Were there any groups that focused on increasing the amount of hispanic voters?

In order to do some more focused research on my sub-topic, Latinos and politics, I read a primary source, a newspaper that described a group that tried to increased the amount of hispanic voters. I thought this was an interesting addition to my research becasue I had focused on how the hispanics, latinos and Mexican-americans immigrated to the US, and how they were viewed in certain circumnstanes and so this article would show the affect of the cummulation of this history regarding hispanics and their voting. It would also reveal certain groups that would try to help the voting of hispanics.

In this newspaper from 1979, it described an organization called the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) that was devoted to trying to increase the amount of hispanic voters in southern states such as Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, California and Colorado. Part of their inspiration was the lack of hispanic voters in years before. This newspaper mentioned that in 1976 38% of eligible hispanic voters actually voted in the election. Considering in the same year 54% of the eligible US population voted, this number is very low. I wondered, why? If the hispanics, latinos and Mexican-americans are eligible to vote, why aren't as many voting? Is it a lack of appealing candidates? Further research needs to be done about more voting patterns of hispanics and certain elections that they have been a huge part of to understand their effects politcally speaking.

I thought it was interesting that William Velasquez, one of the leaders of SVREP, said that the reason for this lack of hispanic voters was that there were political boundaries that kept the percentage of hispanic voters low. What were these political boundaries? Who enforced them? How did they start? Were they ever abolished? If so, how? Does this have anything to do with discrimination against hispanics? Further research needs to be done to find answers to these questions.