The question is whether Pennsylvania Republicans will take advantage of it. Trump is, to some extent, a motivating force behind Latinos’ increasing openness to the GOP, but the party itself hasn’t engaged to a significant degree. Hazleton, and politicians like Cusat, may serve as a model for how the GOP might change tactics and alter the future of our national politics if they’re successful.
The South Side of Hazleton —
a storied, six-square-mile mountaintop city, where the night sky is illuminated
by warehouses in the food processing, manufacturing and e-commerce sectors — was once a neighborhood of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants. They lived in the shadow of the ornate copper spires of St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church, which was founded in the mid-19th century, when most of the Catholics in the region were Irish laborers in nearby mines.
Hazleton’s population peaked in 1940 then experienced a half-century of decline that abruptly changed direction around the turn of the century. That’s when Dominican Americans from metro New York, seeking a better quality of life in the post-9/11 years, began arriving on the South Side and surrounding neighborhoods. They were followed by immigrants — oftentimes, their relatives — principally from San José de Ocoa. This growth continues in Hazleton, leading to a housing crisis, where landlords are converting 19th-century homes into small, often code-breaking apartments.
The pace of the city’s transformation — Hazleton’s Luzerne County “diversified faster than any other large county in the U.S. during the first two decades of this century,” according to
a 2022 Wall Street Journal analysis — makes it distinct from majority-Latino Allentown and Reading.
In those larger cities, the Latino communities trace their roots to the post-World War II era, when Puerto Ricans arrived from the island to work in the Lehigh Valley’s steel, agricultural and manufacturing industries and the farms of Reading’s Berks County. Both experienced second influxes of Puerto Rican and Dominican Americans in the 1990s and 2000s, largely from the New York City area, which is about two hours away by car.
The existing partisan composition of these communities offer insights into their political dynamics now and going forward. James Lee, president of the polling firm Susquehanna Polling & Research, says Latinos in Reading and Allentown “are assimilating in Democratic-dominated areas but in Hazleton … they are assimilating in Republican-dominated areas, and, as such, will likely be more sympathetic to core Republican messages.”
The evidence of GOP inroads in Hazleton is not hard to find. For decades, the area had been a Democratic stronghold. This dates as far back as 1960, when John F. Kennedy campaigned before thousands in the downtown amid what Pierre Salinger, his press secretary,
described as “the wildest day of the campaign.” That year, Kennedy targeted the city’s legions of second- and third-generation European Catholics who viewed his candidacy as a cultural validation.
Democrats flipped Luzerne County thanks to JFK. And in the decades thereafter, Hazleton was a miniature urban machine of
Democratic patronage. But by the mid-1990s, local elected Democrats began
defecting from the party; Trump’s 2016 candidacy accelerated the area’s broader shift toward the GOP. While most of Hazleton’s Latino voters still tend to be Democrats, Republicans nevertheless swept local elections here last year even as the GOP experienced
historic off-year losses elsewhere in the state.
