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The taco trucks on Houston corners are registering people to vote

Doing your civic duty has never been more delicious.

 

Aaron Sankin

Tech

Posted on Sep 28, 2016   Updated on May 25, 2021, 10:10 pm CDT

“My culture is a very dominant culture. And it’s imposing, and it’s causing problems” warned Latinos for Trump founder Marco Gutierrez in an interview on MSNBC earlier this month. “If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.”

Gutierrez was attempting to make the point that America’s white-dominated culture will be threatened if the nation doesn’t elect 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has pledged to deport millions of Latin American undocumented immigrants. Instead, he mainly just made a lot of people hungry for tacos.

Mi Familia Vota, a nonprofit organization that works to bolster civic participation among Latinos, has partnered with the Houston-based design firm Rigsby Hull to create an actual link between the taco truck and the voting booth by turning a fleet of Houston-area taco trucks into mobile registration booths.

“We’re also handing out information on where to vote, with early votes and on Election Day and the process of voting, ’cause that’s–registering folks to vote–is half the battle,” Rigsby Hull’s Thomas Hull told Houston Public Media. “The other half is getting folks to the polls.”

The effort, which launched on Tuesday as part of the National Voter Registration Day, will consist of eight different taco trucks and run through Oct. 11, when the voter registration window closes.

In Texas, voter registration is a big deal because turnout has historically been low. The state had second-lowest turnout rate for any state in nation.

Texas has been a solidly red state for a generation—it hasn’t elected a Democratic to a statewide office since 2000. However, like many of the state’s major cities, Houston is deep blue. A recent poll showed that the residents of Texas’s largest city favor Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over Trump by a 10-point margin.

If Clinton were to win by double digits, it would be the biggest victory for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964. In 2012, President Barack Obama beat his GOP challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by only about 600 votes.

While Clinton may hold a sizable lead, if recent history is any guide, in Houston, every taco matters.

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*First Published: Sep 28, 2016, 3:00 am CDT