Time Magazine just ran a profile of Voto Latino’s founder and CEO, Maria Teresa Kumar, as part of their Latino Leaders 2023 issue. Read the article below and when you’re done reading, make a donation to support Voto Latino’s work in the 2024 election. This is really important. [[link removed]]

DONATE NOW [[link removed]]

headshot of Maria Teresa Kumar wearing a pink suit [[link removed]]
Latinos may be the sleeping giant of American politics, and as founding president and CEO of Voto Latino, Maria Teresa Kumar is laser-focused on how to make their voices heard in government.
Kumar, 49, emigrated from Colombia as a child when her mother accompanied Kumar’s American stepfather to the U.S. for medical treatment and moved in with his family in Sonoma County, Calif. “When my grandparents saw my mother, the only interaction they had ever [had] really with a brown woman was the field hands,” she recalls. So while her father was convalescing, “they sent my mother to work in the fields. And I share that, because that was the first time I became political.” Kumar worked on Capitol Hill and attended Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government before deciding she wanted to devote her career to empowering and registering Latino voters. “Young children, before they turn 18 years old, are navigating America, both in the spaces of the broader society, but also internally at home on behalf of their parents and their families,” she says. “My journey has always been navigating these two worlds, representing my family, but also trying to translate to the broader community who we are.”
Kumar joined Voto Latino in 2004 to mobilize that rising population of voters. “Oftentimes when people do politics, they basically say, ‘Well, how many voters do we have today?’” she said. “The way we did Voto Latino is, I identified the states where Latinos could have been only 3% to 4% of the population to vote, but they were at least 15 to 20% of the classrooms.” While Voto Latino is a national organization, it focuses on the states with big populations of young Latinos who are poised to grow into a powerful voting bloc, like Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia; every 30 seconds, she says, a Latino person in the U.S. turns 18.
Though it isn’t aligned with a political party, Voto Latino, which by 2016 had collected 177,000 voter registrations, tends to endorse Democratic candidates. But when Trump was elected on a wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric, Kumar knew she had to redouble the group’s outreach efforts. Over the course of the Trump presidency, she says, it registered more than 1 million young voters. Latinos are now the country’s second-biggest voting bloc, but with polls showing that some Latino voters may be drifting toward Republicans, Kumar and her team are taking all the strategies they’ve tried in previous elections—from celebrity appearances to social media campaigns to digital organizing—and putting them together for 2024. They aim to register half a million voters ahead of the presidential election. “We are on the precipice of massive change,” Kumar says.
- Charlotte Alter

Make a recurring donation to help fund our voter registration efforts [[link removed]]

PAID FOR BY VOTO LATINO
Voto Latino
PO Box 35608
Washington , DC 20033
United States
unsubscribe: [link removed]