Seeking Policy Solutions, a Big Grant Backs More Robust Data on Latino Communities

For years now, Latino scholars, organizers and politicians have been calling for a major increase in data about themselves and their communities. While organizations like Pew Research Center and UnidosUS do offer important information and findings, for many, it’s not enough to fully understand and address the needs of this large and diverse demographic.

This lack of data has serious consequences. Latinos have been historically underrepresented at all levels of government. Politicians, in turn, fail to understand, let alone meet, the public policy needs of Latino communities. In a similar vein, many hold the erroneous view that Latinos are a monolith and therefore apply a “one size fits all” approach to their needs.

A new project by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative (LPPI) is looking to change that. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has awarded LPPI an 18-month, $2.5 million grant to support the creation of two new databases—a data hub and a redistricting hub—which will focus on identifying and analyzing policy issues facing Latinos. LPPI has received an additional $750,000 grant from Casey Family Programs for the Latino Data Hub. According to UCLA, the databases, which will be free to access and available to the public, are intended to become a “go-to resource for national, state and local data.”

For the Kellogg Foundation, funding LPPI’s databases is part of its ongoing work around the U.S. Census and redistricting. Kellogg is one of several equity-focused funders—including Annie E. Casey, Ford, Carnegie, JPB and more—that made a fair and accurate census a high priority over the past five years or so. While LPPI is far from the only institution working on increasing data on Latinos, Kellogg was particularly drawn by the depth of LPPI’s expertise.

“We knew that UCLA, in the LPPI initiative, is one of the largest concentrations of Latino scholars in any Research I university, and they have expertise across various social science disciplines,” said Kellogg Program Officer Ciciley Moore. She added that because of its expertise, LPPI is “uniquely positioned to do the research that is translatable and actionable by community and policymakers.”

LPPI is a think tank housed under UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Division of Social Sciences. Since its founding in 2017, LPPI has sought to address the biggest public policy challenges facing Latino communities through research, mobilization, leadership and advocacy. It has partnered with numerous community-based organizations and philanthropic organizations, as well as policymakers.

Moore added that, while LPPI is based out of a California university, the resources it will create will cut across states that boast large Latino populations.

For LPPI, this work isn’t new. “We’ve been trying to address the gap in data for Latinx communities,” said María Samaniego, who is LPPI’s deputy director and leads the organization’s philanthropic efforts and partnerships.

According to Samaniego, an increase in data will not only lead to a better understanding of Latinos—a goal in and of itself—it will also provide “evidence-based policy interventions” to address some of the biggest issues facing Latino communities, including the disproportionate health and economic impacts caused by the pandemic, discrimination and equitable education.

“Latinos, despite our growing numbers, have been largely invisible in many spaces. And I think we need more opportunities to elevate what’s happening in our communities,” said Samaniego. “Because there’s been such a gap in data, it’s hard to say that we’re experiencing something if we have no data to show it.”

“We’re not a monolith”

The first of the two databases will be a Latino Data Hub, which will provide information on eight issue areas: demography and population, climate change and the environment, economic opportunity and social mobility, education, health, housing, child welfare, and voting rights and political representation.

For Samaniego, the demography and population category, which will include data on age, gender, marital status and ancestry, is of particular importance. “There’s so many differences,” she said. “We’re not a monolith as a community. There’s so many differences between country of origin and generation status.”

According to UCLA, this data will help policymakers, as well as philanthropists and community organizations, create and support policies that will benefit Latino communities. The idea behind the data hub emerged from data showing that Latinos were disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Never have we been hit in the face with some of the disparities that our community faces than through the pandemic,” Samaniego said. “We had a disproportionate share of confirmed cases and deaths of COVID-19. We were experiencing high rates of business closures, unemployment, evictions, learning loss for our students and food insecurity.”

“In order to turn the tide, we needed to ensure we have the baseline information of what our communities were experiencing so we can know where we have to go to close gaps,” she added.

Fair representation in government

The second database will be the Latino Redistricting Hub, which will include “statistical, geographic and historical data” to show how redistricting affects Latino communities. Conducted every 10 years, redistricting refers to the redrawing of electoral maps after a census in order to account for population shifts. The idea is to have fair and equitable representation for everyone. The reality is that redistricting often deprives voters of color of political representation.

This year’s redistricting process is unprecedented, in that it’s the first in modern history without protection from Section Five of the Federal Voting Rights Act (the Supreme Court effectively nullified the protection in 2013), which required a federal court to clear any proposed changes in jurisdictions that have a history of racial discrimination when it comes to voting. In other words, it’s meant to ensure that changes will not lead to political discrimination against marginalized communities, much in the way Jim Crow laws disenfranchised Black voters for decades.

“We also see how Latinos have lacked representation of the federal, state and local jurisdictions, and part of that is what leads to some of those structural disadvantages that we’ve seen,” Samaniego said. “We wanted to make sure that we were meeting the needs of community partners and providing them with the historical and statistical analysis to be able to draw maps and show that we’re not seeing the regression of representation in the long run.”

The grant not only works in conjunction with some of the Kellogg Foundation’s other grants related to the Census, it also supports Latino leadership, providing data and tools to ensure fair and accurate representation in communities, according to Moore.

Gerrymandering has led to a significant underrepresentation of Latinos in public office. A 2018 study by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) found that although there are about 60 million Latinos in the U.S., Latino political representation amounts to a paltry 1.2% across local, state and federal elected offices.

There have already been accusations of gerrymandering during this redistricting cycle. Last month, Latino civil rights groups, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), filed a lawsuit in Texas, alleging that the maps drawn by the state legislature are “diluting” Latinos’ voting rights. According to an analysis of the complaint, although Texas saw an increase of 2 million Latinos since the 2010 Census, the number of Latino-majority districts represented in the new congressional map decreased.

LPPI intends the Redistricting Hub to be a “resource for officials engaged in redistricting decisions” in order to ensure fair and accurate representation in government for Latinos.

Looking at trends

Perhaps one of the most important contributions of the new databases will be the ability to look at data collected over the years in order to track differences and ensure that progress, not regression, is happening.

The databases will be available through a virtual portal where the raw data will be available, along with the data presented in a “digestible manner” and data visualization. LPPI is looking to launch some initial information in Winter 2022, and hopes to fully release the data by no later than 2023.

LPPI’s databases will not only expand policymakers’ understanding of Latinos and their policy needs, it will, in theory at least, help Latinos gain better representation at all levels of government.

For Moore, the program officer who made the grant at Kellogg, it’s personal.

“As a Black Latina, it was really exciting for me to be able to support this opportunity,” she said. “I come from Salinas, California, and I know that in the community that I grew up in, there was so much need in representation in both our local and state policies, and I know what it means for communities to not have that kind of access. So for me, it’s really an exciting opportunity to be able to support this and know what kind of impacts it will have for communities just like the one that I grew up in.”

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