A version of this post appeared yesterday in Publicola.

In 1992 I returned to the Seattle area after two years in graduate school in Southern California. Before that, I was an undergraduate at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. I paid very little attention to local politics; I was more likely to be reading Karl Marx than Emmett Watson. After I left academics, I got involved in local politics as staff and a volunteer. Almost immediately I discovered and joined a growing movement to elect Hispanics to local offices. Does the election of Lorena Gonzalez and Deborah Juarez mean we made progress in those twenty-three years?

In 1993 I sent a query letter (yes, a letter in an envelope with a stamp on it!) to David Brewster at the Seattle Weekly asking to write about the Hispanic (that’s what we called ourselves then) community’s changing demographics and efforts to turn the growth in numbers into political power.

At that time there were only two Hispanics in the Washington State legislature even though, at the time, the state’s population of Hispanics was the fastest growing in the state. Brewster accepted my proposal and I wrote a few hundred words about efforts to organize a political action committee in Pierce County and the general demographic trend.

For that piece I interviewed State Senator Margarita Prentice. Prentice called herself the “only openly Hispanic state legislator.” The joke was at the expense of State Senator Emilio Cantu, a Republican from Mercer Island who, although Hispanic, hardly identified with the issues associated with the Hispanic community, education, immigration, and economic development.

Today, the Hispanic population is now the largest minority group in the state with more 700,000 people in every county of the state. (US Census)

		U.S. Rank
Total Hispanic Population in Washington	790,000	12
Hispanics as Percent of State Population	12%	15
Hispanics as Percent of U.S. Hispanic Population	1.5%	12
Native-Born Hispanics (Percent of Hispanics)	65%	27

Those numbers were on the upswing throughout the 90s, but really didn’t translate into political representation. Phyllis Gutierrez Kenney joined Senator Prentice in the legislature in 1997; Kenney took an open seat through an appointment process and was subsequently reelected. My own efforts to get elected failed in 2002, and others had mixed results in the legislature in spite of redistricting and promises from Democrats to increase the numbers of Hispanic legislators.

Today, in Yakima, there are now three Latina (I’ll start using Latino/Latina now) City Councilmembers, which makes sense considering that Yakima County has one of the largest Latino populations in the state. And now, Councilmembers Gonzalez and Juarez join those three women on the Council of the state’s largest city. But at the State level, there are still only three Latino legislators.

In 1993 when I was recruited to help re-elect an appointed municipal judge Sergio Armijo, he faced a tough race in Tacoma in what, generally speaking, should have been a walk. Part of it was his “strange” name. This adverse name association was a problem in counties without lots of Latinos, but also in places where the dominant political establishment worried about the local offices being taken over by Spanish speaking people, immigrants, or the children of immigrants. We found that appalling and something that cried out for change.

What hasn’t happened is a successful, organized and statewide effort to elect Latinos at all levels of government in spite of worry about the names on the yard signs. This was my dream as a young person starting out more than 20 years ago in public life. However, the local election of Latinos cannot be attributed to a single organization or fundraising effort. In fact, it’s likely such a thing just doesn’t exist and perhaps never will (in the 90s we formed a Hispanic Political Action Committee in Pierce County and there was one in Seattle too). Such efforts never seemed to get very far in our community.

But what has happened in the intervening 20 years is that many, many Latinos have gotten the education, practical experience, and connections to get elected to local office on their own. Latinos have made themselves a presence at all levels of government and now they are getting elected like all other politicians. While the numbers of Latino people in office may not have grown proportionally with our population, there has been an increase in the depth of penetration of Latinos in government and with jobs related to government. And perhaps, that means we, and our names, aren’t so strange anymore.

While there is no Latino block vote, I think the Latinos getting elected and part of the process are far more sophisticated and their presence more sustainable than if they all got there as the consequence of a machine. Gonzalez and Juarez are more than qualified for their jobs and bring decades of professional and practical experience to a wide array of issues facing the City. Both are lawyers. And it matters that they are both women who came to Seattle from somewhere else from economically challenging circumstances. They’ll understand the challenges faced by newcomers to our city and what it is like being an outsider on the inside.

I find myself very skeptical about Councilmember Gonzalez’ claims to being an “Urbanist.” But, whatever doubts you might have about identity politics (and I have many), I am happy that she is there to be the object of my skepticism. And whatever people say about me, I’m glad that I am here to be the skeptic. The ‘z’s’ in our names matter as an emblem of broader progress toward Seattle being that great city that gives everyone from everywhere, strange or not, a chance to contribute and improve our world.