New York Times
By Julia Preston
October 22, 2013
A majority of Latinos in the United States say they need a national leader to promote their interests but cannot identify anyone who fits that bill, according to a survey published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project.
When asked to name “the most important Hispanic leader in the country today,” 62 percent of Latinos in the survey said they did not know, and another 9 percent answered “no one.”
Of the two people most frequently mentioned as the most important Hispanic leader, one — Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is Puerto Rican — is not a politician. The other is Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who is Cuban-American. They were each mentioned by 5 percent of Latinos participating in the survey.
Other politicians mentioned were the former mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, a Mexican-American Democrat who was mentioned by 3 percent of those in the poll, and Representative Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, a Puerto Rican Democrat who has been very active promoting legislation to overhaul the immigration system. He was mentioned by 2 percent.
The survey was conducted before Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican who is Cuban-American, gained more prominence by leading the effort to shut down the federal government in an attempt to strip funding from President Obama’s health care bill. The national survey was conducted using landlines and cellphones from May 24 to July 28 in both English and Spanish among a sample of 5,103 Latino adults, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Latinos are the largest minority and a fast-growing group, accounting for more than half the country’s population growth from 2000 to 2010. They increased their turnout in every presidential election since 1996. They voted overwhelmingly in 2012 to re-elect President Obama, and recent polls show they are growing increasingly negative toward the Republican Party.
The report also provides a portrait of diversity among the country’s 53 million Latinos that has not coalesced into a strong unified national identity. In the survey, only 4 in 10 Latinos said people from different national origins — coming from Mexico, Puerto Rico or Cuba, for example — share “a lot” of common values, while another 4 in 10 said they share “some” values.
But the Pew report points to opportunities for Hispanics from either party, showing that 74 percent of those polled believe they need a leader who speaks for them, and many express a strong sense of identity both as Hispanics and as Americans.
Among Dominican Latinos, for example, 66 percent describe themselves primarily as Dominicans rather than Latinos or Hispanics. At the same time, 53 percent of Dominicans think of themselves as “a typical American,” according to Pew. Among Cuban Latinos, 63 percent describe themselves most often as Cubans, while 55 percent think of themselves as typical Americans. Fully two-thirds of Hispanics born in the United States describe themselves as typical Americans.
Mr. Rubio gets a boost from the voters in Florida, where 70 percent of Cubans in the United States reside. In the survey, 25 percent of Cubans mentioned Mr. Rubio as the most important Hispanic leader.
Also mentioned — by fewer than 2 percent of those polled — were Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a Cuban-American Democrat; Jorge Ramos, a Mexican-American who is an anchor of Univision television; and Mr. Obama – even though he is not Latino.
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