Right-Leaning Latino Voters Should Not Be a Surprise

There’s been a lot of talk about a small but significant number of Latino voters moving towards the right recently.

Some on the left worry that the promise of a majority-minority electorate that would fuel a shift towards a more progressive voting public is slipping away. Others on the right have pointed out that these claims were overblown to begin with and hope the GOP will manage to attract enough Latino voters to remain competitive.

The reality is that the political attitudes of Latinos in the U.S. are shaped by forces that are as varied as the political histories of the countries we’ve left behind.

The “demography as destiny” hypothesis did turn out to be a bit of a fantasy fueled by the collective desire of a slim majority to believe that a more diverse electorate would keep anti-democratic forces from gaining further power in the United States. But what was once an aberrant thought in this country — an authoritarian U.S. president — is now a very real concern.

Some think that if Trump wins again, it might be because many Latino voters moved towards the right. To be sure, in a state like Wisconsin, where the margins are super close, even a small shift in Latino votes would have huge consequences.

But it is difficult for an immigrant like me to even process those words. Right-wing Latinos as a political force in the U.S.?

I come from a political family in Guatemala, where of course the left and right factions of the political spectrum exist. I grew up experiencing the political oppression aimed at my father. He ran to represent a small Department to the northwest of the capital city in the National Constitutional Assembly of 1985. He won, and together with 87 other representatives, proceeded to draft and sign a new constitution for the country. This founding document includes a clause that reads, “the State guarantees and protects human life from the time of its conception.” Clearly a nod to the conservative Catholic influence in the country. There is indeed a long history of right-wing conservatism in Latin America.

So why am I and so many others shocked to learn that many Latinos in the U.S. are moved by right-wing rhetoric?

Two recent books take a thoughtful approach at tracing the recent history of Latinos in the United States, and they shed some light on the malleability of political attitudes in the Latino community from two very different points of view. 

The first, “The Latino Century” by Mike Madrid, a political consultant who recently co-founded The Lincoln Project, analyzes the phenomenon from the vantage point of a lifetime Republican operative whose perspective is largely informed by his research into the voting patterns of Latinos over the last three decades. 

The second, “Defectors” by Paola Ramos, an award winning journalist who has done work for Vice, MSNBC and Telemundo, delves more specifically into the phenomenon of Latinos in the U.S. flirting with right-wing extremism.

In “The Latino Century,” Madrid takes us through his journey as a young Mexican American in California who is won over by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. During this time, he built his consulting career advising conservative candidates through many long shot campaigns. When the controversial Prop 187 in 1994 was permanently carving out the fault lines of party division in California with the wedge issue of immigration, Latinos in the state aligned with Democrats to oppose the measure. Madrid held fast to his Republican affiliation. His account comes across as that of a tough, numbers-driven political operative who could see through his research that the Latino population is not as monolithic as the political wisdom of the time was painting it out to be.

Madrid argues that as Latino families settle in the U.S., subsequent generations become more open to conservative values like religious faith, patriotism, and hard work. There is indeed an allure to the comfort promised by those erstwhile Republican tenets for Latinos, including some in my own family. But Madrid, now unaffiliated to a party due to his principled stance against Trump, does not delve too deeply into why some Latinos would respond to right-wing authoritarian rhetoric.

Enter Paola Ramos. “Defectors” is a courageous, well written, well reported and deeply thoughtful account of the “Latinos for Trump” phenomenon. She is not afraid to engage with some of the more extreme characters from the Latino community in the U.S. who have risen to prominence by their support of Trump. Through candid interviews, she gets to some of the core themes animating their views and motivations. 

Ramos dives right into the complicated legacy of Spanish colonization of the continent, a violent history that has tasked generations of Latin Americans with making sense of our mixed race roots. Devoting three equally incisive parts of the book to the tribalism, traditionalism and trauma that shape the Latin American experience, she lays out a persuasive case for how the palpable rightward shift of some Latinos in the U.S. is in many ways a continuation of this legacy.

She posits that a big part of the Latino experience is learning to navigate the degree to which we buy into our “fantasy heritage,” that is, the way our cultural origin story is taught to us with a Eurocentric perspective and “our ability to mistake these fantasies as fact.”

The degree to which we buy into that fantasy determines how much we are able to accept beliefs rooted in white supremacy because we believe our proximity to whiteness will keep us and our families safe. The traditionalism that is built to support this curated origin story serves to suppress the trauma of all kinds of oppression — cultural, economic, political — that litters the history of Latin America.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Latinos who fully buy into this fantasy heritage passed down through the generations would find an affinity with right-wing ideologies that promise them they will finally belong.

I’ve been reflecting on this more as I continue to see headlines fretting over which candidate is doing more to “lure” Latino voters to their side. But unfortunately, most of the overtures made by campaigns can end up feeling like mere pandering.

Politicians who want the unwavering support of the vast majority of Latinos in the U.S. need to lay out their vision on how they plan to make us equal partners in forging the future of American democracy. They must convince us that the sacrifices we’ve made, the insults we’ve endured, and the shaky alliances we’ve been fooled into making in the name of assimilation have been worth it. They should appeal to our desire for real democracy, since many of us come from countries where democracy was just a nice idea.

And us Latinos need to get better at understanding how our past affects our present. We must get beyond acting surprised that some of us have different political views. We need to get involved, have the tough conversations, and step up our civic engagement in order to take an even more active role in the grand democratic experiment of America.

In other words, we must all do the work.