Political Face of Florida Latinos Changing

Puerto Ricans began leaving New York and their native island for Florida in the 1970s. Chuck Dunnick, an Osceola County commissioner who recently traveled to Puerto Rico to promote business relations with Central Florida, said the developers of two huge apartment buildings in Orange County brought "people in from the island by the busload."

"Once the relocation started, aunt and uncle would move over, brother and sister," Dunnick said.

In Queens, Hiram Monserrate, a Democrat and New York city councilman, watched family and friends move to Central Florida starting in the early 1990s, then picking up steam in 2000.

An uncle keeps calling him from Florida and saying, " 'You should come here and help us organize,' " Monserrate says. He has promised to go in August and help get out the vote for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) in the presidential campaign.

"When you look at the 2000 election, which was decided by a few hundred votes, there are a lot more Puerto Ricans living there now . . . and it could make a difference," Monserrate said.

Whether Puerto Ricans can claim the Cubans' electoral thunder remains to be seen. Cubans in the Miami area are highly organized and motivated. Cuban Americans made up roughly 65 percent of Florida's 660,000 Latino voters in 2002 -- even though they were only 31 percent of the state's Latino population, according to the census. With the influx of non-Cuban Latinos, Bendixen and others are predicting that the Cuban vote ratio will drop to 50 percent.

In Central Florida, some people seeking to register Puerto Ricans to vote have complained that apathy is a problem, especially among new arrivals from the island.

But apathy can be overcome, said Zulma Velez-Estrada, the Florida state manager of the Que Nada Nos Detenga -- Let Nothing Stop Us -- voter registration project for the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration.

More than 38,000 Hispanics have been registered statewide since December, Velez-Estrada said. The Florida voter registration campaign "is the most successful campaign of the 13 regional offices in the U.S.," she said, but she would not disclose how numbers broke down along party lines, saying that the Puerto Rico agency is nonpartisan.

It is hard to determine how they will vote, said Mari Carmen Aponte, the agency's executive director. Former vice president Al Gore "won Osceola County and Orange County, the first time a Democrat has done that in 20 or 30 years," she said.

Aponte said it was difficult to determine the impact of the Latino vote because the election commission does not break down votes by ethnicity, and because exit poll officials did not take the national origin of voters into account.

In the 2002 election, Gov. Bush campaigned in Orlando and Tampa, delivering speeches in flawless Spanish, promising jobs and better schools -- and won an estimated 55 percent of the area's non-Cuban Hispanic vote, Bendixen said. When Bush returned a few months ago to campaign for his brother's reelection, Orlando lawyer Luis Gomez, a Democrat, wondered how responsive Puerto Ricans will be to the governor this time.

"He hasn't delivered," Gomez said. "You run into the lower spectrum of the economy here, people who work for $7 or $8 an hour. The issues here are education and jobs."

Edison Denizard is less interested in politics than in fulfilling the dream of his parents, who migrated from Puerto Rico to the mainland because "they wanted a better life for me and my sister," Denizard said.

The family moved to Orlando seven years ago, when Denizard was 13. "I didn't know how the situation was going to be," he said, but he could not believe what happened when he entered high school: "My friends spoke the Spanish language. Even though I didn't speak English, they would teach me."

At the gym where he works at an entry-level job, he could hear the steely ping of weights being lifted and dropped, and the voice of a personal trainer shouting to a client, "Vamos . . . uno, dos, tres, cuatro!"

When Denizard goes to the Florida Mall on South Orange Blossom Trail, he runs into other Puerto Ricans working behind retail counters, mixing salads, hawking cell phones. On the way there, he listens to WONQ radio, which competes for listeners with at least five other Spanish-language stations.

Adger said he was not moving back to New York. "My family lives in New York and they ask me to come visit, and the thought of it gives me anxiety," he said.

"I'm used to this Florida living," he said, "and I love it."