It’s cold for an early October afternoon at Glad Tidings Assembly of God Church in Greeley, Colorado. Kids in puffy jackets are running around on the front lawn while the pastor and his volunteers grill food for the high schoolers who show up after football practice.
“Last Friday we cooked up 240 hamburgers and 176 hot dogs,” Linda Gonzales says proudly.
Gonzales grew up in Greeley on the cattle farm her family has lived on for 70 years. The church events provide children in the neighborhood with somewhere to go after school, she explains. But today, the barbecue is also hosting organizers who are telling the parishioners of Glad Tidings about voting, and their voice in the 8 November midterm elections.
Greeley is part of CD-8, a new congressional district drawn after the 2020 census to include a slice of Larimer county, the agricultural Weld county that includes Greeley, and Adams county, which includes the northern suburbs of Denver.
Weld county has traditionally been run by conservatives and Adams county leans Democrat, making the new district a toss-up. Most analysts and local polls have been predicting it’ll send a Republican to Congress, though by very slim margins.
Who wins in CD-8 may all come down to who shows up at the polls, analysts say. And with Latinos making up 38.8% of the district’s residents, the community could play a huge role in deciding the balance of Congress. For organizers from both parties and nonpartisan organizations, that dynamic has presented an opportunity for Latinos to make their priorities heard.
It’s part of the message Stacy Suniga and Sonny Subia are sharing with parishioners at Glad Tidings Assembly of God.
“Now that we have a new district that is balanced and fair, our work is to re-engage Latinos into the political process, or perhaps invite them if they’ve never been before,” says Suniga, a longtime Greeley resident and president of the Latino Coalition of Weld county, which supports Latinos running for office.
Suniga is walking around the barbecue with a clipboard of voter registration forms. Showing up at events like this is part of a strategy to use “trusted voices” to get out the vote.
Success has been intermittent. “There’s a lot of fear to participate,” Suniga says.
Most of the folks at the church told her they’re registered to vote already, she says, leaving Subia, her colleague, wondering whether they were just looking for a way out of the conversation.
Subia is the volunteer Colorado state director for the League of United Latin American Citizens. He is also a school expulsion officer, and a longtime Greeley resident; he reminisces about mentoring one of the parents at a nearby table when he was a kid.
Latinos in the area are afraid of sharing information with the government, he says, especially when they feel they need to protect relatives who are undocumented. “It was the same thing with the census,” he notes.
He insists more needs to be done to educate voters. “They don’t know that there’s a new congressional district. A lot of these people don’t know where they’re voting.”
“We’re behind the eight ball right now,” he concludes.
‘I don’t see a way I can use my voice’
Many Latinos in Weld county work at the JBS meatpacking plant that was the site of a Covid outbreak in 2020, Subia says. They care about family, and providing for their kids.
“They take two steps forward and one step back and it’s a struggle … They don’t always realize that the vote is important to how rough the struggle is going to be for them.”
Others are simply not allowed to vote. At a bakery on the west side of Greeley, where the line of people getting pastries for their families stretched around the shop on Sunday afternoon, many people shrug when asked about the midterms. Roughly a third of Colorado’s immigrant population is undocumented, barring community members from the polls or making them wary of authorities.
It’s a response Javier Luna, a paid canvasser for the Colorado Democratic party over in Thornton, a Denver suburb, frequently encounters as well.
On the hour-long drive from Greeley to Thornton, sprawling farms dotted with occasional oil rigs have made way for American suburbia, with the Denver skyline in the hazy distance.
Luna has been assigned to knock on the doors of a mobile home community near the party’s campaign office in Thornton. He’s speaking mostly Spanish and is getting lost looking for the addresses among the tightly packed manufactured houses.
Oscar Salgado Hernandez is running a garage sale outside his home; he’s a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, with temporary legal status because he was brought to the US as a child. He says he pays attention to immigration policy as a result, but not to elections, since he can’t vote. “I don’t see a way that I can use my voice.”
Laura Villalobos also can’t vote, but says she talks to her children about the importance of voting. “I tell my kids, vote for this one, for the one I think is going to help us, as Hispanics.”
Other residents tell Luna they’re cynical about the process. Politicians ask for their vote as a Latino, they say, but then don’t prioritize the community’s needs once they’re in office.
Luna is a no-nonsense communicator, quickly informing voters about the new district and their chance to elect the Democratic candidate, Yadira Caraveo, a Latina pediatrician and representative in the state legislature.
When he can squeeze it in, he adds that her opponent is like “Trump with a different name”.
“It’s about delivering the information accurately in a way that gives them a sense of urgency, a sense of importance,” he says. “When we are talking to voters, this might be the only interaction that we have before the election, before they get their ballot.”
‘The power of the Hispanic vote’
Angel Merlos is talking to folks with a sense of urgency as well. Merlos is Colorado’s strategic director for the LIBRE Initiative, a conservative nonprofit that advocates for economic freedom as a way to empower Hispanic Americans.
“A lot of people talk about how politicians need to start realizing the power the Hispanic vote has, which I agree with 100%,” Merlos says. But he thinks the onus is also on the community to make themselves heard. “We can do much more. We are not voting like we can.”
LIBRE Initiative’s political action committee has endorsed the Republican state senator, Barbara Kirkmeyer. Merlos says the group focuses on Kirkmeyer’s proposals to strengthen the economy when talking to voters, rather than some of her other stances, including her opposition to abortion access.
“I’m not saying she’s perfect, I wouldn’t say we would agree with her a hundred percent, even me personally. But I think in general, the issues she talks about – inflation and the economy – are something that really impact our community. And we need to see a fix for that.”
A national poll of Latino voters in Colorado conducted in July and August 2022 by UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization, found voters’ top priorities were inflation, crime and gun violence, and jobs and the economy.
Abortion remains a topic of conversation in the district, however. On the same day as the church gathering, two dozen protesters are holding an anti-abortion rally outside the strip mall where Greeley’s Planned Parenthood clinic is located. A few feet away six people hold “my body, my choice” posters.
‘This could be historic’
In a well-kept suburban neighborhood in southern Greeley, Letty Manzo opens the door to talk to a Democratic canvasser. She knows the midterms are coming up next month, but it’s the first she’s heard of the new district.
“I know it’s coming up and coming quickly, but I have other things on my mind,” says Manzo, 37, who works in retail to support her family of six.
“I’m trying to support my family, especially with everything going up: health payments, the car payment. I’m focused on putting food on the table for my kids.” She compares rising housing prices with the canvasser, who lives nearby. She takes the pamphlets, and promises to read up on the candidates. She seems interested, and the canvasser marks the encounter as a success.
Despite the challenges to get out the vote just weeks before the election, Rhonda Solís, a former member of the local school board who is now running for a new seat on the state board of education, feels encouraged.
She recalls not learning until she was an adult that Latinos were such an important part of the historic make-up of Greeley, where she’s canvassing on a Saturday morning. “Growing up here, I was very quiet. I didn’t feel like I was really part of the community.” Through participation in Latino organizations, she came to see elected office as a way to benefit her community. She is one of three Latinas, including Caraveo, who are on the ballot to represent this district at some level.
“This could be historic if we all three get elected. And I want to make sure that people in CD-8 understand and know that if they ever felt like their vote didn’t count or like it didn’t matter, it does. And it’s going to be right now.”
