see issues through the lens of people of color, and as immigrants who have faced historical and institutional barriers.

"Sure, our demographics are changing, sure we’re increasing numbers, but that shouldn’t be the measure of how we’re trying to succeed in terms of representation," Hernandez said. "Equity for me means that we start to undo the things that we’ve done in the past, that have subverted and subjugated ... communities of color and native communities." 

He cosponsored for House Bill 2845, which will implement ethnic studies curriculum in public schools from kindergarten through grade 12. The Oregon Department of Education has until 2020 to make it happen. 

Hernandez said this year's bills gained support from Latinos who felt targeted after President Trump's deportation order and subsequent targeted operations in Oregon, and by the spike of hate incidents in the state following Trump's election.  

"For officials who represent many of these communities, that definitely created the urgency to do something," Hernandez said.

Earlier legislators blazed trail

Latino representation in the Oregon Legislature has grown incrementally for several decades, slowed by periods of no representation. 

“Little by little, it took this long to build the base,” said Ramirez, executive director of the Woodburn-based farmworker union Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste. “We’re seeing the results of work that went into it for 17 years.”

The earliest example is Raul Soto-Seelig, a Portland attorney and Cuban-native who was appointed to serve an unfinished Senate term in 1977. He was not re-elected. 

In 1986, Rocky Barilla became the first Latino elected to the House. While Barilla said he doesn't credit himself with passage of Oregon's sanctuary law in 1987, he was the primary sponsor of the bill prohibiting local and state police from enforcing federal immigration law.

He calls himself an accidental politician — a legislator who only stumbled into politics after serving as a lawyer for a man interrogated by Polk County Sheriff's deputies who assumed he was undocumented.

Delmiro Trevino was physically detained in the middle of the Hi-Ho Restuarant in Independence in January 1977. He was released after deputies established he was a longtime resident and U.S. citizen.

"I was the most apolitical person in the whole world," Barilla said. "I never intended to be a legislator."

But after months of knocking on hundreds of doors a day in South and West Salem, which at the time was Assembly District 31, Barilla won the seat.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon and Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, or Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United, asked Barilla to introduce a bill restricting local and state police from using resources to enforce federal immigration law. 

Barilla said he worked with other community leaders of color, which he jokingly referred to as "just 10 of us back then."

"I just wanted to represent everybody in Oregon, Republican or Democrat, but make sure that people of color were represented because they weren't at the time," Barilla said.

The bill passed the Oregon Senate 29 to 1 and the House 58 to 1. It was signed into law July 7, 1987. Barilla was 38 years old.

Today, three Republican legislators are spearheading an initiative petition that would repeal the law.  

For years, Latino representation in Oregon was confined to the rare school board member or county commissioner. 

The breakout exception was Susan Castillo, who served in the Senate in the 1990s and in the 2000s as superintendent of public instruction, which used to be a statewide elected position.

As a freshman legislator, Jessica Vega Pederson cosponsored a bill in 2013 that would have provided drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants living and working in Oregon. 

She was the first Latina to serve in the Oregon House and served from 2013 to 2016.She served along with Joe Gallegos, another Democratic House member, who didn't  seek re-election in 2016.

"We had allies in the house who were strong supporters of the driver's bill, but having somebody else who was Latino in the House was really important to me," Vega Pederson said.

But they weren't successful with the driver's license bill. It was defeated by a well-funded effort when Measure 88 was placed on the 2014 ballot.

"We knew it was going to be a harder campaign to fight, but we didn't have the broader understanding that there was going to be a concerted effort to move it to the ballot," Vega Pederson said. "The Latino community took a hard hit with that defeat."

She said Castillo, who was the first Latina to serve in the Senate, helped pave the way for Latino legislators.

"There were a lot of champions before us, and we are finally seeing that work reflected in this year's session," said Vega Pederson, now a Multnomah County commissioner.

New lawmakers reflect community

Issues affecting communities of color are no different than in other communities, Alonso León said. 

Education, job security, housing and economic stability matter to everyone. She said the value of a diverse Legislature comes when lawmakers are able to tap into their own experiences to help frame law to better serve diverse groups. 

For Alonso León, who was born along Lake Patzcuaro, a region home to the indigenous Purepecha people of Michoacán, Mexico, her upbringing means she can better represent the Latino community. 

She came to the United States when she was five years old. Her parents were farmworkers supporting a family of seven. During hot summers, she would help her parents pick berries. At 12, she interpreted housing information for her parents while speaking with a realtor when her family bought their first home.

"I don't think my parents anticipated one of their children would become a legislator," Alonso León said with a laugh. "But they certainly created that opportunity by coming to the United States for a better life."

When Alonso León kicked off her campaign, she knocked on roughly 4,000 doors in Woodburn with fliers translated in English, Spanish and Russian. She said she met people who said they had never voted because candidates never looked like them, spoke their language or shared their experiences. 

She first learned of her potential influence on the community when she spoke with an 18-year-old high school student in English about her campaign and switched to Spanish when her father introduced himself in Spanish.

"He said 'I just want to say that, for the first time ever, I get to express myself in my native language,'" Alonso León said. "That was such a powerful moment for me because even if you speak another language, you can show your emotion and articulate things that are important to you. I wanted to cry right there in the doorway."

Acción Política PCUNista, a Latino activist organization based in Woodburn, backed Alonso León's campaign and helped support the first elected Latino majority school board in the state, where 80 percent of Woodburn School District students are Latino.

Group volunteers knocked on 15,000 doors, registered 400 Latino voters and assisted about 200 others with their ballots in service of the election, according to Acción Política PCUNista.

Latino candidates are a “demographic inevitability," said Ron Mize, associate professor of language, culture and society at Oregon State University.

Roughly 40 percent of Oregon Latinos are eligible to vote, according to the Pew Research Center. Mize said that number will climb over the next decade as Oregon Latinos reach 18 years old.

Millennials represent 41.5 percent of the eligible Latino voter population nationwide, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Mize wrote a report assessing the social, political and economic role of Latinos in Oregon for the statewide Oregon Latino Agenda for Action.

“What has made this cycle particularly compelling, and why the story looks a little bit different right now, is that both Teresa and Diego were really experienced before they got to the statewide office," Mize said. "They knew what they were doing, and they had a good cadre of supporters.”

That, Mize said, is an early sign of growing Latino influence.

“I really do feel like this is the beginning,” he said.

However, Moreno, who also serves on the Oregon Commission on Hispanic Affairs, said Oregon's growing Latino population doesn't necessarily equate to growing representation. 

"Latino population has doubled in the last decade, but what has not doubled is our representation," Moreno said. "What has not doubled is our access to equitable resources, or economic opportunities, or civic opportunities."  

Education paves way for political shift

Hernandez, who also serves on the Reynolds School District school board in Fairview, said minority influence can catch up to population growth with the help of equitable education.

He points to low graduation rates and high drop out rates for students of color that are representative of historical inequities in the education system. 

"That's also symbolic of the poverty their parents have to face, so yes, we had a successful session in terms of social wins, but undoing generational poverty is going to require more action from the Legislature," Hernandez said.

Born in Los Angeles, Hernandez grew up in Portland where he found himself the only student of color, attending six elementary schools and three middle schools before completing high school, college and graduate school. His mother was a single parent with four children. She cleaned houses to support the family, sometimes enlisting 11-year-old Hernandez to help.

"I saw the experiences my immigrant family went through, and that gave me a perspective that folks in power may not have," Hernandez said.

When he was elected to the school board in 2013, he was only 26. He was the first Latino elected to the board in a district with a Latino majority. Today, he is joined by his colleague Ricardo Ruiz.

He said it is important to build from the growing representation in community organizations, school boards, city councils and the Legislature in order to advance the next generation of Latino leaders.

Hernandez also believes the 2017 session reflected a cultural shift in the state, but it isn't because there was an easy path to representation. He said Latinos have been forced to challenge power, and challenge what he refers to as Oregon's "status quo," as it relates to minorities in leadership roles.

"It's challenging when you are in the minority and literally marginalized," Hernandez said. "So when you challenge power ... I would say some individuals really want to target you for who you are rather than your political beliefs." 

300 gather, seek solutions to race disparity in Salem-Keizer schools

Pending Trump DACA decision worries Oregon immigrants