SAN DIEGO COUNTY NEEDS A MAJORITY LATINO VOTING DISTRICT
One in three San Diegans are Latino. One in four San Diegans eligible to vote are Latino.
Yet in the last 50 years, Nora Vargas is the only Latino candidate elected to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.
You read that right. One Latino leader in five decades.
Go back a full century — 100 years — and that number skyrockets up to ... two.
It’s a stark and shameful history of political disenfranchisement for a cross-border region that prides itself as home to a vibrant, growing Latino community.
And it’s time to end this injustice by including a majority Latino district in San Diego County’s 2021 redistricting plan. In fact, this is required by the federal Voting Rights Act.
How can it be that Latinos have had such difficulty having representation among the county supervisors for so long?
The reason is simple: blatant political gerrymandering.
For decades, county politicians drew supervisorial district lines — and perpetuated an outdated electoral system — that purposefully diluted the voting power of South County’s Latino voters.
Their most flagrant ploy was adding the upscale, White communities of Point Loma and Coronado to South County’s supervisorial district to decrease the voting power of working-class Latino communities like San Ysidro and Chula Vista.
Combine that with the county’s now-defunct voting system, which until 2018 allowed supervisors to be elected outright in low-turnout primary elections, and you get a one-two political punch to knock out the Latino vote and entrench White incumbents in office.
For politicians hoping to hold on to power, it worked great. But for working-class South County communities hoping for a representative to look out for their interests, it was a disaster.
No action on the Tijuana River sewage crisis. Notorious obstacles to county services for low-income families. A county board that actually aligned itself with then-President Donald Trump, instead of our very own California state government, on immigration.
Now, with San Diego County’s first-ever Independent Redistricting Commission, we have an opportunity to right this historic wrong and draw lines that finally give San Diego’s Latino voters the fair and equal voice we’ve always deserved in county government.
We urge the county’s redistricting commission to follow the Voting Rights Act and include a majority Latino district in South County in this year’s redistricting plan.
The South County district should be a true border district that unites the Historic Barrio District and includes all the major U.S.-Mexico border crossings in San Diego County to reflect the region’s cross-border identity and empower Mexican Americans to effectively address cross-border issues critical to themselves and their families.
The commission’s own consultants seem to agree. They declared in a recent report that there is strong evidence of racially polarized voting in the county and advised commissioners to follow Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is meant to protect voting rights for communities of color.
Some of the commission’s recent draft supervisorial district maps would accomplish this goal by uniting Latino communities in South County from the border up to Barrio Logan. If this is done, residents in the area would have a common voice to advocate for public safety, health care and economic issues that uniquely impact their neighborhoods.
Some of these proposed districts in South County go a long way from the current map in ensuring that communities of color are protected from disenfranchisement.
Unfortunately, the redistricting commission is still considering some alternative maps that would undermine South County’s political representation by adding Coronado back into the district, splitting off suburban South County communities into rural East County and stripping border communities out of the district altogether.
That would be wrong. With San Diego County’s first-ever Independent Redistricting Commission, we have an opportunity to right historical wrongs and draw lines that finally give San Diego’s Latino voters the fair and equal voice we’ve always deserved in county government.
Let’s do redistricting right by focusing on doing what’s right for the people, not the politicians.
For San Diego County, that starts by upholding the voting rights of South County’s Latino community with a majority Latino district along the U.S.-Mexico border.
It’s time — our voices have been drowned out for far too long.
Garcia
López