Boston develops melting-pot politics

When Linda Dorcena Forry launched her campaign for the Massachusetts State Legislature, she opened her headquarters in the same neighborhood as the legendary Eire Pub, one of several establishments that reflect the community's deep Irish roots.

The neighborhood's precincts proved to be the only ones she lost. But her presence there says much about how a liberal Haitian-American woman filled the vacated seat of Thomas Finneran, the tough-minded former House speaker who epitomized Boston's old ethnic politics.

Ms. Dorcena Forry still works the neighborhood: In the countdown to Tuesday's uncontested final election, she chatted with three mothers on Minot Street and blew soap bubbles with two young girls. "It is not about race, or gender, it's about the direction the city is moving in," Dorcena Forry says of her approach. "It's about coalition-building."

In this most clannish of cities, still dogged by the 30-year-old stigma of court-ordered busing - delegates at this summer's Democratic National Convention complained about a party location in a neighborhood reputed to be among Boston's most racially tense - stubborn barriers are coming down.

Dorcena Forry's victory comes on the heels of Andrea Cabral's last year as Boston's first black woman sheriff and Felix Arroyo's the year before as Boston's first Latino city councilman. The races have added momentum to what's been dubbed the "New Boston," an alliance across cultures, races, and ideologies in a city whose increasingly diverse population is voting in higher numbers.

"When Felix won it was like, 'Whoa,' " says John Barros, the executive director of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, which works to mobilize minority voters. "Felix raised the hypothesis that it's a new day in Boston. That's why Cabral became a tester, that we can do this. Linda's winning is further confirmation of what's going to happen, of candidates forming new alliances."

The Irish grasp on Massachusetts politics, immortalized by figures such as JFK and the famously corrupt Mayor James Michael Curley, has been loosening for decades. But it's been such a slow, quiet process that the mayoral victory of Italian- American Thomas Menino in 1993 still surprised some.

"People were saying, 'He doesn't have a chance because his last name ends in a vowel,' " says Sam Yoon, housing director at the Asian Community Development Corporation.

Mayor Menino became the first non-Irish mayor elected in over 60 years. Mr. Yoon, a Korean-American, has launched a bid for an at-large seat on the Boston City Council. He would be Boston's first Asian-American councilman.

New political clout for minorities comes, in part, from demographic change: The 2000 census revealed that Boston had become a "majority-minority" city. And those minorities are increasingly voting. Turnout for the 2004 presidential election in Boston's precincts with the highest ethnic populations was up 27.5 percent among Latinos, 22.5 percent among Asians, and 18.3 percent among blacks, compared to 3.9 percent among whites, according to the nonpartisan group MassVote.

To be sure, Arroyo, Cabral, and Dorcena Forry were strong candidates with broad constituencies. But the word "coalition" has been their common theme. Minorities and progressives worked together to sweep Arroyo into office. Dorcena Forry emphasized a "new partnership." Cabral's guiding principle: "Our differences are also our strengths."

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