Clad in glittery black shirts and wide-brimmed cowboy hats, the sisters Jennifer and Alayna Degollado, of the band Control, took the stage in Charlotte, North Carolina a few weeks ago to play Mexican cumbias in front of tens of thousands of people. Part of the festival Vota Palooza, an event aimed at mobilizing Latino voters ahead of the presidential election, their performance kicked off a series of similar events taking place throughout the month of October across the country.
Control, a Houston-based regional Mexican group founded by the sisters’ dad Sergio Degollado, have also performed in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada at different iterations of the outdoor fête.
“Music is part of our culture,” said Alayna Degollado, 21, a bajo quinto player and the band’s youngest member. “We have our anthems and we have the cumbias that we love, so we wanted to use cumbia to inspire people to vote.”
Vota Palooza is the brainchild of Esau Torres, a musician-turned-grassroots organizer, who founded the non-partisan campaign Grita Canta Vota earlier this year. His organization reached out to the band when they realized they needed a theme song for their initiative.
“Within a day, we wrote “Grita Canta Vota,” said Jennifer Degollado, who plays the accordion.
Spanish for “Shout Sing Vote,” the song, which takes its name from Torres’s campaign, pays homage to Latinos’ cultural and economic output. “We are Latinos,” vocalist Sergio Degollado affirms over the sound of rollicking accordions, “and we are important for [this country’s] growth.”
But playing a role in America’s economy doesn’t always translate to civic participation. According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE), young Hispanics have the lowest voter registration and turnout rates in the country. During the 2022 midterm elections, only 14% of Latinos aged 18 to 29 voted compared to 23% of all eligible voters in that age group.
Torres and his colleagues hope to increase that rate by using music to persuade more Hispanics to participate in the democratic process. To secure tickets to the events—which in addition to concerts also include a food market, an arts and crafts hub, and a car show—people must answer simple questions about their voter registration status online or prior to entering the festival grounds through a Grita Canta Vota portal.
Grassroots organizations have long used concerts as tools for increasing civic engagement among young people. In the 1990s, initiatives like Rock the Vote and the festival Lollapalooza registered voters between shows.
In recent years, organizations looking to draw in fans of genres beyond rock have created their own efforts. The organization Rave the Vote, for example, recently partnered with the non-profit HeadCount to boost voter registration numbers in the electronic music world. Grita Canta Vota sets itself apart by targeting fans of regional Mexican music—a fast-growing genre that increasingly appeals to the wide Latino community, beyond Mexican-Americans.
Out of the five cities where Vota Paloozas are being held, four are in swing states with growing Latino populations, where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have both amped up their engagement efforts. In Nevada, the percentage of presidential election ads running on Spanish-language television rose from 10% to 25% in the past four years, according to the analytics firm AdImpact.
Both candidates have been courting Latino celebrities, too. Reggaeton stars like Anuel AA and Justin Quiles have publicly declared they are voting for Trump, while Harris has enlisted the support of actors Liza Colón-Zayas and Anthony Ramos.
During the 2020 election, mostly voted for Democratic candidates. More than half of Hispanic voters in Georgia, for example, chose Biden. It’s unclear how an uptick in registration this year could affect electoral outcomes in November.
“Historically, Latinos have overwhelmingly voted Democratically, but that is changing and it may cost Harris the election,” said Laird W. Begard, the Director for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies at CUNY Graduate Center.
These numbers, he argued, are hard to predict because the Latino vote is not a monolith. In a swing state like Arizona, Latinos make up 25% of all eligible voters, and 85% of them are Mexican. Meanwhile, In Pennsylvania, 6% of all eligible voters are Latino, and the predominant group is Puerto Rican.
While people of various Latino backgrounds attend Grita Canta Vota’s events, Torres, who left Mexico in 1990 for the US when he was seven, is intent on reaching people of Mexican descent. Having grown up undocumented in a town “with more cows than people” in central California, he realized at a young age that he could tell his story through music.
“Our family couldn’t get hired for jobs, and that forced us to create our own enterprise,” he said. “So we founded a band called Los Malandrines, which roughly translated to the outlaws, and launched this beautiful career.”
Los Malandrines landed a major label record deal, released 15 albums and toured across the country, opening for regional Mexican superstars like Los Tigres del Norte. Being undocumented, they often avoided airports, opting to drive to their concerts instead.
“I knew about the struggles in my own community in California, but I realized that it was a lot worse in places like North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, New Hampshire,” said Torres, “places I didn’t know Latinos were in, specifically those of Mexican descent.”
After earning his GED, graduating from college, and becoming a US citizen, he realized he wanted to spotlight their experiences and pursue advocacy.
A lack of trust in political institutions pervades some Latino communities, according to Torres. But people trust performers, so they created a platform for the music industry to immerse themselves in the world of social impact.
“One of the problems our community has had is that we’ve brought our political ideologies—maybe from our home countries—and passed on this idea that politicians are corrupt, that we don’t talk about politics, that politics never changes, that it doesn’t include us,” he said of Mexicans who come from rural communities, noting that this line of thought is often passed down inter-generationally. “What we want to do is bring politics to the dinner table.”
So far, Torres’s strategy seems to be working. Some 65,000 people attended the event in North Carolina, a collaboration with the annual Hola Charlotte festival, and 650 registered to vote there. And at Vota Con Botas, another Grita Canta Vota event, which took place in San Luis, Arizona earlier this month, the organization registered 500 new voters.
“When something is taking place in a music or art environment, people’s guards are down,” said Frances Negrón-Muntaner, the Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, who writes about intersections between culture and politics. “They don’t feel they’re being preached to.”
But higher registration rates won’t necessarily increase voter turnout rates.
“Latino populations are often the last thing anybody thinks about in these [political] parties and they don’t understand the group, so in the end people are very skeptical,” she added.
Whatever the outcome, it is clear there is an appetite for events like Vota Palooza. Patricia Zapata, who is originally from Colombia, and has lived in the United States for just over two decades, won a guitar signed by the members of Control in a raffle at the Charlotte event.
“I always participate in elections and vote,” she said in Spanish. “That’s because I consider it a duty, as well as responsibility that sits with all of us.”
The festival, Zapata added, did an effective job of convincing others in her community to think similarly. “It showed attendees,” she said, “how important Hispanics are to politics in this country.”
(Photo courtesy of Control)
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