US Latino Political Power Lost in the Mist of Time

by Richard Vasquez 

If you listen to what Latinos want, you’ll hear echoes of a seed I helped plant some 40 years ago as a marketer for many of the biggest U.S. consumer advertisers. Among the brands--and institutions--I’ve advised are: Sears, Kia Motors America, Walt Disney Company/ Disneyland, NBC Universal/Telemundo, The California Endowment and the City of Los Angeles. Most marketers in this space came up among the ranks of the ad agency system. I began as a southern California field representative for U.S. Senator Alan Cranston, the legendary moderate-to-liberal Democrat. As part of an effort to understand the implications of an impending seismic shift in demographics represented by the explosive growth in blue-collar Mexican and Central American communities, his office saw fit to hire a Mexican-American kid from a working class, pro-union L.A. family.

A portion of that population surge had been spurred by the arrival of immigrants from Mexico and Central America in pursuit of the American Dream, something people throughout the world had long since aspired to. Having learned the language of consumerism from TV advertising, they had come here, uninterrupted, for 50 years because of a tacit agreement with their greedy employers and Latino media. Assured by the latter two, they understood that if they worked hard and stayed out of trouble, they could move freely and acquire the goods and services that brought them closer to achieving it. As U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego pointed out recently in a post-off-year election interview that ran in the New York Times interview, being able to afford a big Ford F150 showed the world that you were on the road to success.

It didn’t matter why you came. Mexican workers came mostly for seasonal work that extended from February to November. Later, migrants from Central America arrived seeking asylum from persecution and civil war in their home countries. The impact of this tacit agreement wasn’t fully appreciated until the US census of 1970 when the US government changed the way Latinos were counted by introducing the “Hispanic” category.

Among the first to take note were savvy brand marketers who recognized that a new, addressable, market with distinct characteristics could increase market share. For political parties it meant leverage over a block of voters, both U.S.-born and naturalized Latino citizens who cared how other Latinos were being integrated into and whether they were being treated fairly. Democrats became the party of immigrant integration, favoring humane immigration reform that provided pathways to citizenship. Republicans, on the other hand, camouflaged racial and exclusionary views by espousing onerous bureaucratic obstacles for non-white immigrant naturalization and policies favoring European and other non-Latino immigration. They also pushed hard for increased border militarization as well as expanded deportation enforcement on grounds of national security.

Two partisan opinions came to the same conclusion in the aftermath of the November 2025 elections.

Senator Gallegos astutely pointed out that Democrats miss the mark on connecting with Latinos because there are two conversations going on and only one that matters. Latinos are focused on economic policies that drive down prices of consumer goods because owning a big pick-up, having a nice house, new clothes and still having some left over to help family back home matter most.

Mike Madrid, a noted Republican Latino political pundit, said in response to the 2025 election results that “Latinos aren’t voting for Democrats or Republicans—they’re voting against Democrats and against Republicans when they misinterpret our priorities, which are the same as every other working person’s. It’s a very big difference. The partisans are all looking at us as if we’re this peculiar exotic little creature.”

And I believe they are both right.

While it is important, contextually, to mention how each party approaches historic waves of immigration, both responses suggest al that the idea of integration into society, when left to markets forces, defines what it means to strive for the American Dream.

Savvy marketers began framing a business case for embracing the Latino market when census data revealed that the U.S. Hispanic/Latino population had grown from approximately 9.1 million to 14.6 million from 1970 to 1980, representing an annual growth rate of about 4.8%. From 1980 to 2000 the Latino population grew from almost 15 million to 35 million at an average annual growth rate of 4.6%. 

The 1980 Census drew their attention to a fast-developing domestic market with significant growth indexes, and they began taking the necessary steps to convert its newest segments into loyal U.S. consumers. They devised strategies to reach these emerging Latino communities that spoke directly to their aspirations and a desire to integrate into US mainstream society on behalf of brands such as Coca Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Proctor and Gamble, and Colgate-Palmolive, among other multi-national conglomerates. These companies knew language and culture were essential elements in the conversation they wished to have with these potential customers, so they shifted age-old assumptions with respect to consumer behavior as applied to U.S. Latinos, particularly in the Southwestern US.

This resulted in the first mass media campaigns aimed at Spanish-speaking Latinos in the U.S., most of which were aired by the politically powerful Mexican media monopoly Televisa, whose content and audience reach in Mexico and the rest of Latin America was and still is unsurpassed. Televisa represented to Mexico what CBS, NBC and ABC, combined, once represented in the US. When people began arriving in significant and measurable numbers, Spanish-language television stations began airing Televisa content, first in San Antonio, Texas, then Los Angeles and later Miami, New York, etc. until Univision Network came along and established a 100% reach of U.S. Spanish-speaking households. 

Unsurprisingly, Spanish-language media worked. And the big corporate brands invested heavily by purchasing any and all available air-time from the fledgling Spanish-language media, which by the late 1980s, also included top-tier market radio stations. Notably, these campaigns did not address US-born, English-speaking Latinos.

The promise, repeated over and over, was: “It doesn’t matter how you got here, once you set foot on US soil, all you need is a Coke and a Bud, credit at Sears Roebuck and a ticket to Disneyland,” you are showing the world how you are reaching for the American Dream and on your way to achieving it. An important idea to bear in mind. it is at the core of how, at least the dominant market segment—consumers of Mexican origin comprising a full 65% of the entire US Latino population—adapted and made themselves part of the American mainstream, regardless of their immigration status.

The meaning of this is nuanced as it emphasizes “consumerism” over “citizenship.” Immigrants learned how to be consumers before they learned how to be citizens. For people who came here from Latin America or overseas, it was imperative to understand the immigration system because returning to their countries of origin would pose a greater hardship on them than it would on someone deported to Mexico. For these, crossing back and forth over a porous border was relatively easy until the Obama presidency, so it can be argued that U.S. immigration policy toward Mexico has been traditionally market.

Consumerism, then, is the de-facto immigration policy that leaves people vulnerable because it lulls them into a false sense of security and of belonging. When the political winds shift to racist scapegoating, such as what we are seeing as a by-product of the MAGA movement, this has implications that strike at the core of basic American values not to mention the American Dream itself.

We have not had a serious national conversation about comprehensive immigration reform since the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which “normalized” the status of 4 million immigrants a generation ago. Since then, immigration policy has been driven by pro forma market conditions requiring the fulfillment of low-wage labor needs among U.S. industries without regard to political consequence.

The commercialization of immigration changed that arrangement by empowering workers to feel as though citizenship had been bestowed upon them because they were such reliable consumers and therefore played a vital role in the U.S. economy. Latinos in the U.S. boast a collective annual spending power of four trillion dollars. If the U.S. Latino community were a separate country, it would rank among the top five economies in the world by Gross Domestic Product.

By mistaking consumerism for citizenship, we have inadvertently created an economic powerhouse that is fully integrated into the U.S. mainstream, whether its individual component constituents are documented or undocumented. When they were recruited for participation in this economic experiment, status was not a condition of participation. Undocumented workers complement, rather than displace, U.S.-born workers. That is why it is so hard to determine who is whom. Consumerism is designed to function transactionally, that is, who has money to spend and how they spend that money. That’s the deal.

Now the Trump administration is trying to dismantle that arrangement in the most egregious manner possible by taking U.S. citizens hostage, chasing old ladies in the middle of the street and slamming neighborhood landscapers to the ground.

They will never achieve even a fraction of their stated goal of removing one million of us without ripping the heart out of the very thing that makes America great: its belief in a social and economic system where acquiring goods and services is the central part of American identity, success, and happiness. For this reason, those who support are cool with mass deportation, however illegal and inhumane, will be hard-pressed to find people who are layered into the mainstream by the mist of time.T

This column was first published in Courage: The Saving Democracy Newsletter on Substack. It has been edited for length here, and we offer our utmost gratitude to the author for his patience and support.