LIBERAL, Kansas — Driving through the town of Liberal, Kansas, in the southwest corner of the state, there are plenty of Mexican restaurants. Chikas Fresas stands out, though, with its bright, unapologetic bubblegum-pink exterior.
In an election year, even soft pastel dining places like this can’t escape politics, and are actually part of voter engagement.
Kathleen Alonso slumps in her chair by the door. She’s worked a full 40-hour week, taught citizenship classes in the evenings and wrangled her young daughter. By this Sunday night, she’s a bit worn out.
But as soon as a customer comes in, she perks up and asks about their voter registration status.
She’s trying to get more members of her community registered to vote. A tall task for a county that is 68% Latino, in a state where only about half of Latinos vote.
“Essentially, we just have to meet people where they are,” Alonso said.
Alonso is an activist for New Frontiers, a subgroup of the voting advocacy group LoudLight.
Southwest Kansas breaks rural stereotypes by being quite diverse. The most populated towns in the region are more Latino than other ethnicities. Finney County is 51% Latino, Ford County is 57%, according to Census Data.
And although citizenship rates are slightly lower than the national average, the rates of citizenship in these counties are growing, and more than 80% of adult residents are citizens and eligible to vote.
But, despite being the fastest-growing ethnic group in Kansas, Latinos still lack political power, even where they are the majority. Latinos are underrepresented in local governments and have low to average rates of voter registration and some of the lowest rates of voter turnout. For example, Ellis County, a predominantly white county with a similar population of Seward County, had a voter turnout of about 50% in 2022. Seward County, on the other hand, had only 27%.
“There's just a large gap of information in the community. It’s the real reason why I want to push to number one, engage people, but also inform people,” Alonso said.
Latina women in this rural part of Kansas are trying to fix that by taking some tips from previous generations to reach their community. Knocking on doors, setting up booths at restaurants to catch workers and going to nightclubs are all ways to reach their peers.
Alonso said another barrier to mobilizing lower income and underrepresented groups is civic apathy.
Some people simply think their vote doesn’t matter.
Citlaly Reyes used to think the same way. She works at the restaurant Chikas Fresas. This year, she decided to get more civically engaged by working for the Kansas Latino Community Network, a non-partisan group, where she tries to mobilize voters in southwest Kansas. She educates them on where to get registered, what they need to know and how to vote.
Earlier this year, she went toe-to-toe with the City of Liberal to remove an ordinance that prevented her mother, the owner of the restaurant, from expressing herself with the audacious pink building downtown.
“I’m disappointed it took something happening to me to want to get involved, but honestly that whole situation made me recognize the power we have in our own community,” Reyes said.
Reyes joined forces with Alonso to use her restaurant’s influence to target young families and meatpacking plant workers. They offer discounts on meals if customers registered to vote, and a chance to win a free meal.
But even though Reyes is laying the groundwork to help people exercise their right to vote, she herself cannot participate.
She has a visa that gives her legal residency, but not official citizenship yet. When she hears others say they don’t plan on voting this year, it frustrates her.
“It's about the resources that our town will get, so it gets very annoying,” Reyes said. “Especially the people that can vote and won't vote.”
Over in Dodge City, Alejandro Rangel-Lopez, lead coordinator for New Frontiers, said he gives those people grace because politics can be stressful and hard to engage with.
Participating means knowing what’s on the ballot and when the deadlines are to register and vote, which can be hard to keep up with.
“Young families, they've got bills to pay, they've got kids to feed. So I understand,” Rangel-Lopez said.
Voting in Dodge City has been a touchy subject the last few years.
Rangel-Lopez with New Frontiers sued Dodge City in 2022, arguing the at-large local election system dilutes the Latino vote, making it harder for those communities to get a say in local politics.
In Dodge City, 49% of the voting age population is Latino. Yet, the lawsuit argues that the town has seen only one Latino candidate win an election since 2000.
Only 30% of voters in the 2022 general election were Latino, according to data in the lawsuit.
Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that Dodge City’s elections do not discriminate against Latinos.
But Rangel-Lopez is still determined to give his hometown and community a voice in elections, and a say in what their community looks like. In these small towns, it only takes a couple hundred votes to flip a local election.
“When we vote, we vote for our families. We vote for past generations, for our future generations,” Rangel-Lopez said. “We have every right to be part of this community.”
The recent push to engage voters in western Kansas has some similarities to efforts by past generations.
Lena Mose-Vargas is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. She studied American studies at the University of Kansas and wrote her dissertation on Latina activism in Kansas.
She said the efforts in southwest Kansans today remind her of the Chicano movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Western Kansas helped spur that movement throughout the state.
“These everyday Latinas are doing significant political work, but are not quite recognized as such, because they're not as much in the public eye,” Mose-Vargas said.
There were Mexican-American women conferences. A woman, Elizabeth Gutierrez, was the first to gather data on immigrant needs in western Kansas. Mose-Vargas said Latinas in rural areas were an overlooked force in advancing the Chicano movement in Kansas.
And there are small glimpses of the current mobilizing efforts by the young Latina women having an impact.
Emilio Dominguez works at National Beef, the meatpacking plant that is the town’s economic backbone.
Last year, he took Alonso’s citizenship class at night after he got off work at the plant.
This year, at 42 years old, he will get to vote for the first time. He is an example of why there has been a strong grassroots movement in southwest Kansas.
“This is the country where I plan to live now for the rest of my life,” Dominguez said. “I have the responsibility as a citizen – as a citizen now – to be able to decide who will represent me.”
Calen Moore covers western Kansas for High Plains Public Radio and the Kansas News Service. You can email him at cmoore@hppr.org.
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