Monday, April 4, 2011

CP asks if Hispanic Nashvillians are a viable, voting constituency

The Nashville City Paper quotes me a couple of times today in a story about Hispanic Nashvillians as a political constituency.

I mentioned to reporter William Williams a couple of statistics that didn't make it into the story, namely: 37% of Hispanic Tennessean U.S. citizens are registered voters, and 90% of those voted in the 2008 elections.

The story does report these 2010 Census numbers: there are 61,000 Hispanic Nashvillians, out of 626,000 total Nashvillians, and 290,000 Hispanic Tennesseans, out of 6.35 million total Tennesseans.

Read the full story at http://nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-news/davidson-countys-hispanic-population-grows-will-latino-political-influence-do-like.

Editor's note about sources: I tried to connect Williams to a few other sources, none of which made it into the piece. The Nashville-centric Tennessee Hispanic Chamber has plenty of politically engaged leaders, but they never get quoted in these stories. And Williams has previously reported on Hispanics in Nashville politics, so he knows the current and former leaders of local Hispanic political groups, like the Middle Tennessee Hispanic Democrats and the Republican National Hispanic Assembly of Tennessee; did they not return his calls?

Admittedly, neither the MTNHD nor the RNHA of TN appears to have a currently functioning web site, but maybe that could have been a tidbit for Williams' story. Ask them: what is the status of your group, given that your web site is down, as well as the web site of your political
contraparte? The answer might have served as a decent metaphor for the overall dynamics of the Hispanic constituency in town. Or not.

But it would have been an interesting line of questioning, don't you think?


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