Multiracial Coalitions in the Election of the First Latino Legislator

The election of Nelson Merced to the Massachusetts State Legislature in November 1988 represented a milestone in state politics. He became the first Latino ¹ ever elected to state-level office in Massachusetts. Merced was elected to the State Legislature after winning the Democratic primaries in the Fifth Suffolk District in Boston; he received 43 percent of the vote among a field of six candidates, three of them African American. In this chapter, I argue that Merced's election was the result of a strategy framed within a multiracial coalition. Such coalitions are crucial for Latinos to gain electoral representation in Massachusetts, particularly in cities such as in Boston where they are far from constituting a voting majority due to a realtively small Latino population and low levels of voter participation. Latinos currently make up 14.4 percent of the population in Boston (U.S. Census 2001) and have one of the lowest voting rates in the city (Chapters 9 and 10 in this volume).