Clarissa Martínez De Castro
Clarissa Martínez De Castro is passionate about strengthening civil society. As Vice President of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS, the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., she leads efforts to advance an accurate understanding of Hispanic voters and their priorities to foster greater and more effective engagement with these voters, and campaigns and systems approaches to increase Latino electoral and advocacy participation.
Informed by policy and practice, that work has resulted in the creation of the Hispanic Electorate Data Hub—a public resource providing a closer look at the makeup, distribution, and participation trends of the Latino electorate in the last two decades, multi-year dynamic polling data on leading issues and concerns for Hispanic voters, and their views on parties and candidates. On the community agency front, these efforts have resulted in the registration of over one million voters and reaching over half a million new and infrequent Hispanic voters in each of the last two cycles.
A frequent commentator on the Latino electorate and immigration issues, she is a graduate of Occidental College and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a U.S. Vote Foundation and Fair Elections Center board member, an advisory committee member of the Ad Council and Power The Polls, and a 2015 Presidential Leadership Scholar. Formerly undocumented, she came to the US as a teenager and is now a naturalized US citizen.