Latinos in New England

5. Growing into Power in Rhode Island

5 Growing into Power in Rhode Island Miren Uriarte A lthough present in the state since the 1960s, Rhode Island Latinos erupted into the consciousness of the region in the late 1990s with two critical facts. The first is that the growth of the Latino population in the state had been explosive.1 Since 1990, Latinos quadrupled their share of the population, and today, with 90,820 persons, they account for 8.7 percent of the total population and for 48 percent of the racial/ ethnic minority population of the state. Without the influx of Latinos, Rhode Island would have experienced negative population growth in the 1990s.2 In Providence and Central Falls, Latinos account for a significant percent of the populations of those cities, 30 percent and 47.8 percent, respectively. In those cities, the presence of Latinos can no longer be ignored. Even as the numbers climbed, there appeared to have been little acknowledgement of the meaning of the demographic change to the institutions and politics of the state. Through the 1990s there had been some appointments to the boards of nonprofit organizations and the presence of Latinos grew in key areas, such as health care delivery. But in general, there was scant attention to the supports that this large influx of newcomers would require.3 At the end of that decade, Latinos faced serious barriers of access to services of all types and were caught between mainstream public and private systems of service delivery unable to serve them well and policies that strongly restricted Latinos’ capacity for building service organizations of their own. The avenues used by Latinos in New York, Hartford, and Boston to meeting the communities’ needs for services to support their adjustment and incorporation (such as for example, community-based service organizations) have been largely out of reach to Latinos in Rhode Island, as the growth of the Latino population largely coincided with the cuts in federal funding for the urban programs that had made those services possible in other areas of the region. In Rhode Island, meeting the community’s needs has meant obtaining access to decision making at the state and city levels. And that brings us to the second fact that brought Latinos in Rhode Island to the attention of observers in the region. In Rhode Island, Latinos were running for office and getting elected. Anastasia Williams, a Panamanian woman, had represented Providence’s District 9 in the State Legislature since 1992. Luis Aponte, a Puerto Rican, had been elected city councilor for Providence’s Ward 10 in 1998 on his second try. Victor Capellán and Miguel Luna, both Dominicans, had run campaigns for state representative in 1996 and 1998, which resulted in very narrow losses; Luna would be successful in 2002 in his run for the Providence City Council. León Tejada became state representative in Providence’s District 11 in 2000, and Juan Pichardo, in his second try, was elected state senator in Providence’s District 2 in 2002 (both Tejada and Pichardo are Dominicans). In Central Falls, Ricardo Patiño, a Colombian, was elected to the city council in 2000. From the perspective of Latinos in other areas of New England, this was a rise to electoral success the swiftness of which was unparalleled in the region. The ideal process of immigrant assimilation described by classic American sociology is still the prevalent thinking about the factors that lead to political participation among immigrants. The assimilation model places ‘‘civic assimilation,’’ or the active participation in civic society, at the pinnacle of the process of ‘‘Americanization,’’ a tale that evolves over several generations.4 New immigrants first struggle to acculturate and incorporate themselves into the economy and social institutions, facing discrimination. As they make themselves familiar with and familiar to others already here, this discrimination diminishes, opening the door to the increased participation by the second generation of immigrants in the social institutions of the broader society. This broad, unimpeded interaction promotes social relations that lead to intermarriage and, with that, a sense of identity in the third generation that is based less in the ethnic identity of yore and more in the common identity as ‘‘Americans.’’ This sense of common future as Americans is, according to the model, the basis for the political participation of newcomers. In spite of the power of this paradigm to shape the American perspective as well as policies toward immigrants, the experience of immigrant groups—both old and...