Nearly 1 in 5 people in the United States today are Latino, and 'the Latino vote' has attracted significant news coverage as their political voice grows stronger. Yet considering all 62 million Latinos as a group isn't necessarily all that helpful in understanding attitudes or voting patterns, as some scholars and journalists have pointed out. The U.S. Latino population is extremely diverse. As scholars who study immigration in the fields of sociology and religious ethics, we are especially interested in the growing religious diversity and often overlooked geographical diversity among Latino populations. These aspects of Latino identity are just beginning to be recognized more clearly in media reports. Yet they are as informative as gender, race and other characteristics for understanding Latino voters ' and will likely come into play when Americans go to the polls in November. Historically, Latinos in the U.S. have mostly been Catholic, but the numbers have recently changed. In...
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