The morning after Mayor Bloomberg was re-elected, he placed a call to the Latina Political Action Committee.

Founded three years ago, the upstart Hispanic women’s group made a bold move last year in endorsing the billionaire mayor over his Puerto Rican opponent. Even political players who thought it was the wrong choice – there were many in the Hispanic establishment – said the August endorsement won Latina PAC new clout. “Next year, more people will take them seriously,” Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat, a Democrat who represents Washington Heights, said. “I don’t think they will be taken for granted by candidates from either party.”

Indeed, other politicians have since reached out to Latina PAC, including Elliot Spitzer’s gubernatorial campaign and Senator Clinton’s office. Latina PAC members are pleased policymakers are taking note.

“It’s not just a group of women making noise,” the director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights and a founding member of Latina PAC, Raquel Batista, 31, said. “Now they know that we’re serious about being politically involved.”

The group, whose leadership is dominated by American-educated Dominican women in their early 30s, demonstrates the shifting dynamics of the city’s Hispanic political scene. While more Puerto Ricans are eligible to vote than any other Latino group, their numbers are decreasing and Dominicans are poised to eclipse them. In addition, there are nearly a quarter of a million Colombians and Ecuadorians, predominantly in Queens; and Mexicans are the city’s fastest growing major immigrant group – they number 125,000 according to the 2000 census.

“The Latino population in New York is growing very rapidly, but it’s diversifying even more rapidly,” a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Philip Kasinitz, said. Members of Latina PAC said one of their intentions in forming the group – beyond representing women who would not usually be heard and creating a cadre of female leaders who would begin to promote Latinas as effective policymakers – was to show that the Puerto Rican establishment does not necessarily speak for them.

“We came together because there was nothing like it,” Lilliam Perez, 30, a founding member and community liaison for state Senator Eric Schneiderman, said. “We have a very well-established Latino political machine. I have to give some credit; they put us on the map. But the same institution has failed to integrate others such as Dominicans, Mexicans, Hondurans.”

Still, despite Latina PAC’s name, integrating Hispanics besides Dominicans into leadership positions remains a challenge. Of the seven founding members, all but two – one Puerto Rican and the other Mexican-Cuban – are Dominican. There are now 30 dues-paying members and more than 100 individuals in the Latina PAC network, who come from a variety of backgrounds and even include a handful of men, but Dominican women continue to dominate key positions.

In their actions, however, they have shown a willingness to look beyond ethnic divides, the director of Dominican Studies Institute at the City University of New York, Ramona Hernandez, noted. For example, in the race for Manhattan president, they backed a Puerto Rican politician, Margarita Lopez, over a Dominican, Adriano Espaillat. “These women are willing to play hardball and sit at the table,” Ms. Hernandez said.

Latina PAC’s organizing approach is likely a first in New York, but it is part of a larger trend of Hispanic groups using political action committees as a means to boost their political representation, according to the president of the Institute of Puerto Rican Policy, Angelo Falcon. Mr. Falcon, who organized a conference of Latino PACs in 2004 at Columbia University, said the growth of PACs, which often trade in influence rather than financial contributions, “may be the beginning of a different form of political organization in the Latino community.”

Lucia Gomez-Jimenez, 30, a founding member and political consultant, was among those who did not support Mr. Bloomberg. But she said the repercussions from Latina PAC’s choice hold a powerful lesson for other groups: “Why are we sitting at the table? It’s because we have been able to organize ourselves in a way that is familiar to the political establishment. We were responsible for [Bloomberg] being able to say, ‘Latinas are represented.'”