Representing the Future: The Latino Vote, Electoral Demonstrations, and the Politics Of Statistics

• In Event: 568 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. The Politics of Representation

Abstract

For decades, demographers have forecast that the United States is undergoing a dramatic demographic transformation, as ethnoracial “minorities” are expected to numerically surpass the white “majority” within decades. Travelling far beyond the academy, the circulation of such projections has popularized the idea that the country is undergoing a dramatic and seemingly inevitable demographic and cultural transformation. Despite growing anxieties and anticipations over the “Browning of America,” social scientists have largely ignored the impact of these projections on contemporary politics and public policy. In this presentation, I approach elections as an important site from which to study how diverse political actors and projects represent, contest, and leverage “demographic change.” As part of a broader research project on national Latino civil rights and advocacy organizations, I document and analyze the role of statistics in constituting and representing the so-called Latino “sleeping giant” in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Specifically, I focus on the statistically mediated relationship between spokespersons and public demonstrations of “Latino power.” As I trace empirically, demonstrations do not only refer to protests and marches; they also include censuses, elections, and other large scale events that seem to validate, at once and irrefutably, both the ontological existence “Latinos,” as a collective and coherent entity, and a future in which this population has realized its full political potential.

Author

• Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, Brown University