MIAMI _ On a recent Tuesday, a canvasser approached shoppers trickling into and out of a Sedano's in Southwest Miami-Dade with a question: "Es ciudadano americano?" "Are you an American citizen?"
If shoppers said they weren't, the canvasser, a Venezuelan immigrant named Lisbeth Hernandez, gave an encouraging response: "Soon, then." If shoppers were citizens, Hernandez was quick with a follow-up.
"And are you registered to vote?" she asked, holding a clipboard filled with blank voter registration applications. "Is your (voter registration) card up to date, mi amor?"
A foot soldier for UnidosUS, the largest Hispanic advocacy group in the country, Hernandez will spend the next nine months canvassing Miami-Dade County. The effort is part of a national UnidosUS campaign to register 120,000 new Latino voters nationwide in time for the 2020 election.
As the Pew Research Center points out, 2020 will be a history-making vote, since Hispanics will for the first time make up the largest minority group in the electorate. The milestone is buoyed in part by the fast-growing number of registered Hispanic voters in Florida, which reached a record 2.1 million people in 2018.
"We see obscene amounts of money get spent every political cycle, but very little of that goes to voter registration," said Clarissa Martinez de Castro, UnidosUS' deputy vice president of research, advocacy and legislation. "We believe it's very important because investments in voter registration are an investment in expanding the size of the Latino electorate. And we are very focused on that."
At around 1 p.m. on this day, Hernandez had only registered a handful of people at Sedano's, but she was confident she would meet her daily goal of 16 filled-out applications by the time the day was over.
"Every single day I'm able to register new voters, thank God," she said. "But the issue is this tough political climate. People are weary. There's mistrust. ... My job is to educate and to motivate people who aren't registered to register."
Twenty Spanish-speaking canvassers split in four teams of five fan out across Miami-Dade every day from Tuesday to Saturday. Each canvasser works 35 hours a week and earns $15 an hour.
As Indira Navas, UnidosUS' South Florida civic engagement specialist explained, though all canvassers are immigrants themselves, their backgrounds vary. The majority are from Venezuela, but there are others from Cuba, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. Some were homemakers before they were canvassers. Others were medical surgeons, back in their home countries.
Like the people they are registering, some canvassers will be voting for the first time in November. Navas said that's an asset.
"There's many people in our team who are brand new American citizens, so they'll be voting for the first time. They're very, very excited about it, and they're the ones who end up doing the best job," she said.
Canvassers spend their day in Hispanic enclaves around town, typically holding court near supermarkets and malls or knocking doors in non-gated apartment buildings. On occasion, they set up shop at community events including, most recently, the Three Kings Day Parade in Little Havana and a gathering at the Puerto Rico Chamber of Commerce.
Of all the cities in Miami-Dade, heavily Cuban and Republican-leaning Hialeah offers the most fertile ground for canvassers, according to Navas.
"Sometimes everyone goes to Hialeah," she said. "The people who vote the most are over there because, generation after generation, the Cuban culture is that you have to vote. ... Cubans are the ones we register most of."
Hernandez also notices a generational breakdown in the people most likely to want to register.
"We see senior citizens come through a bit more," she said. "With younger people, it's a struggle."
When they're hitting the streets, canvassers have to be ready to give abridged civics lessons in response to questions from relative newcomers still familiarizing themselves with an election process they find complicated.
"None of the Latino communities are as informed as they should be," Hernandez said. "People don't even know there's an election happening this year."
Navas echoed that assessment.
"There's people that say, 'I don't want to vote for the president,' for example. 'Which is the party that isn't the president's?' ... There's people that don't even know you have to register after getting citizenship," she said. "And then there's people that don't believe that voting counts, that don't understand the Electoral College. They don't get how it can happen that someone can be president having lost the popular vote.
"There's lots of questions for us to answer, and we have to try to explain everything in a few seconds," Navas added. "It's a tough job."
Making a tough job even harder is the perception that harsh rhetoric on immigration is making members of immigrant communities keep a low profile.
"Folks are hiding. They get nervous," Navas said. "Immigration becoming a much more sensitive topic has definitely made voter registration harder than before."
Though only U.S. citizens can register to vote, outreach to noncitizens is important, Navas explained, because it is a way to educate the broader immigrant community on the electoral process, and because noncitizens can help register relatives or friends who do have citizenship.
The Florida goal for UnidosUS is to register 65,000 Hispanic voters across the state by October.
Given that, every year, tens of thousands of immigrants become citizens in the Miami area alone, canvassers have a big and constantly replenishing pool of potential new voters to go after.
"There's always going to be a big number of new citizens to register in Florida," Navas said.
UnidosUS is a nonpartisan organization, meaning canvassers don't talk politics on their registration rounds. But the people they speak with are less restrained, especially when they reach the part in the registration process that asks about preferred party affiliation. That gives canvassers a sense of what the political leanings of the communities they spend time in might be.
"People are divided" between Democrats and Republicans," said Taira Rodriguez, a canvasser. "It's almost 50-50."
On a recent Friday spent knocking on doors at a Kendall apartment complex, Rodriguez found people of all political persuasions. In a 10-minute stretch, she registered a teenage independent, a young Democratic father, and spoke with a man who still had two years to wait to become a citizen but who asked her "to vote for Trump for (him)."
It's not unusual for the president's name to get brought up, unprompted.
"People mention him a lot," said Hernandez, the other canvasser. "As far as the other party is concerned, what I hear from people is that Democrats are socialists. You get the sense sometimes that people are just repeating things they hear, without necessarily being really informed."
Regardless of the political views she encounters, Hernandez plans to spend the next nine months on the job focusing on a narrow message: Voting is important. She said she learned that lesson firsthand when she missed her chance to vote against Hugo Chavez in the Venezuelan leader's first election, in 1998.
"When people tell me that voting doesn't interest them, I think about my own story," she said. "We have to vote, we have to participate."
Soon after that 1998 election, Hernandez moved to South Florida. She became a U.S. citizen last year.
Like the people she's helping register, she'll be voting for the first time in November.
