From local school boards to the halls of Congress, the ranks of elected officials of Hispanic heritage has surged throughout the United States.
In two decades (between 2001 and 2021), the number of elected Hispanics — who serve on local school boards or as town officials, as state legislators or as governors, or as members of the U.S. Congress — nearly doubled, from 4,060 to 7,087, according to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund, a nonpartisan group that encourages Hispanics to take part in the U.S. political process.
“There’s a lot of room for growth,” says Dorian Caal, a director at the fund, because this group is becoming a larger share of the U.S. population and the voting-age population. Nationally, the percentage of Hispanics among all eligible voters in the U.S. has been growing, according to the Pew Research Centre, and is up from 7.4% of eligible voters in 2000 to 14.3% in 2022.
And so is the share of Hispanics as a percentage of the U.S. population, which has grown to 19% today, according to the polling firm Ipsos. The trend is happening in states like Florida and California, which have large Spanish-speaking populations, but also across the country, Caal says.
He notes that Hispanics are also being appointed to prominent government or court positions too. He points to the 2009 appointment of Sonia Sotomayor as a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Recently, both the U.S. House and Senate set records for Hispanic/Latino representation. The House set a new record after the 2022 midterm elections, with 52 Hispanic members, Caal says.
The Senate has a record six Hispanic members - The Congressional Research Service lists 54 House members with Hispanic/Latino heritage. State legislative seats across the country also saw a jump after the 2022 elections — from 344 to 376.
The number of Hispanic governors, while slowly growing, has been most remarkable in the state of New Mexico, whose voters elected current Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, the first Democratic Hispanic woman to be elected governor in the history of the U.S. Lujan Grisham followed the first female Hispanic governor, Republican Susana Martinez.
Before Martinez, New Mexico voters elected several male Hispanic governors, including Toney Anaya, the late Jerry Apodaca and the late Bill Richardson, who also served in Congress and in the Cabinet as energy secretary and as U.S. representative to the United Nations. Kristoffer Shields, director of Rutgers University’s Eagleton Centre on the American Governor, says the dominance of Hispanic candidates in New Mexico is partly because the success of Hispanic candidates breeds more success and partly because of a strong voting bloc of Hispanics in the state.
According to the Pew Research Centre, New Mexico is the only state where Hispanics are the largest ethnic/racial group, at 42% of eligible voters. “Representation always matters. You have to see it to believe,” Shields says.
“We are a diverse nation. It’s important, especially at higher levels of government, to get people with diverse backgrounds who understand their communities, so those communities have a say.”
