Muted Voices: Latinos and the 2000 Elections.

• Author: Pineda, Richard
• Position: Book review

Muted Voices: Latinos and the 2000 Elections. Edited by Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Louis DeSipio. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005; pp. ix + 276. $29.95 paper.

The Latina/o community in the United States is growing rapidly and with this growth has come near constant attention by the media, political parties, and pundits. The 2000 presidential election and focus on Latina/o voters in the election certainly reflects this trend. Despite the attention, however, it seems that popular media's and even politicians' interest is superficial and ultimately fails to engage what is possibly the most important minority community in contemporary history. By contrast, every four years since 1988, political scientists Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Louis DeSipio have provided critical and groundbreaking insight in their edited collections of post-election analysis of Latina/os and the political process. Each volume focuses primarily on the presidential race, but also reviews state contests in which Latina/o participation was significant.

The newest volume in this series examines the 2000 elections and offers several important observations about Latina/o political participation at the national and regional levels. It also treats the framing of campaign outreach and issue focus by Republicans and Democrats. In their introductory chapter, the editors conclude almost immediately that "Latinos did not have an enhanced impact on the results of the election" (13). Justifying the book's apt title, de la Garza and DeSipio focus on the space between "symbolism and influence," pointing to minimal shifts in Latina/o voting patterns in 2000. Their primary argument is that, unless voting patterns reveal a major shift in Latina/o preferences, it is unlikely that present political outreach efforts will make a difference (27). Contextualizing the data they have collected thus far, a series of tables shows changes in the number of Latina/o voters from 1976 through 2000, and also compares "turnout rates and share of adult citizen population for age, education, and income cohorts of Latinos, Non-Latino Whites, and Non-Latino Blacks" in 2000 (23). Given the difficulty of finding complete data related to Latina/o political participation in the popular media, this material puts Muted Voices in a category by itself. De la Garza and DeSipio also offer a fascinating narrative of the role of Latina/os in the presidential election process from the primaries through the contested...