The Challenge of Mapping the Latino Right
Two weeks before the 2020 election, the journalist Paola Ramos published a book called “Finding Latinx,” in which she argued that the label “Latinx,” used mainly by younger Latinos and progressives as a gender-neutral form of address, represented the Latino community as a whole. At the time, a Pew Research Center report found that fewer than a quarter of Latinos had heard of the term, and only three per cent used it to describe themselves. As she writes in the book, her grandfather, the Cuban journalist and writer-in-exile Carlos Alberto Montaner, asked her, “¿Pao, qué carajo es Latinx?” (“Pao, what the hell is Latinx?”) To which she responded, “I believe Latinx stands for all the people in the Latino community who have ever felt left out, Abuelo. That ‘x’ is simply an invitation for every one of those people that can’t fit into one identity, for people that want to challenge norms, or for those that simply want to reimagine themselves.” And “Guess what? . . . You’re Latinx too,” she told him.
Her grandfather laughed then fell silent. But she believed that he understood what she meant. He had spent much of his life exiled from his home of Cuba for opposing the Castro regime—challenging norms in a way that, for Ramos, embodied “the very sentiment of the term.” In “Finding Latinx,” she writes that she began to notice the spread of “Latinx” after the 2016 election, when it became “part of the daily vocabulary of the resistance” against Donald Trump, made up largely of “women, youth, students, black communities, Latinos, immigrants, Dreamers, victims of sexual assault.” By the time she finished her book, she felt that Latinx transcended “all imaginable borders” previously separating Latinos, and signalled “the beginning of the change we were all aching for.” A report released last month by the Pew Research Center found that today a majority of Latinos still hasn’t heard of the term; seventy-five per cent of those who have say that it shouldn’t be used; its opponents have argued that it corrupts the Spanish language, is part of the “woke agenda,” and is used by so few Latinos that it shouldn’t be imposed on all of them.
Trump’s unexpected gains with Latino voters in 2020 made Ramos reëxamine many of the conclusions she reached in“Finding Latinx.” Airing her doubts in a 2021 interview on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” she asked, “How, after four years of Donald Trump . . . after hearing about the wall, after seeing family separation, after seeing hate crimes rise, after hearing the words ‘go back to your country,’ how is it possible that Donald Trump did ten points better with Latinos in 2020 than he did in 2016?” She told Vogue that she began to question whether Latinos could be a “unified voting block,” or even a “unified community.” These questions have seemed both urgent and perplexing, not only to Ramos but to many others as well; whether Trump will repeat or exceed his performance with Latinos is one of the main unknowns that could determine the outcome of the election.
In her second book, “Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America,” Ramos attempts to explain why Latinos have been drawn to Trump. “Defectors” is dedicated to the same grandfather whom she encouraged to embrace the term Latinx, to honor his memory (he died in 2023), but also, perhaps, as a nod to his silence back in 2020, which may have reflected a sense that a term like Latinx—and the progressive politics it represented—would never be embraced by the Latino community as his granddaughter hoped.
Democrats and their allied political consultants and commentators have long argued that Latinos vote as a bloc, and that promises of immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship, are the way to win the “Latino vote”—the reductive description of more than thirty-five million eligible voters. The more that Trump’s brand of politics continues to resonate with Latinos, the more these assumptions need to be rethought. Latinos are younger than other demographics, represent a greater share of the electorate every election cycle, have a significant presence in all of the critical swing states, and are driving the shift that will eventually make the United States a “majority-minority” country. It’s often thought that as the Latino share of the vote expands, liberal politicians will benefit. Trump’s inroads with Latino voters suggest that this might not be the case—that demography might not be destiny after all. If Democrats fail to engage and mobilize Latino voters, the Party could get left behind. That would be a stunning reversal of thinking over the course of the past decade: Republicans, after Mitt Romney’s loss, were the ones who, in a 2013 report called the “Growth & Opportunity Project,” feared for the future of their party if they didn’t bring Latinos and other nonwhite Americans into the fold.
“Defectors” isn’t a book about the so-called Latino vote, Ramos insists. As she sees it, Latino conservatism is about culture and history more than politics. She traces the appeal of the MAGA movement to the legacy of colonialism and the traumatic experiences many Latin American immigrants have suffered before and after arriving in the United States. The Latino Trump supporters Ramos interviewed, many of whom will vote for him in this election, defy easy categorization—she talked to Latinos of different ages, genders, national backgrounds, ethnicities, and races, all of whom have supported Trump for their own reasons. She meets a border vigilante whose views on immigration align with the former President’s, and a former Navy officer and Border Patrol agent who supported Trump before discovering that he himself was undocumented. An Afro-Dominican hair stylist in New York, whom Ramos calls Ysabel, tells Ramos that she feared for her safety during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and will vote for Trump again because he’s the law-and-order candidate. Other interviewees value the Republicans’ restriction of abortion rights or see Democrats as socialists or communists. Christopher Monzon, a former member of a white-supremacist group who used to go by the nickname “Cuban Confederate,” once believed that Black people were inferior, Ramos writes. He belonged to neo-Nazi chat groups, participated in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, hated immigrants, and thought that the South should secede from the United States. Monzon is now “deradicalizing,” he says; he has enrolled in college and is learning about Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, the Holocaust, and the civil-rights movement.
Ramos argues that what ties together the different strands of Latino conservatism is a trinity of “tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma.” By tribalism, she means primarily the “internal racism and discrimination” that many Latinos hold toward Black and Indigenous people. Her subjects tell her that immigrants are “bad actors” who are here to commit crimes. Some of her interviewees, she writes, “can be a brown person in America yet look at themselves in the mirror and see a white, Spanish person in the reflection.” By traditionalism, she means “conservative moral values,” namely Christian nationalism and patriarchal norms. (One subject, Luis Cabrera, an evangelical pastor in Harlingen, Texas, who immigrated to the United States with his family during Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution, was so enthusiastic about Trump’s 2020 campaign that he set up tents in South Texas where, Ramos writes, he would “pray, read Bible scriptures, and sell ‘Make America Godly Again’ T-shirts to Trump supporters.”) And by trauma Ramos means “the pain we carry from Latin America’s troubled political past.” She talks with Cubans, Dominicans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and others, many of whom have fled leftist regimes that have shaped their desire for security and religious and political liberty in the United States.
As Ramos suggests, Latinos on the right can paradoxically reject left-wing authoritarianism only to support right-wing dictators. Evelyn, a Salvadoran American living in Las Vegas, whose parents emigrated to the United States in the nineteen-eighties during the U.S.-backed civil war in their native country, says she felt safer at home in Nevada when Trump was President. Like several of Ramos’s subjects, she’s also drawn to Nayib Bukele, the charismatic and popular President of El Salvador, who once described himself on Twitter as the “World’s Coolest Dictator.” Ivan, a Mexican American who moonlights as a security guard in Southern California, is so infatuated with Bukele that his wife threw him a Bukele-themed birthday party, with cupcakes decorated with the autocrat’s face and a large candle that read “Happy Birthday Bukelito” (little Bukele).
Latinos’ “shared roots,” Ramos writes, make them “empathetic, open, and compassionate people.” Yet, she continues, “those roots are also what hold us hostage to our past—a past that’s marked by racial baggage, colonial traditions, and political traumas that can evoke a proclivity to white supremacy as we find our place in America.” Ramos sees her own family’s history reflected in that of many of her subjects. Writing about right-wing Latinos who idealize their Spanish heritage, she reflects on her own struggles to accept the complexity of her identity. Ramos spent her childhood between Madrid and Miami, where she was surrounded by Latinos who “lived unselfconsciously in the world as privileged white people.” When she was admitted to Barnard College, she received a “welcome package for students of color”—the first time she had been identified as such. The experience caused her to feel “othered,” she writes.
When Ramos arrived on campus, she was directed to an E.S.L. classroom instead of the mandatory English seminar attended by most first-year students. At first, she felt ashamed. “Wasn’t I supposed to be with them? Weren’t they what success in America looked like . . . ?” But when she joined the other students in the E.S.L. class, many of whom were Black or brown Latinos, she writes, “I felt more at home than I ever had.” Ramos speculates about what might have happened if she had refused to join the other Latino students, and instead “turned right toward the room that was less racially and ethnically diverse.” It may have sent her down an entirely different path in life, one in which assimilating into whiteness would have remained something to strive for. She could have become one of the many defectors that give her book its title.
Ramos isn’t wrong to chalk up so much of Latino conservatism to colonialism and to the long shadow it has cast over the region’s political fortunes. Many influential scholars, including Emma Pérez, Walter Mignolo, and Rolando Vázquez, have argued colonialism has consequences that have lasted well beyond its official end. In an essay from 2013, Mignolo and Vázquez wrote that “colonial wounds” are “historically true and still open in the everyday experience of most people on the planet.” Their goal, like Ramos’s, is decolonization, which, they write, would amount to “the empowerment and affirmation of those dignities wounded under racial classifications, under the logic of the disposability of human life in the name of civilization and progress.”
But Ramos’s claims are too sweeping to account for why all Latinos have embraced conservatism. Recent work by historians of Latin America challenges an understanding of the Spanish colonial period as a story of one-sided oppression of Native and African peoples by Europeans. (For one thing, much of what we consider to be European modernity was shaped by Indigenous science and epistemology, as the historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has argued.) The scars left by colonialism are real, but Ramos’s account of colonialism as a force that has united Latinos ignores the fact that many people of Indigenous and African descent formed alliances with Spaniards. Some did so in order to survive, others because such alliances would aid them in their wars against their enemies. Our ancestors have been divided from the beginning, just as Latinos are today.
Moreover, the political views of Latinos, like those of other Americans, are formed not only by the injuries of the past but by what they perceive as their interests in the present. For example, around half of all Latinos, including Democrats, say in public-opinion surveys that they support charter schools. Is that what colonialism has conditioned them to believe, or do they support charter schools because, as many of them report, public schools haven’t served them well? And when liberal politicians fail to address Latino demands, are we letting those politicians off the hook by attributing Latinos’ attraction to the Republican Party to the effects of colonialism?
Part of the challenge of mapping the Latino right is the diversity of the Latino experience. In “Finding Latinx,” Ramos acknowledges, even celebrates, this complexity, but in the new book she presents her subjects unapologetically as defectors from a liberal Latino majority. The empathy she shows her subjects models how we can have difficult conversations across political divides, but her personal approach also makes her more prescriptive than another writer might be. She writes that aspects of what her subjects believe are “wrong,” that they “couldn’t see” some of the consequences of conservative policies, that they have a “massive blind spot” on certain matters, and that they suffer from “colonized minds.” Applying the term “defectors” to conservative Latinos implies that they’ve defected from a particular community—the Latino community. But the Latino community is, in fact, many different communities, to which many members of the Latino right and far right feel that they, too, belong. And so, for all that Ramos insists Latinos are not a monolith, she ultimately advances a monolithic picture of Latino identity.
In an afterword, she writes, “I am convinced as I have ever been that, as Latinos, we have an opportunity to harness our collective power and reimagine a future that bears no resemblance to any past we’ve been subjected to, on either side of the border. To do that we must not be scared to face ourselves. Only then can we turn our stories of defection into a story of unprecedented unity.” After “Finding Latinx” was published, she wondered whether the Latino community could ever be united. Now she ends “Defectors” with the assertion that it can be.
But is Latino unity an attainable—or even a desirable—goal? The political scientist Cristina Beltrán argued more than a decade ago that it was a potentially harmful fantasy that erased the specificity and complexity of our communities. Although the “mass media and other political elites often portray Latinos as a collective body with common interests,” Beltrán writes, “the actual existence of Latino unity—of a collective political consciousness and will distinct among Latinos—is far less certain.” Latinidad itself, she continues, is a “site of permanent political contestation,” one that is and will remain fraught.
The Latino community currently counts sixty-five million members and is growing every day. If Latinos lived in their own country—call it “LatinoLand,” to borrow a term from the Peruvian American author Marie Arana—the population of that country would be comparable to that of Italy, France, and South Africa. Surely, we would never expect the inhabitants of these countries to someday achieve unity. Politically, there will likely always be Latinos who are liberal, Latinos who are conservative, and Latinos who don’t fit into either category. Among the conservatives there will be some who embrace the far right. Any other conclusion seems to be motivated by what we wish to be true, rather than what is. ♦
