For Hispanics, Numbers Are the Key to Power

The Back of the Yards neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side is located at the intersection of population growth and political frustration. The old Irish and Polish meatpacking center that inspired poet Carl Sandburg to dub Chicago the “hog butcher for the world” is now 80 percent Hispanic. Yet Hispanics have little political power there, thanks in part to creatively drawn legislative districts that have the effect of keeping them a voting minority. The four-square-mile community is represented by five city council members, three members of Congress, three state house members, and two state senators. Of those politicians, only five are Hispanic, diluting the political clout of the fastest-growing population in the nation.

“Do the math,” says Chicago Alderman Ricardo Muñoz, who argues that there is “20 years of pent-up growth” in the Hispanic community. For decades, he says, political leaders have used Hispanic neighborhoods as “backfill”—dividing them up to preserve black and white majority districts. Muñoz believes Hispanics won’t tolerate such tactics much longer, now that they have grown in number and affluence. They surpassed blacks as the nation’s largest minority in the 2010 U.S. Census and increased four times faster than the total population.