Several prominent members of Boston’s Hispanic community, including City Councilor-At-Large Felix Arroyo and activist Gerardo Villacres, called Wednesday night for Hispanics to have their political voice heard.
Tomas Gonzalez, Mayor Thomas Menino’s liaison to the Hispanic community, said that there is room for Hispanic leadership in Massachusetts because there are only two Hispanics, besides Arroyo, holding public office in the commonwealth. He added that only 5,000 of Boston’s 85,000 Hispanic residents voted in the last election.
But Villacres said most Hispanics in Boston do not vote because they are either not old enough or unable to.
“Most Latinos in Boston are youths – over 60 percent – and cannot vote,” he said. “Many of the others are non-citizens.”
Arroyo implored Hispanics to get youths more involved in the political process.
“We have to be more proactive,” he said. “We have to reach out to them.”
Villacres also said Hispanic youths need someone to look up to and used Arroyo as an example.
“We need role models,” Villacres said. “We need people to want to grow up to be like Felix Arroyo.”
But Arroyo said everyone in the Hispanic community, not just youths, needs to get involved and overcome obstacles that have been holding them back.
“We have to make an effort to get the community involved despite the many barriers,” Arroyo said.
The event was the first in a planned series for City Year, a community-based action group similar to AmeriCorps, in an effort to bring more college students and those under 30 into the political fold, according to a brochure.
“I’m a big supporter of this event as I want to bring community to the youth,” said Matthew Hendren, 19, of Winston-Salem, N.C.
Another City Year volunteer and event organizer, Aaron Marquez of Arizona, said he saw the need to get the message of leadership out of the “formal setting of JFK Library and Harvard and to more of a college student and youth-geared setting.”
Members of the Hispanic community also came to support the cause.
Natily Santos, originally of New York City, said she came to the event because she is new to Boston and “felt that it would be great to get involved in the Boston Latina community.”
Diego Sanchez, a longtime Boston resident, said he went to hear “Arroyo speak about his ideas of bringing the [Hispanic] community together.”
Arroyo said it is important that Hispanics band together and not be swept under the rug to make sure they have their political say.
“We can be ignored,” Arroyo said, “but we cannot let ourselves get ignored.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
