Heath Haussamen / NMPolitics.net
A statue outside the Roundhouse in Santa Fe.
Capitol Hill has the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. But what about the Capitol in the state where nearly half of residents are Hispanic?
On Thursday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers created the Legislative Hispanic Caucus, which will, as they put it in a letter, advocate on behalf of Hispanics and under-represented communities across New Mexico.
The group comes the same week as Senate Democrats elected Mimi Stewart of Albuquerque to serve as their new whip — meaning not a single Hispanic member would be part of the party’s leadership in that chamber.
But lawmakers insisted Thursday the new group is not a response to that vote.
“The leadership is what the leadership is,” said Sen. Jacob Candelaria, a Democrat from Albuquerque who is one of the founding members of the new group and had been mentioned as a possible whip before Stewart’s election.
Mentioning the educational achievement gap, poverty, health care and other issues marked by racial and ethnic disparities, Candelaria said the aim of the group is to provide a “coordinated, systemic way to address these issues.”
The new caucus, which starts with 15 members, is open to members of both chambers, both parties and all ethnic groups.
Lt. Gov. John Sanchez, a Republican, signed on, for example. In what seemed like a jab at Congresswoman Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, he argued the group is an example of bipartisanship that Washington, D.C., could learn from — a reference to Lujan Grisham’s chairmanship of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which recently denied membership to a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives.