I’m Julio Vaquiero. This is El péndulo.
By now, you’ve probably heard the supposed joke from Donald Trump’s rally in New York this past Sunday that has made headlines. A comedian referred to Puerto Rico like a floating island of garbage floating in the middle of the ocean.
The response has been forceful and fast. In key states, like Pennsylvania, with almost half a million Puerto Ricans, Latin radio stations have been flooded with calls from voters offended by the comment. Puerto Rican celebrities like Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricki Martin shared Kamala Harris’ plan to support the island with their hundreds of millions of followers. In a campaign as close as this one, it is no exaggeration to say that this joke could change the results in one of those battleground states. There are 131,000 Puerto Ricans in Georgia, and 133,000 in North Carolina, which is the state that we are going to focus on today.
The reality is that the rally on Sunday was filled racist and intense rhetoric. And anyone who has observed Donald Trump’s campaign in the past couple of months has noticed it: the tone is aggressive, violent, particularly against immigrants. Trump himself says so in his speeches…Whilst he promises mass deportations, he compares undocumented migrants to parasites that are poisoning the country’s blood.
Trump’s campaign has distanced itself from the comments on Puerto Rico, but Trump called the event in New York a day filled with love.
Well, all of this brings us to today’s episode, to a community of Latino voters who are living in that crossroads: evangelicals. On one hand, it seems that the Republican Party promotes some of their values. But, at the same time, the violent rhetoric of the campaign offends some of them.
We went to a rural community in Forsyth County, near the city of Winston-Salem, in North Carolina.
Speaker1: My name is Margery Soto. I have not voted. I can now vote.
Speaker2: Amen.
Speaker1: That’s great. Yes sir. And yes, I am confident and I want to vote.
Julio: We found ourselves in a scene that I, at least, would not have expected…
Speaker1: My name is Milton Collado. This year I became a citizen and I am going to vote. [applause]
Julio: About 40 people of various nationalities and all ages gathered in the social hall of a church on a Friday afternoon… to talk about democracy.
Speaker1: Eh, yes, I have voted. And 100% confidence in the vote. The voice of the people is the voice in the vote.
Speaker2: I know that God is also going to put a good leader for America.
Julio: And that is why we are here, because when people talk about the power of Latino voters in these elections, the power of the evangelical vote is often mentioned. North Carolina, with more than 16,000 churches, is part of the so-called Bible Belt —a region in the south and midwest of the United States, where religion, and specifically evangelical Christians, have a lot of influence.
For generations, the southern states have formed a fixed, conservative block in the Republican Party. But in the 2008 elections, Barack Obama won Virginia, Florida… and North Carolina. Now, elections in some of these southern states are won by very narrow margins —Trump, for example, who four years ago won North Carolina by just 74,000 votes, or 1.3%.
What is also changing is the demographics of the state. Here, Hispanics are the group that has grown the most —they are now 11% of the population, and 4% of voters. The big question in North Carolina is whether more people will register and turn out to vote or not, since voter turnout has so far been very low.
That is why workshops like the one we saw can make a difference.
Speaker 1: Politicians here, here in the United States, they, for them democracy is when the elections come, after the elections everything changes… We are going to achieve it by making the effort like what we are doing, what the pastors, the Latino Congress and many from other counties are doing. And that is what I said, I have faith in these votes…[applause]
JULIO: And for many of the participants in this workshop, their civic duty is intertwined with their faith. They cannot be separated. And it is always assumed that the evangelical influence in politics favors the Republican party.
But what we found in North Carolina is, as it has been in every state we have visited during this series, that the reality is a little more complex than we thought.
This is El péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast by Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios.
Today… North Carolina.
MIDROLL
Pastor: Give the Lord a round of applause. Give God glory. Say with me, Praise. Believe it with all your heart. Glory to Jesus. Glory to God.
We are at the Sunday service of the Church without Borders —an evangelical church in Winston-Salem. Like all evangelical churches, the emphasis here is on salvation through Jesus Christ. Here they are neither Pentecostals, nor Baptists, nor Jehovah’s Witnesses… to mention some of the most well-known denominations… But that belief, of the personal relationship with God, is perhaps the most important thing among evangelicals. Well, that and taking the Bible as an infallible document, which contains no mistakes.
From the outside, the Church without Borders looks like what one would imagine a temple to be —a small hill, beautiful red brick, and a gabled roof. When you enter, the first thing you see is the shine of the red carpet. In the wooden benches there are about 60 people, all Latinos. Most of them are Mexicans, but also:
Pastor: Many Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, we have Costa Ricans, Venezuelans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Ecuadorians and the pastor and the Argentine pastor’s wife.
Julio: And who leads this congregation?
He is Pastor Daniel Sostaita. When he preaches, he wears jeans and a black t-shirt.
Pastor: I like to wear casual clothes because of the tie. I feel like I’m stuck like that, all cornered… And do I wear ties for a wedding or a funeral?
And because it’s a growing community, there are many more weddings than funerals. The pastor assures that the Church Without Borders is very well known in the area.
Pastor: Well, this place is a place for the community. The street is called Catalan. Anyone from Winston, everyone knows that. Oh, the church where they help people or the church where they make IDs, the church where the clinic is. I mean. Everyone knows where this church is.
The pastor founded it 18 years ago.
Pastor: I started in the church. The church was a school and people came to the school. A very nice lady. And she told me. My English was very twisted at that time. And she said Ok. What do you need? Should I say, either the cafeteria or the gym? He made me sign a contract for free. And that’s where we started.
It only grew from there. Shortly after, Pastor Daniel’s group moved to a church that already existed, a white community. And they revitalized it.
Pastor: This church was dying. The American church.
JULIO: That is, where we are now. Before, it was a church.
Pastor: It still is, but there are 20 people. At that time, when we arrived here, there were 40. They were dying, the truth is they didn’t change and there were 20 left. So they couldn’t maintain the building.
Julio: Now, Pastor Daniel’s church has about 200 people. When he founded this church, his intention was to share the gospel. And so he did, with two services each week, Bible study groups, and baptizing new believers. But little by little, the more he got to know his congregation, he began to listen to the concerns of the members. Many were scared of the checkpoints, or roadblocks, that the police set up.
Julio: They were only in Latino communities, in Latino neighborhoods?
Pastor: Latino neighborhoods. Of course, for example, here we are surrounded by buildings where Latinos live and the Trailas neighborhood, where Latinos live. A State Trooper or a sheriff or a policeman from each end would stop on the corners, stopping whoever was coming in, or whoever was going out. Of course, people didn’t want to leave their houses.
Julio: And the pastor noticed something… He, unlike many in his congregation, is white. And he noticed that the treatment he received from the police was very different from the treatment that others received.
Pastor: Then I saw that they never stopped me. I was without a license too. And I began to see racism. Why don’t you stop me, because of my skin color? But the one coming behind me, who is brown, it doesn’t matter where he came from, you do stop him.
Julio: For the pastor, the stops were a form of racial discrimination —the police were profiling Latino people during these stops. In these raids, the police would ask for your driver’s license, and if you didn’t have one, they would fine you. And since many of them didn’t have documents, they didn’t have licenses either.
Pastor: A member of our church, who in seven months got 12 tickets. 12. None for drunk driving because he doesn’t drink. None for speeding. Just because they looked at his color.
Julio: The church, along with other community organizations and the ACLU, denounced the police for racially profiling Latino people. As a result of these efforts, the Winston-Salem police changed their policies on stops.
And since then, the church has changed as well.
Julio: It became a priority of yours, right? Social justice.
Pastor: Yes, Julio, because I don’t think so. I can’t talk to you about love or grace, about mercy, if I know that you are going through marginalization or racism or discrimination. So, where? Where does love and grace come into that context? So, I think that the Gospel is accompanied by social justice, equity and equality.
Julio: These great ideas —love, mercy, equality— are seen in the local acts of the church. A food bank. A mobile clinic two days a week. Mental health workshops. They were part of a network of community organizations that developed unofficial identity cards, called Fe-Accion ID’s, so that people without documents have some way to identify themselves.
Pastor: If I go to the hospital and they prescribe me a very strong medicine. When I go to the pharmacy and I don’t have a valid ID, they don’t give it to me anymore. So we started to make arrangements and the hospital was the first to accept it.
The Fe-Accion ID is recognized as an identification document at health centers, hospitals, schools, and pharmacies. In some counties, even local police accept it, although not in Forsyth County.
PASTOR: You read Leviticus, you read Exodus, you read Deuteronomy, and God exhorts his people to love the immigrant. Take care of the immigrant. So Jesus was a migrant, Jesus was a refugee. So that is where I… say no, as a church we have to do something. We cannot align ourselves with a false Christian nationalism, nor with the other one either because, I already told you, we are not partisan.
JULIO: What do you think the role of the churches should be in these elections? Or how do you see your role in these elections?
Pastor: When you listen to a lot of nationalist Christians, they tip the balance to one side, so why am I going to say that we cannot talk about politics in the Church if there is a very large group that does talk about and promote a candidate?
PASTOR: I have to say it honestly, it fills me with anger or rage or impotence. That if you call yourself Christian because of the values that you present in your political platform, you have to show that you are Christian. There are a lot of people who go after a party because it calls itself Christian, but for me it is absolute hypocrisy, because I do not see that love reflected in others. I mean, I see that we build walls and not bridges.
Julio: For some, a progressive evangelical sounds contradictory. But when you listen to Pastor Daniel, it starts to make sense.
PASTOR: Tell me why, being an immigrant, I am going to vote for you. When your candidate tells me that I eat like a dog or a cat, or when they call me a rapist, a terrorist, for me it shows a lack of respect. You are denigrating me as a person and as an immigrant. So, how can I align myself with someone who denigrates my roots? How can I align myself with where there is respect for one’s neighbor? Where is love for one’s neighbor?
Julio: After the break, the progressive history —yes, progressive— of the evangelical church.
This is El péndulo. We’ll be right back.
We are back in El péndulo. I am Julio Vaqueiro.
If we look at the history of North Carolina and the American South, it is perhaps not so surprising that a church is not only dedicated to God, but also to activism. For example, in the 1960s, the movement for the rights of the African-American population emerged from the churches of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia.
God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day.
That is the voice of Martin Luther King Jr.
Then, in 2013, the so-called Moral Mondays were protests to guarantee rights such as education and health care in North Carolina. Pastors accused the Republican Party of having a policy against the poor.
I thought it was about time that somebody stood up for Jesus. Well the time comes when someone ought to stand up for justice…
To understand the relationship of the Latino community with this ‘rebellious’ tradition, we spoke with her.
Barbara: My name is Barbara Sostaita and I am a professor here at the University of Illinois, Chicago. But I grew up in North Carolina, in a Christian community.
Barbara is an expert in religion and global migration, but she is also the daughter of Pastor Daniel. So when she talks about the church, she does it from her personal experience.
BARBARA: My family came to the United States in 1998. We came with a tourist visa, but we stayed undocumented and grew up in North Carolina. In the church there were other migrants, children of migrants, people who had also lost their family, who had lost their traditions, who felt uncomfortable here. I came from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Tobaccoville, North Carolina.
Julio: It couldn’t be more different. North Carolina than Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Barbara: No, no, I always say that if I write another book it will be From Buenos Aires to Tobacco Bill, because it was a total shock.
Julio: Years went by. Her family found understanding and solidarity in the church. And there was a moment when suddenly… a lot changed.
Barbara: In 2006 I found out that I was undocumented. In 2006 my dad started his church and in 2006 there were these marches, marches of millions and millions of immigrants in the streets, participating in a day without immigrants, striking…
Archival: CBS segment They left their jobs and took to the streets to show us what America would be like without millions of immigrant workers…
Barbara: In our church they brought lawyers to tell us about our rights. We coordinated, we called our representatives. We were undocumented, but we still participated in politics. And I always remember that in those marches they said “Today we march, tomorrow we vote”.
Audio Archive: Here we are and we are not leaving!
Barbara: And now we are 20 years after those marches. And in those 20 years I have seen how the churches have provided sanctuary. In North Carolina after Trump took office… In 2018, North Carolina was the state with more migrants living in sanctuary than any other state in the country.
File: Telemundo While this happens, more and more immigrants are seeking shelter in churches, fearing that ICE agents will knock on their door at any moment.
As we can see… The evangelical church in this part of the country has a history and a progressive legacy. But today, what we hear about evangelicals is something very different.
Scripps News City Church: in Harlingen is an evangelical church actively encouraging its flock to be militant about politics… Because God knows we need a red wave like never before.
FOX News: And now Donald Trump is making a push to get more hispanics inside his tent. And one key group is Hispanic evangelicals
CBC: Republican, Evangelical, Latino… he runs a facebook group: Latinos support Trump
Many media outlets have focused on the power of this group that has grown very quickly. And in the coverage, you hear many generalizations about what they believe or think. That they are all Republicans. That they always vote as their pastors want. That the only thing they care about is the defense of life, of the traditional family.
JULIO: How does this way of seeing or covering Latino evangelicals from the media make you feel?
BARBARA: I think it eliminates or makes invisible the activism that I have seen all my life.
BARBARA: And this community is very fetishized by the media. They are people who betray their own interests. They are people who have forgotten where they come from, their migrant backgrounds.
What that type of coverage ignores perhaps is that Latino evangelicals, like any voting group, are capable of being flexible, of thinking strategically and sophisticatedly about how to use their political power.
BARBARA: In my dad’s church I see people who, for example, before going to church felt conservative, but who listen and participate in a community that practices love for their neighbor, social justice and over time they change their minds or see themselves in a space in the middle, in a gray space, not something so black and white.
Barbara spoke to me about one of the most polarizing political issues of the moment, abortion. And the evangelical position on this… Is it clear? Or not…
BARBARA: Evangelical conservatives really do struggle with this issue. And when you sit down with my dad and you sit down with the people in his church and they start talking, people see something more complex. Maybe they change their minds and maybe they say, well, being undocumented has shown me what it is like to not have autonomy, being undocumented has shown me what it is like to not have control over my life and my body. Oh, interesting. And with abortion, you also don’t see that people have autonomy or control over their bodies and their lives?
JULIO: But would you say that it is fair to say that in general there are more evangelicals, Latinos, conservatives than progressives?
BARBARA: Maybe at this moment. Eh, maybe. But you do see, eh? The number of Latino evangelicals who vote Republican has progressively grown. That is changing. And the question is why is it changing and how are politicians failing with this community?
I asked Barbara’s question to Jonathan Calvillo, a sociologist and theologian at Emory University in Atlanta.
JONATHAN: It seemed like there was a group, a segment of the Latino population that was ready to be recruited so that the candidates could try to convince them, right?
JULIO: But how did we get to this point?
JONATHAN: Evangelicals have been part of politics in many ways for decades, but now what we are seeing is more public policies, right? And a policy perhaps trying to get closer to the axes of power where you can find more influence and more to be, to be part of the change, to be part of those structures, right?
Julio: According to Jonathan, we have to take into account that Latino evangelicals have historically been on the “margins of the community” —for being immigrants.
JONATHAN: It felt like an experience of being part of a minority and perhaps not having much of a voice. So much power, right? And now, in this last decade, we have seen the growth and, we could even say, the visibility of Latino evangelicals. There is a feeling that now perhaps one can have more impact, perhaps one can have more influence. Perhaps an approach to the more conservative movement could offer more opportunities towards the American dream.
Julio: And what we are seeing now, according to Jonathan, is a rapprochement between evangelicals and political and institutional power. If they were isolated before, now they are a community that both parties seek to attract.
Julio: But Jonathan told me that any explanation for a conservative trend would have to take into account the diversity of the evangelical community.
JONATHAN: The evangelical movement is a very diverse movement in terms of race and racial background. There are many Latinos who no longer speak Spanish and in fact the preference is for English… and many of them are found in multi-ethnic churches and mostly Anglo-Saxon churches… The evangelical movement arises from Protestantism and is not a centralized organization, but rather a network of organizations and denominations.
Julio: Pentecostals, Assemblies of God, Baptists, even some non-denominational churches.
Surely you are familiar with the most well-known denominations. What they all share is an emphasis on personal connection with God and finding salvation through Jesus Christ. And the importance of evangelizing. Of seeking new believers.
JONATHAN: In a certain sense, that is why they are called evangelicals. In other words, the emphasis on each person going out and sharing that message of Jesus Christ.
In recent years, the evangelical population has matured and gained a greater space in the public sphere. Like other Latino groups, there is great diversity within the congregations, and the motivations behind their vote vary.
Jonathan: I believe from my observations that there is more diversity in the churches than in the leadership of the churches. So the leaders, those who have a voice, those who are representing the congregations, tend to be more conservative.
Julio: But as we saw in the first segment, with Pastor Daniel, it is not always like that.
Pastor: Jesus’ first sermon is to give freedom to the captive, to the oppressed, sight to the blind, that is, the Church, the first Church, shared everything. There was no needy person among them, they shared bread, they sold their property. So it is a Church of social justice, of love, of coexistence.
The latest surveys of evangelicals at the national level say that Latino evangelicals are divided in half. 27% are Republicans, 25% are Democrats, and 30% are independents. It is difficult to predict how they will actually vote.
It is true that, at this moment, many are leaning more to the right if we compare it to any other time in their history here in the United States. But it is not possible to pigeonhole an entire population by a few, because the pendulum always swings from one side to the other.
It is always in motion.
In the next episode of El péndulo… at last, we will count the votes and study the results. We will hear from you next week.
Jess: El péndulo is a co-production of Radio Ambulante Studios and Noticias Telemundo.
Julio Vaqueiro of Noticias Telemundo is the host. This episode was produced by me, Jess Alvarenga, with José Osuna and Desirée Yépez. The editing is by Daniel Alarcón, with special help from Eliezer Budasoff and Daniela Cruzat.
Alana Casanova-Burgess is the executive producer. Desirée Yépez is the digital producer. Geraldo Cadava is an editorial consultant. Ronny Rojas did the data verification. The music, mixing and sound design are by Andrés Azpiri. The graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo.
At Noticias Telemundo, Gemma García is the executive vice president, and Marta Planells is the senior digital director. Adriana Rodriguez is the senior producer, and José Luis Osuna is in charge of the video journalism of the series.
At Radio Ambulante Studios, Natalia Ramírez is the product director, with support from Paola Aleán. Community management is by Juan David Naranjo Navarro. Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of alliances and financing. Carolina Guerrero is executive producer of Central and the CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.
El péndulo is funded by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, an organization that supports initiatives that transform the world.
You can follow us on social media as [at] central series RA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast punto audio.
I’m Jess Alvarenga, thanks for listening.