Headlines, Human Rights, Migration & Refugees, North America

POLITICS-US: Election Day in a Colorado Steel Town

Peter Costantini

PUEBLO, Colorado, Nov 7 2008 (IPS) - Interstate 70 in western Colorado heads east towards Denver along the upper reaches of the Colorado River.

On a railroad track paralleling the highway, two orange and black locomotives of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe line haul a long train of hopper cars full of coal up a steep grade into the Rocky Mountains and across the Continental Divide to points east.

The river, not much wider here than a fly-fishing stream, meanders westward down the valley that it carved over millennia between red-rock mesas, bordered in early November with yellow-leaved cottonwood trees.

Broadening as it flows through the Grand Canyon, the Colorado is corralled by huge dams that provide water and electric power for Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles, and irrigation for the thirsty farms of the Southwest and California.

University Volunteers Find Inspiration Forty miles north of Pueblo lies Colorado Springs, a city of roughly 400,000. Two evangelical mega-churches and five nearby military bases help make the vote here a slam-dunk for the Republicans. The town is also home to a small liberal arts school, Colorado College, home to about 2,000 members of another heavily Democratic demographic. Nationally, 18- to 29-year-old voters favored Barack Obama over John McCain 66 percent to 32 percent. Late on Election Eve, a large part of the student body is gathered in the new arts center to watch Obama's victory speech in Chicago. Rapturous faces absorb his words through their skin, and many in the crowd are moved to tears. This is more ecstatic than any rock concert, but there's an underlying sense of gravity as well, as if history were pausing and taking a deep breath. Kelsey Kamm of San Francisco and Zoë Wick of Seattle, students at the college, went door-to-door earlier in the day to get out the vote in a working-class neighbourhood. "It's so funny that the election is held on a Tuesday in the middle of a workday. It's once every four years, but it's not a national holiday." "Yeah, why don't they just put it on the weekend?" "I heard some goofy report that said the reason they didn't was because Hamilton said the weekend was for drinking and whoring around." (Alexander Hamilton was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.) "It's like, why does that still need to be the way we do it?" Another student, Jesse Lehrich, has been volunteering as an organiser for the Obama campaign here for a few months, sometimes putting in 110 hours a week. He trains groups of canvassers and sends them out weighted down with campaign literature. Ninety percent of the campus will vote, he says, and 90 percent of those will go for Obama. So the campus organisation uses its resources to help more conservative areas, sending students to "down and dirty places that need able-bodied, young, fearless children." Lehrich, a political science major from Massachusetts, finds Obama "an unbelievably inspirational figure". He values his bi-partisan approach and his ability to make people feel that government is working for them, not against them. In talking with undecided people, he says, he didn't try to change anyone's mind, just elucidated Obama's beliefs and asked questions like: "Why are we spending ten billion dollars a month to risk the lives of courageous soldiers as opposed to using that money for education and health care and tax cuts?"

By the time it crosses the border into Mexico and empties into the Gulf of California, the river is a mere trickle. Mexican wetlands and farms are drying up because of the reduced flow.

Mexico, for its part, has been more generous in sharing its resources, particularly its human ones, with its northern neighbour. Millions of workers, unable to make ends meet at home, have ranged northward for many decades to provide labour for the farms and cities of el Norte.

The state of Colorado has been a destination for a good part of them. The population of 4.86 million is 19.5 percent Hispanic, about a third more than the Hispanic share nationally.

Along with immigrants, Colorado is also home to many Hispanic families who have been here since before the United States was. U.S. Senator Ken Salazar and his brother, Representative John Salazar, come from a family that has lived in the area for 12 generations. A large part of the state had been part of Mexico, but was forcibly annexed by the United States in the 1840s.

In this year's presidential elections, the 19 percent of Colorado voters who are Latino voted 60 percent to 38 percent for Democrat Barack Obama. This support provided a critical boost to his 6.8 percent margin over Republican John McCain, which gave the Democrat the state's nine electoral votes. In 2004, George W. Bush won the state from John Kerry by 4.7 percent.

Nationally, Bush won some 40 percent of Latino voters in 2004. This year, the Republican share of the Latino vote dropped to 31 percent, while the Democratic ticket took 66 percent.

An influx of newly registered young voters is another factor widely credited with swinging the victory to the Democratic ticket. And the Democratic nominating convention was held in Denver, the state's capital and biggest city, which gave the candidates high visibility here.

Immigration is among the most important issues to many Latino citizens, according to polls. Even though Senator McCain was co-sponsor of a comprehensive immigration reform bill that died in Congress in 2006, he took a harder line on the issue during the campaign.

Many Latinos blame conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, such as Tom Tancredo, who represents the Denver suburbs, for sinking the bill and pushing for criminalisation and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

Raids by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, including one on a Colorado meatpacking plant, swept up U.S. citizens along with undocumented workers in their dragnet. Lydia DeLaRosa, a Latino community leader in Grand Junction, told the Washington Post: "Even Mexicans who were born here were put on a bus and taken away."

Heading south from Denver on Interstate 25, the pale gold grass on the undulating hills shows traces of green from the last rain. The Front Range of the Rocky Mountains thrusts up to the west and the Great Plains flatten out to the east.

Much of Colorado's Hispanic population is concentrated in the southern part of the state in communities like Pueblo, about 110 miles south of Denver.

A blue-collar town of a little more than 100,000 with an economy built around a steel mill, Pueblo includes a large Latino community – 44.7 percent of the city – with a long history here. Most in that community are native U.S. citizens, with only 3.7 percent foreign-born.

On election night, the Democrats' party is at Union Depot, an old brick railway station sandblasted and remodeled as commercial space. In a big room with a bar, everybody seems to be somebody else's cousin or high-school buddy, and they're all buying each other a beer and a shot. Hooting and hollering ensues each time a new blue state is announced on several big-screen projection TVs. When the election is called for Obama, the chants of "Yes we did" are deafening.

Mike Rodriguez is looking pretty happy. He works at the steel mill and is wearing a jacket with the logo of the United Steel Workers Union.

Since a long, bitter strike in the late 1990s, the workers at Rocky Mountain Steel Mills have gone through hard times, Rodriguez says. Layoffs reduced the workforce from 10,000 to 1,000. "We used to be owned by John D. Rockefeller, now we're owned by the Russians."

The steel market has been recovering, he says. "Our company is making more money than ever" because more domestic steel is being used in the U.S. "But there is going to be a downturn."

Virginia Rodriguez, Mike's wife, says her 80-year-old mother didn't get a valid absentee ballot, so she had to go down in person today to vote. "Una hora para votar" – she switches into Spanish – an hour to vote, and the ballot was so long.

"The Hispanic vote is very important here and they have truly come out," she says. Her daughter voted for the first time today. Seeing three generations of her family voting was "exciting for us".

One of the speakers tonight is Printis Dominguez, an organiser for Democracia USA, a Latino group sponsored by the local Chamber of Commerce that registered voters and got out the vote in Pueblo's poor neighbourhoods. "I'm so proud of that work tonight," he says. Although the group is non-partisan, he believes over 80 percent of the people they reached voted for Obama.

At the Republican headquarters a few blocks away, the evening is subdued. No party officials are there, but Silver Salazar of Veterans for McCain is scheduled to speak tonight. A disabled Vietnam vet and lifelong Democrat, he's crossed over for the first time to back a Republican.

In the primaries, Salazar supported Hilary Clinton. But when Obama won, he had a meeting with some other Hispanic Democrats and they agreed on Obama: "He was wrong on the Iraq war, he was wrong on abortion, he was wrong on immigration, he was wrong on oil drilling."

"Hispanics have been Democrats and Catholics by tradition, out of respect for their ancestors," he says. In Pueblo, Democrats outnumber Republicans by about two to one.

A city official told Salazar that he was finally going to be able to vote Republican.

"Why?"

"My father passed away this year."

Why did Republicans take the heat for the failure of immigration reform? "I have to blame it on the media," he smiles. "Senator McCain has more compassion."

The Obama win "is going to be a rude awakening to the Republican Party. They have to come out and reach out. They haven't done a good job in reaching out to anybody."