ALLENTOWN, PA. – Nestled in the heart of Allentown sits La Placita, a city jewel that is half deli, half restaurant, where people have gathered for the last 29 years for authentic Mexican cuisine – from chorizo and rice and beans to homemade tamales.
"Everything's made from scratch – I think that's why people love it," said Beti Rosales, 47, who helps run the restaurant with her parents, Jorge and Ana, who immigrated from Puebla, Mexico.
They've had to increase their prices in response to the rising costs of ingredients.
"We use limes a lot – that box itself costs more, avocados cost more, lettuce costs more – meat prices are going up," Rosales said, adding she can see the toll the economy is taking on her customers as well.
"If you're struggling, you're going to have to cut off things like going out to eat, so now the business also feels that and then they have to cut costs as well – it just becomes a domino effect," Rosales said.
Concerns about the economy reign supreme among Latino voters this cycle, said Stephanie Valencia, co-founder of Equis Research, a Latino polling organization. The power Latino voters have to sway power in Washington can't be understated.
"How the House gets decided is inextricably tied to whether Latinos turn out and who they're supporting," Valencia said.
That's particularly true in Allentown, a former manufacturing powerhouse that's a far cry from Billy Joel's 1982 anthem about the decline of the industrial working class.
"It wasn't 100% wrong at the time – there were factories closing down, there were people struggling," said Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk, the first Spanish-speaker to hold the office. "It told a story of a time. But when that song hit the charts, massive change was underway. You look at the 1970 U.S. Census, the city has like 109,000 people and it's 98.2% white."
Allentown is now a majority-Latino city, predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican. The demographic represents a critical voting bloc in both parties' quest to control the House of Representatives.
"Democrats lost a thread with Latinos over the last couple of election cycles," Valencia said, nodding to President Trump's significant gains with Latino voters. "What we have seen in our polling is that Latinos felt like Democrats were focused on the wrong things – interventions abroad, social issues - things that felt very out of touch with the anxieties that Latinos had on the economy and immigration."
Tuerk said it's a dynamic he saw play out even in a blue city like Allentown.
"Every single one of the precincts went blue, but 52 of those 55 shifted red from the 2020 election, and the biggest shift was in one of our most heavily Latino precincts," he said.
He attributes it to a mismatched message from the Biden administration.
"One of the big challenges is that people here were saying, I'm struggling economically, I can't afford childcare, rents are out of control," he said. "And the message coming from the Biden administration was like, we're seeing massive economic success, we've done all these amazing things, and it's gonna be great. And people are like - I feel like you're gaslighting me a little bit."
Valencia said that according to polling, a third of Latinos don't see themselves as part of either political party.
"They're voting every single election cycle based on what's motivating their anxieties, how they're feeling about their own personal economic situation," she said. "Both parties have to contend with that and both parties have to fight for their votes."
National threads trickling down into PA-07 race
In a race dominated by economic issues, there are still other national messages from both parties showing up.
Democrats maintain the Trump administration's immigration enforcement will erode some of the inroads Republicans made with Latino voters. GOP incumbent Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, who won by one percentage point last cycle, said there's a level of "misinformation" within that argument, adding he has worked with law enforcement to "make sure they are going after the criminals that are in our community."
"There is no doubt that we want to make sure we're reforming ICE appropriately when things are not done correctly at the national level," Mackenzie added. "It's just our experience in the local community – thankfully, we have not had those problems."
Democratic challenger Bob Brooks, a retired firefighter and union leader, said fear about ICE is something he encounters frequently on the campaign trail.
"I was out knocking doors and this tiny little lady, she came out and she started talking to me and she starts crying," Brooks told NPR after an event announcing his Latino outreach effort. "She's afraid to go to a grocery store. Her husband passed away and she's afraid to go to her husband's grave because she's afraid some masked man is going to come scoop her up."
Polls show 66% of Hispanic independents and 26% of Hispanic Republicans say Trump's immigration actions go too far.
It's an issue Rosales, of La Placita, said she expects will be motivating for voters.
"My sister lives in Connecticut and she walks around with her passport just in case she gets pulled over and it's just crazy to me – we were born here, but it can still happen," she said. "I'm not against removing criminal illegals, but they need to have a better system in place on how they're going about it. Because now we have actual workers who haven't committed a crime, just going to work and they're being picked up."
George Rivera, chairman of the Lehigh County Republican Committee, pushes back, calling the Democratic messaging a type of fear-mongering.
"If you talk to children of immigrants or people that immigrated here properly, they're going to support the Department of Homeland Security," he said. "The Hispanic culture is being misled that just because you're brown or bilingual or don't speak English, you're going to get picked up. And does it happen? Yes, but it gets rectified and they get resolution. Is it happening every day? I don't think so."
Just as ICE has become a national issue, so too, is tying Democrats to the far left wing of their party.
"The same way that if you're a Republican, you're basically connected to Trump – let's keep it consistent. If you're voting for Bob Brooks, you're voting for a socialist," Rivera said, nodding to popular political figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani emerging on the left. "It's very simple – in November, you're either going to vote Republican or socialist."
Cost of living and economy dominate
Barbara Gonzalez-Rizzotti, a Puerto Rican mother of two and registered Republican, said Rivera's point on socialism resonates with her.
"I don't know when making money and capitalizing has become a bad thing – it just makes no sense," she said.
She said the cost of living is a top issue for her.
"Regardless of your political party or your ethnicity, we're all feeling the same things for the most part," she said. "I feel like it's gotten to the point where we're gearing towards two classes of people, the filthy rich or the dirt poor. We're squeezing out the middle class, which is where I fall."
She runs a day care out of her home and said she can feel the stress of parents.
"People are afraid to have more children. I had a mom who has two and then accidentally got pregnant again and it's supposed to be such a happy time. And she's sobbing, you know, 'we don't know if we could afford this,'" she recalled.
She's likely going to support Republicans in November, although she says a Democrat "who wasn't wacky left" could perhaps get her vote one day. She said she feels "a little let down" by the administration.
"I feel like we're not focusing on what we were initially told was going to be the focus. I feel less America first, like I'm not hearing that as much," she said. "Obviously, we have to broker things as America and show our force. But I just feel like, how important is that? Because gas isn't coming down, food prices are going up. Could there be a better balance?"
It's a question Ana Acosta said she wonders about, too. She's originally from the Dominican Republic and has worked as a truck driver based in Allentown for six years. She said the skyrocketing price of diesel has been brutal.
"Whatever little profit we're making from the loads is going into diesel – just incredibly expensive," she told NPR in Spanish. "We're hardly making anything."
Acosta, 47, supported Trump in 2024 but says she's been disappointed with the administration.
"I expected something different – all the hope we had that everything was going to improve and now it's just gone downhill instead," she said. "We said that with Biden, we were doing badly, and maybe we were going to improve with Trump. But now, no. I think we're actually much worse off than we were with Biden in terms of the cost of living, the cost of fuel."
She hasn't decided who she'll support this year and describes herself as politically in the middle.
"I feel like it's always the same thing over and over again," she said. "They always promise the same things. They promise change, but it's just more of the same."
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