El péndulo: The Latino Vote in Pennsylvania [Central] | Translation

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Translated by MC Editorial

[Daniel Alarcón]: Hello, ambulantes. Today, just one week away from the U.S. elections, we bring you a special episode from our new Central series: El péndulo. With our partners at Noticias Telemundo and alongside journalist Julio Vaqueiro, we’ve been covering the Latino vote in the five most decisive states of this election.  

With over 36 million Latinos eligible to vote, we wanted to better understand what this so-called “Latino vote” really means in one of the most crucial and contested elections in history.  

Today, we head to Pennsylvania, where the series begins. You can listen to the rest of the episodes on the Central feed, where we also visit Florida, Nevada, Arizona, and, finally, North Carolina.  

Alright, here’s the episode.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: This episode contains strong or violent language and may not be suitable for all listeners.

I’m Julio Vaqueiro. Welcome to El Péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast by Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios.

Let’s start with something simple, sharp: these presidential elections could be decided in the first state we want to focus on… Pennsylvania. I’m not saying it, the experts who observe and study the electoral maps are saying it. They tell us that the candidate who wins this state will almost certainly win the presidency.

For decades, Pennsylvania was one of those blue states that Democrats always counted on. Until 2016, when Donald Trump won by less than 45,000 votes. It was a key and surprising victory… No Republican had achieved it since 1988. And that victory helped take him to the White House.

Then, four years ago… things changed again. This time, Joe Biden also won by a small margin… Only 80,000 votes, just a little bit over one percent.

These two results confirm that every vote counts…

And that Pennsylvania is now one of those swing states.

In El Péndulo we are not going to predict who will win in Pennsylvania, or in the other four states we are going to visit. That is not what this podcast is about. What we want to do is understand what role we, Latinos, can play in these elections.

In the case of Pennsylvania, until relatively recently, when one spoke of “Latinos in Pennsylvania” one was referring to the voter of Puerto Rican origin who lived in Philadelphia and who almost always voted Democrat. But now it is a different picture. Now, more than half of the Latinos in Pennsylvania live in smaller cities in the east of the state, in places like Allentown, Lancaster, Hazleton, Reading and York. All towns that have been revitalized in the last twenty years by new Dominican, Puerto Rican and Mexican communities.

The change has been so significant that the area even has a new name. Before, it was the “rust belt.” And now… “the Latino belt.”

[Archive soundbite]

[MSNBC]: “Both campaigns are trying to win over voters in the state’s Latino belt”.

[Telemundo]: Have you heard this expression? The Latino belt.

It is a key area. The two candidates, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, have campaigned here during these last frenetic weeks of the contest. If Pennsylvania as a state is unpredictable, this region of the state is going to be particularly contested.

And, for that reason, we wanted to know. We sent our editor, Daniel Alarcón, with our producer Alana Casanova-Burgess to the so-called Latino belt. Hello, Daniel.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Hello, Julio.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: What did you expect to find there?

[Daniel Alarcón]: Well, we went because we didn’t know exactly what to expect. There’s a lot of talk about the power of the Latino vote in this election, but the truth is that there are several Latino votes across the country.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: Sure. Each state has its own dynamics, and that’s why in this series we’re going to visit five swing states.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Yes, it seems like no one can define exactly what the Latino vote is or if it still exists. It’s almost incomprehensible. And that’s why we went to a place in Pennsylvania where the Latino vote has a history and a present that’s quite complicated and frankly difficult to decipher.

A city called Hazleton. A little bit more than two hours northwest of Philadelphia.

And I want you to know about the history of this place, because it’s important… So  Julio, I want to start in Hazleton, but 30 years ago. Two gentlemen we met there, Amilcar and Daniel, are going to tell us about it.

[Amilcar Arroyo]: Amilcar Arroyo. I was born in Peru. I came here to pack tomatoes and I started from scratch.

[Daniel Jorge]: My name is Daniel Jorge. I am Dominican. So, I am going to talk about the people I know, maybe a little bit more, which are the Dominicans.

[Daniel Alarcón]: And both of them have been in Hazleton for a long time. They remember a Hazleton that no longer exists… When there were abandoned houses. Few businesses, very little commerce.

[Daniel Jorge]: When I arrived here, at five or six in the afternoon, six in the afternoon, if I arrived at six… I didn’t see anyone on the street. Nobody. Absolutely nobody. In other words, a ghost town.

[Daniel Alarcón]: In 2000, the vast majority of residents were of European descent, the largest group being Italians —and their families had arrived a century earlier to work in the coal mines. The Latino population in Hazleton was only five percent.

[Amilcar Arroyo]: There were one hundred of us Latinos. You didn’t see a Latino, they were all white. And this is a city that is always known for being a city of old people.

[Daniel Alarcón]: So the schools didn’t have many students either and, of course, the town had a very low taxpayer base.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: All very typical of what was being seen in many cities in the “rust belt”.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Exactly. And to give you a concrete example of this abandonment, Daniel Jorge mentioned a store, Lowe’s… It’s a huge hardware store.

[Daniel Jorge]: And I went to Lowe’s, it looked like a museum. The store was so well organized because nobody bought anything. It’s the truth. It’s the truth.

[Daniel Alarcón]: But after September 11, people began to arrive: some Mexicans; but, mainly, Dominicans from New York and other cities in the northeast… And, eventually, directly from Santo Domingo or San José de Ocoa, in the Dominican Republic.

[Amilcar Arroyo]: It was a pyramid. I brought you, you brought your friend, your brother, your brother-in-law and this filled up. Just like that.

[Daniel Alarcón]: They found a somewhat run-down city, yes, but with opportunity. Low rents, cheap housing, and work in factories and distribution warehouses. By 2007, a third of Hazleton was Latino —eight thousand more people in seven years—, a lot for a city of only thirty thousand.

[Amilcar Arroyo]: They started opening groceries. They started buying houses. They started investing.

[Daniel Alarcón]: And for many in the white community it was a huge change. And, frankly, uncomfortable.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: In just seven years it is a very dramatic change.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Yes. Suddenly, there were signs in Spanish that they couldn’t read, students in school who couldn’t speak English…

[Daniel Jorge]: Instead of ten or twelve students that you had before, now you’re going to have 20. They never thought that we were going to come in such numbers. So they weren’t prepared.

[Daniel Alarcón]: And in the midst of all this change in May 2006, there was a crime: a white man was murdered. The District Attorney charged two undocumented immigrants with the homicide.

The charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence. But then-Mayor Lou Barletta had already cited the case as evidence that undocumented immigrants were dangerous —and that they were ruining the quality of life in Hazleton.

[Archive soundbite]

[CBS]: Barletta believes what’s been going on in Hazleton, a city of about 30 thousand people, is a microcosm of what’s been going on all over the country: illegal immigrants are overwhelming his city, draining its resources, and ruining the quality of life.

[Daniel Alarcón]: And in the summer of 2006, Barletta proposed anti-immigrant ordinances in Hazleton.

[Amilcar Arroyo]: Well, anyone who helps an undocumented immigrant and has a business, is shut down. Their license is taken away. The same goes for anyone who rents a room. So it became a little terrifying. It became something against a group, it ended up being against an entire Latino race.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: So the legal status of people no longer mattered.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Not anymore. Many Latinos felt like the town was rejecting them. National media, like ‘60 Minutes’, came to tell what was happening here.

[Archive soundbite]

[60 minutes / Woman]: They want the people to leave town. Steve Kroft: You think they want you to leave? Woman: I’m not going to leave. This is my home. We are here 24 years, half of my life.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Hazleton became famous throughout the country for its ordinances. More than 80 cities and towns tried to copy them.

[Amilcar Arroyo]: When they passed that ordinance, racism or racist people came out of the closet. So, when I walked down the street, they would say to me… in English, they would say to me, go back to your country with your banana boat. “Hey, what are you doing here?” And I was standing here to cross and a car would stop there on red, and when I was going to cross, they would say fucking Hispanic… and they would say, I’ll tell you. And Mexican ladies who were walking, they would cross and they would insult them and all those things.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: You know, I don’t remember this happening in Hazleton but it sounds horrible, Daniel.

[Daniel Alarcón]: From what they told us, yes. And, at that time, there was violence against Latinos too. In 2008, a Mexican man was attacked by four white boys in Shenandoah, a town not far from Hazleton. The victim died from his injuries.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: Hazleton —with racism “out of the closet,” as Amilcar told us— was supposed to be an inhospitable place for Latinos.

[Daniel Alarcón]: It was supposed to be. But it didn’t happen that way. Those ordinances were declared unconstitutional. And despite the tensions in Hazleton and the reputation that the city had, Latinos kept coming.

And almost twenty years later, Hazleton has changed completely. There are Dominican botanical shops and barbershops, many businesses that refer to New York. Everywhere you go, you hear Spanish and Latin music.

When those ordinances were proposed, Hazleton was 30 percent Latino… Now that number exceeds 60 percent.

[Noel]: You see all over the school, you see, that one is Dominican, that one is Dominican, that one is Dominican.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Like Noel, a young man who arrived two years ago, when he was thirteen.

[Noel]: Are you not from there, from the Dominican Republic?

[Daniel Alarcón]: No, I’m Peruvian.

[Noel]: Ufff. Yah.

[Daniel Alarcón]: What a shame to disappoint you! We don’t play basketball, we play soccer.

[Noel]: Oh, yes, I like soccer. Messi!

[Daniel Alarcón]: We met Noel at the gym of a community center, where he goes to play basketball with his friends.

It’s called the Hazleton Integration Project and, in addition to a gym, they also have a cafeteria where they cook for the community, classrooms where they teach classes in technology and Spanish and English, and a small library with books for children. Daniel Jorge, who we met at the beginning, is the athletics director of the center.

[Daniel Jorge]: They come, form their own teams, and play.

[Daniel Alarcón]: The day we went, of the thirty-something boys and girls playing there, almost all were Latinos, almost all Dominicans. Hazleton is no longer a ghost town, it is no longer a city of old people. It is a city of Latinos.

[Daniel Jorge]: Whoever lost, has to leave. Whoever wins, keeps playing.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: After the break: who left and who keeps playing in Hazleton.

You are listening to El péndulo. We will be back.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: We are back on El péndulo: the Latino vote from five states that will decide the presidential elections in the United States. A podcast from Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios. And today: Pennsylvania.

I am Julio Vaqueiro, here with Daniel Alarcón, our editor.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Hello, hello.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: Daniel, while you were telling me about Hazleton, I couldn’t stop thinking about Springfield, that city in Ohio where, according to Trump, immigrants are eating pets. A rumor, of course, that is totally false.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Yes, yes. There is a certain echo. Like Hazleton, Springfield is a town with an industrial legacy that has been economically revitalized by the arrival of immigrants.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: And in Springfield, like in Hazleton, there was a death that changed everything. In the case of Springfield, a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus and an 11-year-old boy died.

[Archive soundbite]

[PBS NEWS]: Dozens of children were injured, and 11 year old Aidan Clark died. When the driver was revealed to be a Haitian immigrant without a US license, things erupted.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: Vice-presidential candidate JD Vance and other Republicans have used the story of this child’s death in their anti-immigration speeches. And it reminds me a bit of what you told us about the former mayor of Hazleton, Lou Barletta, who spoke about the victims of undocumented immigrants…

[Soundbite archive]

[Lou Barletta]: Everyone talks about the illegal immigrants but very seldom do we talk about the victims.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Yes. And after being mayor, Lou Barletta ran for congress, won, and in Congress he was very anti-immigrant. When Trump appeared on the national political scene, Barletta supported him almost immediately.

[Soundbite archive]

[Donald Trump]: I wanna introduce a very special man because he’s been a friend of mine since the beginning.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: And now, Barletta’s speech is, in essence, the immigration platform of Donald Trump’s party.

At the Republican Party convention in July of this year, for example, we saw “mass deportation now” signs.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Amilcar Arroyo, the Peruvian we spoke to in the first part… He did notice the echo.

[Amilcar Arroyo]: So, what do I feel when I see those, those signs? I am already used to it because I saw the same signs here, the same signs, I saw them here.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Today, Amilcar is 75 years old, he remembers when the Republican Party seemed attractive to him. When it was his party. Amilcar left Peru in the middle of a terrible economic crisis, in the second half of the eighties.

[Amilcar Arroyo]: When I became a citizen and registered to vote, I registered as a Republican because my ideal since I was in Peru was capitalist.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: Of course, we all bring our dreams to this country.

[Daniel Alarcón]: And in a certain sense, in Hazleton he achieved the American dream. He went from canning tomatoes to opening his own business: a magazine for the Latino community called ‘El Mensajero’. And he told us about a Barletta’s rally to promote restrictive ordinances against undocumented immigrants. Amilcar went with his camera to take photos for El Mensajero and saw signs there that said, “Speak only English,” or “go back, illegal immigrant”.

[Amilcar Arroyo]: Then all the people started saying, coming up to me and insulting me with bad words and saying illegal immigrants go back to your banana boat.

And when I looked around, I saw people I sat with at Chamber of Commerce’s meetings. There were people I did business with. Nobody said “I know that guy, he’s not illegal. That guy is a citizen, that’s Amílcar Arroyo”.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Two police officers approached him, not to arrest him but to rescue him from threats from his own neighbors.

[Amilcar Arroyo]: I will never forget that experience. So, that’s the same thing that’s happening now. Because the effervescence that Trump has created, because you have to say it by name, is too strong and there are people who believe that what he says is like that. They believe that Latinos in general are bad, that Latinos don’t belong in this country.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: In other words, the national Republican Party moved toward an anti-immigrant stance like the one seen in Hazleton. And in the process it left out people like Amilcar. So how does he vote today?

[Daniel Alarcón]: After that incident, Amilcar changed parties. He voted for Obama in 2008 and has voted Democrat ever since. And he told us he’ll vote for Kamala Harris in November.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: And how do you get along with your neighbors today?

[Daniel Alarcón]: Almost 20 years later, everything Amilcar described to us is like another world.

[Amilcar Arroyo]: There are no white people here in Hazleton anymore. There are no white people anymore.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Well, he’s exaggerating a bit. There are white people, but not that many. Many have left or died. And Amilcar explained to us: it’s not that the anti-immigrant and racist people of Hazleton changed their perspective. It’s that they’re simply not there anymore.

And while the Republican Party at the national level uses very anti-immigrant language, the local party in Hazleton has a completely different tactic.

Today, Mayor Jeff Cusat, a Republican of Italian and Polish origin, is running for his third term. He is relatively young, not even 50 years old… And many told us that he has a very comfortable relationship with the Latino community and even travels a lot to the Dominican Republic.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: And for the people of Hazleton, this city that became famous for tensions, for racism… Did you find that immigration is still an important issue?

[Daniel Alarcón]: Yes, but perhaps not in the way you imagine. That experience that Amilcar had almost two decades ago began with the fear of undocumented immigrants. And that fear still exists. But now you no longer hear it only from white people. But sometimes from Latino people.

We spoke with the owner of a beauty products store. She is Adaíris Casado and she arrived almost 14 years ago.

[Adaíris Casado]: You know, and it’s not that I’m against immigration, but when you open… like you open the door of your house, a lot of people are going to come in and you don’t know. There comes a, well, a bad guy, a murderer, you know. So that’s why the country lost security.

[Daniel Alarcón]: She used to be a Democrat. But she voted for Trump in the last elections, and she will do it again in November.

[Adaíris Casado]: He is a person who believes in God. And, second, he offers the country the security that this government, well, took away from the country.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: It’s like the opposite trajectory to Amilcar.

[Daniel Alarcón]: It’s exactly that. She came as part of a migratory wave. But now she feels that the city can’t absorb more people. She sees it in concrete details of the way of life in Hazleton. Above all, security.

[Daniel Alarcón]: In general, would you say that the change has been positive or negative with this migration?

[Adaíris Casado]: Negative. Because, and I’ll tell you why. There’s a video out there, and it’s on Carson Street, of a young man opening cars.

[Daniel Alarcón]: I must clarify here, Julio, that data indicate that Hazleton does not have more crime than other similar cities. But there is clearly a perception of danger. Her husband had part of his car’s engine stolen a few months ago and Ada feels scared in her own store.

[Adaíris Casado]: I used to leave that door open. Not anymore, because one is no longer safe here. One is not safe.

[Daniel Alarcón]: In case it’s not clear, she refers to a literal door. Not a metaphor.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: But there is a metaphor here… So close the door behind me. Or not?

[Daniel Alarcón]: That’s the idea I had. It’s a feeling that several people shared with us. Many Latino people express themselves against immigration with language that resembles the Republican speech. We are seeing this at a national level. And, in a sense, it is understandable. Julio, at the beginning, our impression was that Hazelton was a thriving city of opportunities, where Latinos could buy houses, educate their children… We felt everything was going well here. And that things were going well in Hazleton because Latinos saved it… With their labor force, their businesses, their taxes…

That was the message when we arrived at a job fair. And I owe you a little more context here: Hazleton’s growth was no accident. The local government has offered tax incentives to attract companies to the area, and that brought in plenty of migrants too, looking for work. One of the state’s largest industrial parks is here, with warehouses for Amazon and American Eagle Outfitters and even a Hershey’s plant.

[Hershey’s woman]: We need at least two years of experience in mechanics, in manufacturing.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: Hershey ‘s? Chocolate?

[Daniel Alarcón]: Yes. And there are so many Latinos, they designated the plant in this area to be bilingual. English and Spanish. And all around the fair you could hear Spanish, even at a table of two state legislators, both Republicans:

[Ariela]: Any problem that people have in the state, we are there to be able to solve, solve the problem.

[Daniel Alarcón]: But the line to enter was very long, at least two hundred people waiting. And, frankly, most of them were not going to get a job at this fair.

[School woman]: Right now there are no vacancies, but we do want to have, so to speak, enough staff just in case, when there are available positions, they already have a list.

[Upset woman]: And look how the line is here, because we are all desperately looking for work and there is nothing.

[Daniel Alarcón]: A woman, in tears, spoke to us from the line.

[Upset woman]: So, how? It is a mockery for the people, here we Hispanics are the ones who work hard, we are the ones who really do the work in the company, we need employment, because here we are the ones who do the work. Isn’t it right, my people?

[Daniel Alarcón]: And that is where we realized that Hazleton is in another stage of its history.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: Now I understand. In twenty-something years, it has gone from being a predominantly white city in decline, to being a city where new migration was controversial, and then a Latino city with many opportunities. To what is now.

[Daniel Alarcón]: YES, now it is a city where there are no houses for so many people. Another Dominican woman told us what things were like when she arrived seven years ago.

[Woman]: There was a lot of work. And people came from New York, New Jersey, from all those states, since rent was expensive there, they came here and after they came, so many people here, the rent went up, the rent is very expensive and there is no work there.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Seven years ago. What were the rents like for example?

[Woman]: Very cheap. With 600 dollars you paid for an entire house. Now they charge you 1,400. 1,500 for the same house.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: And is it true that there are no houses?

[Daniel Alarcón]: Seriously, they told us that this growth took all the authorities by surprise, that they did not plan, because nobody expected it. And not just in the housing issue. There is no space in the schools either, the kindergarten is full for this year.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: And, Daniel, the people in line, who couldn’t find work, and have to pay these very high rents… Did they tell you if they are going to vote?

[Daniel Alarcón]: Some didn’t want to say.

[Man]: But that’s… That’s confidential, right.

[Daniel Alarcón]: … Some don’t know yet.

[Young woman]: No, I haven’t decided yet.

[Daniel Alarcón]: And some haven’t registered to vote.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: Look out, the deadline to register in Pennsylvania is October 21, for those of you listening in that state.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Sure, there’s still time. And that brings me to another thing that we hear a lot about in Hazleton, perhaps the most important: that Latinos don’t vote.

Hazleton has no Latino representation on the school board, nor on the city council. It has never had a Latino mayor, even though it is predominantly Latino.

[Daniel Jorge]: This city has life thanks to Hispanics. We are the life of this city, economically, but we are nothing at the government level.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: After the break, we continue in Hazleton, a city in Pennsylvania with Latinos everywhere… except in the government. This is El Péndulo. We’ll be back.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: This week on El Péndulo we are in Pennsylvania with Daniel Alarcón.

He told us that Hazleton is a predominantly Latino city, which has no representation in the government. It is a community that has been in Hazleton for almost two decades, right?

[Daniel Alarcón]: Look, Hazleton is part of the so-called “Latino belt”. But unlike Hazleton, the other cities in the Latino Belt do have Latino representation in government. Allentown and Reading even have Hispanic mayors. Places like these make the Latino vote extremely important.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: And how do you explain it?

[Daniel Alarcón]: Well, Daniel Jorge explained it like this:

[Daniel Jorge]: One hundred percent our fault.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Huh!

[Daniel Jorge]: You didn’t expect to hear that. Okay, changes are made through voting and we just don’t vote. Ok? We don’t vote.

We don’t care, we don’t believe that voting means absolutely anything. We don’t believe that we can change through voting.

Absolutely nothing. We are stuck in that, in that mindset.

[Daniel Alarcón]: So, what is happening in Hazleton? People gave us several explanations…

First, and we heard it several times, Julio. The Dominican came here to solve an economic problem, not a political problem. So there is simply not much interest in the political aspect, right? That’s not why they came.

It is a very divided community. There are factions among Dominicans, depending on the partisanship in their native country, or what city they come from. And sometimes they divide their vote between several candidates.

And finally, they are two different political systems. To give you an example, in the Dominican Republic the school boards are not elected or function the same as in the United States.

Daniel ran last year for “school director” in the county. Like others in his community, he lost.

[Daniel Jorge]: And I still find people who tell me “come back, run again.” That encourages me. But I am discouraged by the fact that we Hispanics are so neglected when it comes to voting. It hurts me because it holds us back. It drags us down, it sinks us and we don’t understand the potential we have here.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Now, does that apathy that you have diagnosed in the Latino community towards local politics also extend to national politics?

[Daniel Jorge]: No. Look, it’s good… it’s a phenomenon… The vast majority vote in the presidential elections. The apathy is at the local level.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: This Daniel always surprises me with his answers.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Yes, me too, me too.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: So the Latino in Hazleton does vote… for president.

[Daniel Alarcón]: Yes, the statistics seem to confirm it. But looking at the rates in the city’s most Hispanic neighborhoods, we see that, in the 2020 election, the vote in Hazleton was split between Trump and Biden almost head-to-head. Biden won some, Trump won others, but always close, sometimes only dozens of votes separated them.

There are no state-level Latino polls in Pennsylvania, but we did see a poll done in Northampton County after the presidential debate that can give us some clues. It’s an area, like Hazleton, that has a lot of Latinos. And there, 60 percent of Latinos are voting for Harris. Only 25 for Trump. So, Hazleton, as we’ve seen, with its particular history, is, in many ways, an atypical city and vote.

And for me all this confirms that the Latino vote is even more complex than many people think.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: Absolutely. Would you say that it’s also proof that there is no real “Latino vote”?

[Daniel Alarcón]: Maybe. Those who are going to vote in Hazleton have the same concerns as in any other place. Security, jobs, prices, abortion rights… and (in general) these are the same concerns that all voters have in this election. Being Latino does not determine your vote.

But there is something else. I was thinking about something that Daniel Jorge told us. That, really, many of the issues that matter at the national level are local issues.

[Daniel Jorge]: Is the economy a main issue in the elections? I know it is, but that is a process and I do not think that Harris or Trump can change that overnight.

[Daniel Alarcón]: He cares more about his rights.

[Daniel Jorge]: And we believe that we are going to vote for this president because he is going to lower the price of gasoline. Is that all you are looking for in a president?

[Daniel Alarcón]: For Daniel, no, clearly. For others, for many, the economy is simply the main thing.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: Thank you, Daniel.

[Daniel Alarcón]: With pleasure, Julio.

[Julio Vaqueiro]: Next week on El péndulo we travel to a market in Las Vegas and ask: what can Harris and Trump really do for the economy?

Thanks for listening!

[Alana Casanova-Burgess]: El péndulo is a co-production of Radio Ambulante Studios and Noticias Telemundo, with funding from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, an organization that supports initiatives that transform the world.

Julio Vaqueiro, from Noticias Telemundo, is the host. This episode of El péndulo was reported and produced by Daniel Alarcón and myself, Alana Casanova-Burgess, with support from Jess Alvarenga and Mariana Zúñiga, with editing by Silvia Viñas, Eliezer Budasoff and Daniel Alarcón.

Desirée Yepez is our digital producer. Geraldo Cadava is our editorial consultant. Ronny Rojas did the fact checking. The theme song, music, mixing and sound design are by Andrés Azpiri. Graphic design and art direction are by Diego Corzo.

At Noticias Telemundo, Gemma García is the executive vice president and Marta Planells is the senior digital director. Adriana Rodríguez is the senior producer and José Luis Osuna is in charge of the series’ video journalism.

At Radio Ambulante Studios, Natalia Ramírez is the product director, with support from Paola Aleán. Community management is by Juan David Navarro. Camilo Jiménez Santofimio is the director of partnerships and financing. Carolina Guerrero is executive producer of Central and CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios.

You can follow us on social media as @ [at] centralseries RA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast.audio.