When we last visited the Central Valley farm town of Lindsay, Amy Huerta and her brother, Luis, were in the middle of a pretty intense dinnertime conversation about voting.
“I mean, these are things that matter,” said Luis, who can’t vote because he’s not in the country legally. Amy is 18, and she could be the first in her family to vote, so he’s putting a lot of pressure on her.
“I don’t always take his side,” laughed Amy. “I don’t always do what he tells me to do, because we both have different minds.”
But other potential young voters in Lindsay come from families where politics are not a main course during family dinner.
'It doesn't matter if I vote or not'
Across town from the Huerta household, 22-year-old Cassandra Baca’s daughter, Amoriee, just woke up from a nap.
Baca said she hasn’t really thought at all about voting. She’s got enough on her plate as a single mom with a baby. She works as a kitchen assistant in a facility for senior citizens.
“It doesn't matter if I vote or not. I don't think it would count. It really doesn't have anything to do with me,” she said, as she tries to distract the baby by jangling her car keys.
Baca's dad migrated from Mexico to work in the fields. After she got her GED, she picked fruit in the citrus orchards, too, climbing on top of the tall ladders and braving the thorny branches to pick lemons.
“How was it to work in the fields?” I ask her.
“It was hard, but it was a lesson.”
“What was the lesson? That you didn't want to do it?” I ask.
“Yeah, to do something better than working in the fields. It was a good experience to know you can work hard for your money, and that's not an easy job,” Baca said. “A lot of Americans just sit around on their desk while immigrants are actually out here, from the dawn to when the sun goes down, working in the fields.”
In fact, the only thing that’s caught her attention this election season has been Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s message about immigrants.
“Some of the stuff he's been saying about Mexicans,” Baca said. “If it wasn't for the immigrants, we wouldn't have any fruit or vegetables. So I think it's pretty cruel for him to be out there doing that.”
Maybe, just maybe, she said, Trump might be enough to drive her to the polls.
But so far, no one has ever encouraged her to register to vote or to cast a ballot.
“I think that makes perfect sense,” said Lindsay’s first Latina mayor, Ramona Villarreal-Padilla. “If you’ve never heard why it’s important to vote, if you’ve never seen Latinos moving forward and being in office, if you’ve never seen or been exposed to that, how would one make that first move?”
Latinos' hard-won political power
Latinos make up more than 85 percent of Lindsay’s population. Padilla is in her 50s, and she said when she was growing up here, the town was mostly white and controlled by white farmers.
She said it’s taken a long time for Latinos to achieve a balance of power in local government. Now three out of the five members on the City Council are Latino.
But she worries that the activism that helped sweep Latinos like her into power in Lindsay could be diminished by a generation of would-be voters who are less politically engaged.
“If everybody thought voting wasn’t important, we wouldn’t be moving forward in the Latino movement, the Latino caucus, or anywhere you see that Latinos make a difference, because we are the majority," Padilla said.
Padilla said her father marched with Cesar Chavez, and farmworkers were always stopping by their house for advice.
“Even though my dad wasn’t on City Council or anything, he was an activist for the people’s voice,” Padilla said. “I think that’s the ethic and the legacy that I’m taking over from my father, still being a voice for here in the town where I was raised.”
Padilla said her dad, who had only a second-grade education, taught his 14 children the importance of voting.
“I didn’t think it really mattered. But my dad, if he left anything for any of us to know, he says, 'If you don’t vote, or don’t register to vote, then the government will take your voice away.' "
Like a lot of mayors from small towns and mid-size cities, Padilla is hardly a fat-cat politician. As mayor, she receives only a $75 stipend each month. Her day job is as a mental health clinician in the schools. She’s also working toward a Ph.D. in psychology.
Padilla takes me on a tour of the McDermont Field House, a former citrus packinghouse that the city turned into 172,000-square-foot indoor sports complex. It’s got indoor soccer fields, the largest laser tag space in the world and an indoor wave rider where landlocked farm kids can hang ten on a man-made swell.
“This was a project for Lindsay to be a fit city," Padilla explained. “To improve engagement of youth in Lindsay, to have a place where they can come and not get themselves into trouble.”
But trouble came nonetheless. Not from kids, but through alleged financial mismanagement by previous city leaders that has left Lindsay’s current administration trying to figure out how to pay for the sports complex.
Padilla said she’s trying to bring more transparency to the city and to get residents engaged. And that means all residents, including farmworkers living illegally in the U.S. who can’t vote. And their children, who can, but maybe don’t.
Like Amy Huerta. The mayor has a message for her:
“Amy, I get the sense that you’re thinking that it might not make a difference whether you would vote,” Padilla said.
“I’d like to say to you that it does make a difference because I remember from Lindsay City Council, people won by one vote. That (one vote) could be you.”
Copyright 2016 KQED. To see more election coverage, visit kqed.org/election2016.
