A handful of people trickled into the Las Vegas office of Latino advocacy group Make the Road Nevada on Tuesday night for a listening session on the 2024 election moderated by Radio Ambulante, NPR’s sole Spanish-language podcast.
Colored pencils and papers were spread across the tables to doodle as participants listened to one of the series’ latest episodes on the Latino vote and discussed how those issues connected to their own lives.
“Latinos need to vote and decide how we would like to be represented,” Etelvina Zamora-Esquivel, a 60-year-old phone banker for the progressive group said in reaction to the episode.
For more than an hour, Zamora-Esquivel and the six other participants at the event moderated by Radio Ambulante’s Head of Communities Juan David Naranjo Navarro expressed wide-ranging grievances with the current state of affairs, from rising xenophobia to the economy and rising housing costs. While they expressed dissatisfaction with both parties, they demonstrated begrudging acceptance of Democrats, contending that they were less belligerent than anti-immigrant GOP candidates such as former President Donald Trump, who has promised to launch a mass deportation campaign if elected.