LOS ANGELES — As the California election approaches, many Black and Latino voters calling for a cease-fire in Gaza say the humanitarian crisis unfolding thousands of miles away is swaying which Democratic Party candidates they support in the U.S.
Demonstrators at a Los Angeles rally in support of the Palestinian people, one of many organized in U.S. cities Saturday, said their solidarity with Gaza was an extension of the struggles they experience every day.
It is a sentiment, some say, they will take to the voting booth this election season.
“Our liberation is intertwined with the liberation of Palestine,” said Eduardo “Lalo” Vargas, a public high school teacher who is running for the Los Angeles City Council in District 14, where 62% of residents speak Spanish.
Vargas said he will not support President Joe Biden for a second term because of his administration’s refusal to call for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, where more than 30,000 people have died since Hamas militants’ terrorist attacks on Israel on Oct. 7. About 1,200 people were killed and about 240 hostages were taken in the multipronged attacks on Israel.
Instead, Vargas encouraged the crowd to vote for anti-war candidates.
One of them, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., bills herself as the “pro-peace candidate” in California’s U.S. Senate race. Lee, who is Black, was the only member of Congress to vote against authorizing war in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and she was one of the first Democrats in Congress to call for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.
Her two main Democratic opponents, Reps. Adam Schiff and Katie Porter, have called for a “humanitarian pause” in the war and a “bilateral cease-fire” between Hamas and Israel, respectively.
Lee told supporters on the campaign trail last week that the current anti-war movement is more diverse than in previous generations and that it unifies marginalized communities.
She said at the event: “This movement is multiracial. Now is the time to unify. Now is the time to bring people together for our fight for peace and justice.”
The Rev. Michael McBride, an Oakland-based pastor and a co-founder of the political action group Black Church PAC, said many voters supported Biden in 2020 when he campaigned to restore “the soul of America.” That support is now in question.
“We believe these actions are actually causing us to lose our soul,” McBride said of U.S military support for Israel. “How can we say we have a moral compass and watch the images of starvation, mass famine, displacement, failing hospitals?”
McBride and more than 1,000 Black clergy members from across the U.S. have released open letters to the Biden administration, bought full-page ads in The New York Times and spoken with White House officials about calling for an immediate cease-fire and de-escalation of military operations in Gaza.
At the polls, Biden represents a fundamental “misalignment” within the Democratic Party over Gaza that could hurt establishment candidates this year, said Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, a progressive political action group that has endorsed Lee.
“What we’re seeing is the emergence of a powerful pro-peace voting bloc in 2024 on the Democratic side,” Geevarghese said, referring to the more than 100,000 uncommitted votes cast last week in the Michigan presidential primary.
The votes were largely seen as a protest against the Biden administration’s policies on the war. Geevarghese said the nascent peace movement, fueled by social media, is uniting people of color beyond Arab and Muslim communities.
Some Black people in the U.S. have a “heightened sensitivity to an abuse of power over a vulnerable population” after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, he said. Some Latino voters, he added, have firsthand experience with oppressive, right-wing regimes.
Polling indicates that Black and Latino people in the U.S. are split over Gaza. A poll published in December by Quinnipiac University found that 57% of Latino respondents disapproved of Biden’s response to the Israel-Hamas war, compared to 54% of white and 44% of Black respondents.
Asked whether they support sending more military aid to Israel, 60% of Latino respondents said they opposed it, compared to 56% of Black and 40% of white respondents.
The momentum for support of a cease-fire reflects a broader anti-war sentiment that has been spreading across the country at a time of deepening political divides.
Unlike wars of the past, the conflict in Gaza is livestreamed across social media in real time, creating a sense of urgency not experienced by previous generations. Voters, especially young people, question engaging in conflicts abroad while the U.S. faces its own problems, such as housing affordability, student debt and climate change.
“A lot of our community was seeing the brutality of it on their phones,” said Daisy Lomeli, a City Council member in Cudahy, a small majority-Latino suburb of Los Angeles.
“Our people have been suffering in our own communities for the same reason — colonization,” she added, referring to the European conquests of Mexico and other Latin American countries.
When she was mayor of Cudahy last year, Lomeli, a former schoolteacher and a first-generation American whose family immigrated from Mexico, introduced a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and accusing the Israeli government of “engaging in collective punishment” against the Palestinian people.
The resolution passed on a 3-1 vote in November. It was inspired by a similar resolution approved by the city of Richmond in the San Francisco Bay Area. That one, the first in California, was proposed by Mayor Eduardo Martinez.
Martinez said his was just one of five Latino families in the small Texas town where he was raised. He was often bullied and harassed by white classmates until he fought back, he said. When he did, he said, he would be sent to the principal’s office, not his tormentors.
“You can use the analogy for Palestinians,” he said, referring to decades of fighting over the territory of Gaza. “You can only take so much before you fight back.”
Lomeli said constituents reached out to her about Cudahy’s taking a similar stand after they saw images of children and their mothers suffering in Gaza and believed Israel was going too far in defending itself against Hamas.
She said the images reminded her of mothers and children drowning as they tried to cross the Rio Grande into the U.S.
“That’s where it hits the hardest — I could never imagine seeing the body of my dead baby,” Lomeli said.
Another Cudahy City Council member, Elizabeth Alcantar, said she voted for the resolution because she had Palestinian classmates in high school and college and felt compelled to stand up for them.
“I have been called antisemitic,” she said. “Our resolution does not speak negatively of our Jewish community at all. We just want justice for all, including Jewish people.”
The bridge between Latinos and Muslims dates back centuries to when Spain was under Islamic rule. Since then, the cultures have grown sometimes in tandem, with certain words in Spanish deriving from the Arabic language and cuisine, like “tacos arabes,” emerging from the two cultures.
A 2020 Pew Research survey of U.S. Jewish adults published in 2021 found that 4% identified as Hispanic and 1% as Black. Eight percent of Muslims in the U.S. identify as Latino, and 20% identify as Black, according to the Pew Research Center.
Rida Hamida, a co-founder of the Latino & Muslim Unity group in Los Angeles, said she grew up steeped in both traditions. Her family is from Gaza, but she was raised in Southern California, where she often snacked on street tacos after she attended services at her local mosque. In 2017, she decided to bring her bicultural experience to the masses.
The result was a popular event called Tacos in Every Mosque, which aimed to unite the two communities. It grew from a few hundred people into more than 1,000 attendees, she said. After the war between Israel and Hamas broke out, Hamida rebranded the pop-up as Tacos for Gaza.
“Food is part of the resistance,” she said. “We need to use food to promote social justice, because that’s how we nourish communities.”
Hamida, whose teenage relative was recently killed in the West Bank, is helping the Southern California cities of Montebello, Bell Gardens and Santa Ana draft new resolutions calling for a cease-fire.
“Members of Congress are starting to pay attention to what their constituents are saying,” she said. “It’s a temperature check for how the community feels.”