In late October, parishioners at St. Cecilia Catholic Church in Dallas walked through the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Oak Cliff, asking for feedback and inviting residents to the parish festival. Going door to door, they asked people not only about their concerns but also what they loved about the community.
The Latino vote is often described as a “sleeping giant,” but Amanda Benavidez, a leader with Dallas Area Interfaith at the parish, disagrees.
“We reject that narrative. Our community is awake. There are people that are working two jobs, raising kids and supporting our parishes,” she said. “What our community needs isn’t a drive-by campaign ad. I think what we need is more relational respect, listening.”
This time of year, political parties are focused on mobilizing—registering voters and getting them to the polls. Religiously affiliated community organizers do some of that, but their work is more long-term. The Nov. 3 election is just a small part of it.
“When you’re mobilizing people, you’re asking them to show up for your agenda. But when you’re organizing with people, you’re sitting down with them, you’re listening to them [about] what their family’s pain points are,” Ms. Benavidez said. Elections, she said, are a way to help people see their vote as a tool to address their concerns.
Using turnout data from the 2022 midterms, Dallas Area Interfaith identified historically low voter participation in West Dallas, including in areas served by St. Cecilia, Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos/Santa Teresita and St. Mary of Carmel. In October, the organization helped Santa Teresita parishioners host what they called a “civic academy,” which was developed by the Industrial Areas Foundation, a national community organizing network.
According to Silvia Manzano, an organizer with Dallas Area Interfaith, people in the area said they didn’t understand the voting procedure, how to identify their voting district and the difference between elected offices. Using a sample ballot, the academy walked participants through the process and explained the roles of officials like state senators and representatives.
And while they also help people register to vote, “[t]his isn’t a partisan matter,” Father Ángel Ríos, a Dallas Area Interfaith leader and pastor of Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos/Santa Teresita Catholic Church, said in Spanish. “In fact, the academy was carried out without any leaning toward any political party.” He referred to the U.S. bishops’ document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” in which he said the bishops encourage Catholics to vote “without any intention of telling you who to vote for or not vote for.”
Father Ríos described the communities he serves as “100 percent Latino” and said many are ineligible to vote. Even if they are eligible, he said, many immigrants, influenced by corruption in their countries of origin, have low confidence in the electoral process and do not prioritize voting.
“But once people see themselves affected, in their family, their work, their community, this concern arises,” he said. “Maybe the parents don’t have the ability to vote, but their children do.”
Beyond mobilizing
Carmen González, a Dallas Area Interfaith leader at St. Mary of Carmel, has helped to register voters for years. Elections impact community members’ jobs and finances even if they don’t realize it, she said. Beyond elections, she said the community can organize on issues like housing. It’s a challenge, though, because so many work at least one full-time job.
“When we’re in an election season, it’s the complete manifestation of how people can be objectified and commodified,” Tim McManus, senior organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation, said.
“Whole groups of people just become objectified as a possible vote or an interest group or something, and their humanity gets stripped away, and they’re just thought of as ‘how do we market to this particular interest group’—the Latino vote, the women vote, the Catholic vote, whatever,” he said. “It’s very top down, and it’s very dehumanizing.”
Organizing offers a different path, he said.
“We hope everybody who is eligible participates in the democracy through their vote. But that’s only a part of what it means to really, actively participate in a community,” Mr. McManus said. “It’s the long-term work of restoring human dignity to an understanding of what it means to be political in a community that goes way beyond political parties or elections.”
The point resonates with Nicholas Hayes-Mota, an assistant professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University who spent nine years as a leader with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. That coalition helped bring about “Romneycare,” a Massachusetts health plan that served as a model for the Affordable Care Act.
Dallas Area Interfaith, part of the Industrial Areas Foundation, traces its organizing tradition back to Saul Alinsky. In the 1930s, Alinsky began organizing communities in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, the same meatpacking district that inspired Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Alinsky, according to Mr. Hayes-Mota, worked in a neighborhood that was 90 percent Catholic but was “very hostile toward collaboration” because it was divided into Irish, German, Polish and Slovak parishes.
Alinsky met with one leader after another and learned that people from disparate communities named similar problems: garbage collection, hunger, crime and unsafe housing.
The communities eventually formed the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council. They backed a union and, with the support of a sympathetic auxiliary bishop, secured concessions from the owners of the meatpacking companies. Alinsky later founded the Industrial Areas Foundation.
“One of the values of learning to see the world as an organizer does is you never take solidarity for granted,” Mr. Hayes-Mota said, adding that organizing builds the power of a constituency. Organizing happens when groups of people discover their common interests and create an agenda.
The Latino vote
“I don’t think of the Latino community as a singular, well-organized constituency,” Mr. Hayes-Mota said. The Latino community, he explained, is drawn from many countries of origin, and he does not believe it will ever be “fully in the camp of one party or another.” Neither Democrats nor Republicans, despite well-funded overtures, have built a constituency out of the Latino population.
President Donald Trump won a record 46 percent of Latino support in 2024, but by October 2026, Pew Research found just 24 percent of registered Latino voters approved of his job performance. That included only 57 percent of his own 2024 Hispanic voters, down from 93 percent at the start of his term. Equis Research, in a survey conducted in October 2025, found Latino sentiment fluid rather than locked into either party’s camp, with many voters saying they feel overlooked by both outside of campaign season.
“They’ve been trying to mobilize Latinos without really organizing Latinos,” Mr. Hayes-Mota said. Both parties have taken Latinos for granted, he said.
According to polls, members of the Latino community are concerned with bread-and-butter economic issues, Mr. Hayes-Mota said. Immigration, while a growing concern, is still secondary to the economy, health care and education.
“Part of what made the first Obama campaign so successful practically, but also just so inspiring to a lot of people, was [that] it was actually built on an organizing basis,” he said. Mr. Hayes-Mota’s mentor, Marshall Ganz, helped design the Obama campaign’s grassroots strategy that “adopted a very relational approach.”
“It wasn’t just about turning out people to vote in a transactional way,” Mr. Hayes-Mota said. “It was about drawing in people to really connect their own personal stories and values to the campaign.”
Yet the approach, he said, did not survive the election night victory.
“No sooner had Obama won the election [than he] demobilized his entire organizing apparatus and turned it into essentially a messaging infrastructure,” Mr. Hayes-Mota said, adding the pivot lost President Obama a lot of credibility among organizers. In the 2010 midterm elections, it was the Republicans who connected at the grassroots level.
“That sense of being part of something bigger, that moved so many people because it was real, because there was organizing, evaporated,” he said.
In Chicago, the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership has brought diverse communities together to organize, including on lead pipes. The city has more lead service pipes than any other in the country. They are concentrated in Black and Latino neighborhoods, and the current plan to replace them will take 50 years to complete. The coalition has also been organizing on behalf of immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and sued the Department of Homeland Security to secure a legal agreement allowing daily pastoral visits. The morning of his interview with America, Michael Okińczyc-Cruz, the coalition’s executive director and a co-founder, said he had spoken with three ministers—a Scalabrinian priest and two Episcopal ministers—who had just finished pastoral visits at the Broadview ICE detention center, located on the outskirts of Chicago.
Bringing thousands to protest ICE is important, Mr. Okińczyc-Cruz said, but building an organization capable of sustained pressure over years takes something more.
“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” he said of participating in decisions that impact the entire community. “Organizing is not about blowing the table up. It is about getting to the table.”
Immigration is a concern among the coalition’s members, but Mr. Okińczyc-Cruz said, “much like many working-class Americans,” what comes up most are rising utility costs, wages and the cost of child care. In some cases, he said, those costs can be more than a family pays in rent or a mortgage.
People who organize together, Mr. Okińczyc-Cruz said, undergo “a metanoia, a conversion,” learning to see themselves “not as victims but as protagonists, as agents of change, as co-collaborators with one another and with God.”
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