'New' Bostonians embrace an old rite of passage
Bay Van Le was beaming as he left the Viet-AID community center in Dorchester yesterday afternoon.
The 74-year-old immigrant had just voted for the first time.
''That's why I became a citizen, so I could vote," he said in Vietnamese. ''I'm old. Why else do I need to be a citizen?"
Quynh Dang, a volunteer for at-large council candidate Sam Yoon, tried to sell her candidate to Le as he entered the polling place, but Le already knew whom he was voting for. He had learned all he needed to know about the election this year from Vietnamese language newspapers and Vietnamese cable television.
This year, the candidates have launched an unprecedented drive to reach minority and immigrant voters like him.
Over recent election cycles, as Boston's population has grown more diverse, the electorate has followed, albeit far more slowly. Minorities now make up just over half of the city's population, though whites remain a majority of voters. The city's predominantly white neighborhoods have long been home to the most fervent voters. But with each election, the gap in political participation between those neighborhoods and those that are home to black, Hispanic, immigrant, and young professional voters has narrowed somewhat.
That trend seemed to be continuing yesterday, according to some preliminary turnout figures. By early yesterday evening, turnout was up in communities of color and down somewhat in some neighborhoods, such as South Boston and Charlestown, that have long been powerhouses of city politics.
A forceful effort by Mayor Thomas M. Menino's office and several councilors to bring minority voters to the polls raised turnout in increasingly Hispanic East Boston and parts of Jamaica Plain, and in Lower Roxbury, parts of Dorchester, and Chinatown, the early figures showed. The impact of those voters was dulled somewhat by turnout in high-voting West Roxbury and Roslindale.
The Menino administration, recently embarrassed by a US Department of Justice lawsuit alleging that the city had failed to accommodate voters with limited English skills, was doubly motivated to turn those voters out, and to make casting ballots as easy as possible for them. Signs were prominently displayed in several languages at polling places, and those in minority neighborhoods like Fields Corner, home to a large Vietnamese population, had translators on hand.
None of the minority voters interviewed yesterday held Menino's Justice Department troubles against him, however.
''I'm not into politics, but I like what the mayor is doing," said Garth Findlay, 35, a Jamaican immigrant who registered to vote a few years ago, after he became a US citizen.
In neighborhoods that remain predominantly white, there were also signs of change. At St. Nectarios Greek Orthodox Church in Roslindale, there was a Spanish translator on hand and signs in six languages showing voters how to fill in their ballots.
An elderly white voter looked up at the signs and shook her head. ''More languages, more languages," she muttered.
The neighborhood has seen more seismic changes in recent years, however, and not all of them related to race. Roslindale Square became Roslindale Village, wine shops and boutiques moved in, and young professionals and their families gentrified the area, shifting politics to the left, as well.
''It's changed, believe me; I've been working at the polls for 40 years," said Mary Munger, whose family has been a Roslindale fixture for so long that most people still know her by her maiden name, Pagliarulo.
Munger, 78, was sitting outside the polling place, sporting four green Menino buttons.
''The thing that used to carry [this] precinct was the old-timers," she said. ''You never got many young people to vote. Now you do get a lot of young people to vote here, professional people and working people."
