Los Amigos de Wallace: Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign and the bid to capture the Latino vote

This essay analyzes the Latino political organization Amigos de Wallace, created to support the 1948 presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace under the Progressive Party ticket, as the earliest known organized attempt to mobilize Latinos as a national voting bloc in a US presidential election. Amigos de Wallace, the essay argues, rallied Latinos as a distinct electoral constituency who deserved to have their voices heard and votes counted in the national political arena, and thus serves as an important antecedent to the better-documented political efforts of the 1960s and onward, such as the Viva Kennedy clubs. The essay enlarges our understanding of Latinos' political mobilizations and their contributions to the US Left prior to the 1960s and supports an earlier chronology and context in which to understand the construction of modern Latino political identities.