I am in New York, along the east-west grid from the site of the Twin Towers, towards the tenements and the fledgling gentrification of the Lower East Side. It is a warm day and I have walked here past people laying out on pavement trestles, bits and pieces that only scavengers could covet. Every door stoop is a patio and it seems every building has a room to rent. The church is flush to the street corner in that uncompromisingly New York urban way, and hanging off its rear is a high narrow terrace. In the house, the basement is alive with Spanish: women cooking in one room, toddlers playing in another, an old lady telling the cat to get out of the way of her broom. Sitting over from me is a girl whose future has just turned lucky and she shines with the news. She is 16 and she has come from an interview at the prestigious Mother Cabrini High School in Upper Manhattan, which has offered her a scholarship. Before the new school year begins she must read, she says, Pride and Prejudice and A Man For All Seasons.
This girl represents the Hispanic factor in American politics and in the US Presidential election. Two years ago she came to New York from Ecuador, with her two siblings and her mother, to join her father who was already working in the city. The children had agreed, it was better for the family to be together. In New York, their mother cleans, their father works in construction, they live five together in one room, and if anything untoward happened to any one of them it would be a tragedy. They are undocumented immigrants, working illegally, who have no insurance, for whom access to higher education is out of the question, who pay taxes but whose healthcare depends on charity, who are the life-blood of the city but for whom security of residence does not exist. Of course they cannot vote. And they are by no means unusual.
A considerable proportion of the 39 million Hispanics (or Latinos) living in the US will not be taking part in November’s ballot:
in California, for instance, only 13 per cent of its huge Hispanic population are eligible to cast a vote, and then, only 30 per cent of the electorate overall even make it to the polling booth. Put those figures together and you