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On a warm evening in late July, Maria Beltran walked down a quiet, tree-lined street in Yakima, Washington. Beltran, who is running for state Senate, was canvassing her childhood neighborhood. If elected, she would be the first Latina senator to represent Legislative District 14, which, after a contentious redistricting, is majority Latino for the first time. Beltran pointed to a low building with an intricate red graffiti mural a block away — the Mercado de Yakima. “We would buy our groceries at this store,” she said. “Now, I get to walk the streets as a candidate.”
Yakima is the largest city in Yakima County, which stretches over 2.75 million acres of rolling hills and fertile valleys in south-central Washington. Yakima County includes the Yakima Valley, known as the nation’s fruit basket, where Latinos have settled in large numbers since the 1930s. The Latino population has grown more than fivefold since 1980, making it the largest Latino-majority county in the Pacific Northwest. As of 2022, 51.2% of its residents identified as Hispanic, compared to just 14% in Washington in general.
For decades, legislative maps have split Latino hubs between districts, limiting their voting strength. But last year, in response to a 2022 lawsuit filed by a coalition of local Latino voters, a federal judge ruled that Washington’s 2021 legislative map diluted Latino power, thereby violating the Voting Rights Act. The judge ordered the state to redraw the boundaries of Legislative District 15, which encompassed the eastern part of the city of Yakima and parts of four other counties. Although the district was majority Latino, the old map had lumped in east Yakima, where Latino voters turn out in high numbers, with areas that historically had low Latino voter turnout, while also separating it from several communities where Latinos are more politically active. The power of east Yakima’s Latino voters was further diluted because District 15, as an odd-numbered district, does not hold state-level elections in presidential election years, when Latino turnout is higher. The newest legislative map unites east Yakima with several other Latino-majority communities along the Yakima River to create an even-numbered Latino-majority district, Legislative District 14.
The Latino population has grown more than fivefold since 1980, making it the largest Latino-majority county in the Pacific Northwest.
That decision is the latest of several recent court cases consolidating Latino electoral power in the Yakima Valley region. Meanwhile, community organizers have been hard at work building coalitions and educating voters. In the past decade, voters have elected historic numbers of Latinos to positions across Yakima County. But those victories have also revealed the political divides in the Latino community, as conservative Latino voters and lawmakers confront the often-progressive slate of new lawmakers.
This year will test the strength of the organizers’ wins — and also show whether the community’s divisions can be overcome. Beltran will face Republican incumbent Curtis King for District 14’s state Senate seat. Two other Latina Democrats are also running for state representative in the district: Ana Ruiz Kennedy, a Mexican immigrant and the business liaison for a community development financial institution, is facing Republican Deb Manjarrez, while Chelsea Dimas will battle another Latina, Republican Gloria Mendoza, for the district’s other state congressional seat.
WHEN BELTRAN was a child, her parents, both farmworkers, rose early to pick fruit. They couldn’t afford child care, so she went with them. Among her earliest memories is “waking up and being confused why I couldn’t sleep in and watch cartoons,” she recalled. Even when her father took on a second job, working night shift at a warehouse, the family still had to rely on affordable housing and food support. “That level of poverty didn’t make sense for how hard they worked,” Beltran said.
Her experience is not uncommon: Latinos in the Yakima Valley are more likely to experience poverty, police violence, and, in some cases, worse health outcomes than white people. Discrimination and voter exclusion have long disenfranchised Latinos, and people with Spanish surnames vote at far lower rates than members of other groups. “As soon as one barrier topples, another emerges in its place,” said Josué Estrada, an associate professor at Central Washington University who studies Latino civic rights.
For years after the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, voters in Washington had to take a literacy test to vote. Bilingual voting materials weren’t available in Yakima until 2002. Organizers and Yakima residents say that voting information is still difficult to obtain, particularly in the rural Lower Valley, and voter education remains a challenge.
“The Latino community isn’t a homogenous group. They just don’t vote one way. It’s very diverse. But at the end of the day, your vote is your voice, and you should express that.”
Last year’s redistricting decision is the latest in a series of wins. In 2015, after a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, a judge ordered Yakima to change its electoral system, ruling that its city-wide election system suppressed Latino votes. That fall, Latino city council members were elected for the first time.
But a series of setbacks followed. The Latino council members elected in 2015, particularly the two progressives, often clashed with the conservatives on the council. The wins brought a backlash, too: After 2019, all the Latino candidates either lost their districts or decided not to run.
Now, Danny Herrera is the sole Latino representative on the Yakima city council. “Now we only have representation in one district. That’s scary,” said Cristina González, with the nonprofit Latino Community Fund. González has been an activist in the area for more than 25 years.
But with these losses has come resolve. “They haven’t taken the fight out of us.”
SUNNYSIDE, A CITY in Yakima County 35 miles south of Yakima, has one of the highest concentrations of Latinos in Washington — 86.1% — and organizers there have begun transforming its politics to reflect this. Although 70% of the city’s Latino population speaks Spanish, city council meetings were held in English. That changed this year, after voters elected three Latinos to the Sunnyside city council — the most in the city’s history. Vicky Frausto, a Sunnyside native and former diversity, equity, and inclusion specialist, was one of them. On her arm is a tattoo of a logo for ELLA, the organization she credits with convincing her to run.
Community organizer Maria Fernandez founded ELLA to help Latino women navigate social services and advocate for themselves in the workplace. In 2023, she developed an emerging leaders’ course, hoping to prepare Latinos like Frausto to run for office.
“The energy was through the roof. It was just different. It’s so different.”
That same year, ELLA joined forces with other progressive Latino organizations to form the Lower Yakima Valley Latinx Coalition to boost voter turnout. Together, they ramped up voter engagement and education efforts in Sunnyside, knocking on doors and hosting ballot parties and community listening sessions, often in Spanish. “The energy was through the roof,” Frausto said. “It was just different. It’s so different.”
The coalition’s approach didn’t work for everyone. After they hosted a community meeting primarily in Spanish, some residents, mostly white, accused ELLA of divisiveness, Frausto said. On social media, commenters called the candidates criminals, referring to them as a “cartel” or a “gang.” And some Latino residents withdrew their support, Fernandez said, over the coalition’s partnership with Raíces, a queer-led organization. “Our area is very conservative, and I’m talking about our Latino community,” Fernandez said.
In the end, the Latino voter turnout in Sunnyside was 20%, still slightly lower than the average local turnout, but nine percentage points higher than previously. Frausto and two other candidates became the first Latinas ever elected to represent their districts.
This year, Fernandez incorporated a second nonprofit, ELLA Adelante, as a 501(c)(4) organization, which can legally do more political advocacy. Now, she hopes to keep the momentum going while avoiding what happened in Yakima, where representation was won and then lost. She is focused on District 14, where Beltran is running for state Senate, working to get out the vote and educate the community about how to hold its representatives accountable.
All of this organizing has a long-term purpose. “The hope is that it becomes the model,” Fernandez said.
STILL, THE RACE for state representative showcases the divides ELLA mentioned. Both candidates are Latina, and both have roots in the valley’s farmworker community: The parents of Democratic candidate Chelsea Dimas, the founder of Raíces, were immigrant farmworkers, and Republican Gloria Mendoza, formerly mayor of Grandview, about 38 miles southeast of Yakima, worked in the valley’s orchards and farms before launching her political career.
The two candidates share some priorities — affordability, public safety and education — but promise different approaches to addressing the community’s needs. Among Mendoza’s top goals are lowering taxes and deregulating industry, whereas Dimas seeks to expand the social safety net and other government programs.
Mendoza doesn’t believe that the 2023 legislative district maps boost Latino representation. “The people behind the redistricting are not interested in electing Hispanics, they want to elect Democrats,” she wrote in a statement to High Country News. She points out that the redistricting moved Nikki Torres, the region’s first Latino state senator and a Republican, out of her old district, Legislative District 15, and into District 16, which is not majority-Latino. She’ll retain her seat for the next two years but won’t be able to run again in District 15, unless she relocates.
Mendoza adds that people of all races need to be encouraged to vote. “Washington state has made it very easy for people to vote,” she wrote. Washington has been a vote-by-mail state since 2011. “People who want to vote can easily do so. We need to make sure everyone knows that and is encouraged to exercise this important right.”
Dimas believes that fully mobilizing the Latino vote will take work, well beyond this election cycle. “Our people have been oppressed for a long time,” she said. Redistricting gives Latinos in the Yakima Valley “a historic opportunity for us to really elect more legislators that really understand our community, that are from our community, that look like us.”
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This article appeared in the October 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Latino power.”
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