The U.S. Latino shift to the political right is undeniable. Last month, not only did Donald Trump win more Hispanic-American votes than any Republican candidate in recent history, but he won more in all the border counties in Texas, where he is planning to build a wall to keep out unwanted Latinos. He also did better than expected with Puerto Rican voters, even after a comedian referred to the island as “garbage” during a rally at Madison Square Garden. Every major news and opinion outlet, including Commonweal, has published at least one article about “why Latinos turned red.”
The shift was already evident four years ago. On the eve of 2020 elections, when it looked as if Trump might pull off an unexpected victory, the New York Times columnist Nikole Hannah-Jones posted on X (then Twitter): “One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans and helps explain why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate [compared to whites].” Since then, as the Latino shift to the right has increased, many other voices have responded in alarm.
The rightward shift of U.S. Latinos has left César J. Baldelomar, like Hannah-Jones before him, ready to question the usefulness of “Latino” as a category. In a recent piece for Commonweal, he writes: “If Latinos can teach this country anything, it’s that there is no singular Latino identity.” Baldelomar believes that Latino identity as it is understood today by many U.S. Latinos entails values that lead to right-wing extremism. The moral and progressive response to this rightward shift, Baldelomar believes, is to promote a more fragmented understanding of Latino identity, so that an “unprecedented unity in diversity might emerge, truly shifting the political, social, and religious narratives of this country in unforeseen, complex ways.”
Baldelomar cites a new book by Paola Ramos (no relation), which tackles the right-wing trend among U.S. Latinos. “The reasons for Latinos’ defection to alt-right movements and ideologies are complex and intertwined,” Baldelomar writes. “But the common thread is the history of colonization and its psychic and emotional toll on Latinos.”Though they themselves are the victims of colonization and racism, Latinos have internalized white supremacy and other oppressive attitudes. The problem, Baldelomar says, comes down to a question Paola Ramos asks in her book: “How far can the colonized mind bend?”
Baldelomar and Paola Ramos have it wrong in two ways. First, the Latino label was never meant to denote a fixed essence, racial or otherwise. As the Cuban American philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia puts it, Latino identity is based on “historical relations that create historical families,” which stretch back hundreds of years and have created a literature, a culture, a way of life. It is by virtue of these historical ties—and not race or religion or even language—that Indigenous Guatemalans, Black Puerto Ricans, white Cubans, as well as Paraguayans, Catalans, Brazilians, Chileans et al., can all be said to form one people. Second, the fact that one can’t always predict how U.S. Latinos will vote is an example of the “unity in diversity” that Baldelomar rightly celebrates. There are around 60 million Latinos in the United States. It is hard to imagine 60 million people thinking and acting in the same way about anything, especially about politics. Of those 60 million, some work for ICE and border patrol; some own small businesses; some haven’t been to church in years; others are undocumented and live in fear of being deported. Where there is diversity of circumstance and experience, there will be a diversity of political judgment.
On some level, Baldelomar knows this. He writes, “I’m a close follower of voting trends and take pains to speak with people outside of my ‘bubble,’ so I was not surprised by the results of the election.” Yet instead of letting the voices outside his bubble speak for themselves—instead of letting them explain why they think and vote the way they do—Baldelomar retreats further into his bubble in search of an expert who can explain these poor souls. The title of Paolo Ramos’s book reveals its bias: Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for America. From the outset readers are given to understand that Latinos in the United States who do not vote for Democrats are not only on the “Far Right”; they are also defectors. Defectors from what? Who is setting the standard here?
The same implied standard often shows up in media coverage of U.S. Latinos. To offer another example, when Eli Valentin, founder of the Institute for Latino Politics and Policy, was interviewed on the Commonweal Podcast in 2022, he argued that one of the factors contributing to the right-wing turn of U.S. Latinos was the conversion of many Catholic Latinos to Evangelical Christianity. He claimed that these conversions were the result of “colonization.” The possibility that many Latinos found in Evangelical churches something life-giving—a closer connection to Jesus Christ, say—was not entertained. No, it must have been Yankee colonialism. (If a Catholic Latino becomes a Buddhist, is that colonialism too? What if he becomes a Marxist?) Again, the assumption is that under normal conditions Latinos are progressive Catholic Democrats. If they become Evangelical or vote Republican, it means they’ve been swayed by some nefarious influence. It could be colonialism, as Valentin claims, or it could be Paola Ramos’s “tribalism, tradition, and trauma.” The important thing is to understand that Latino voters have had their judgment warped by social or psychic forces beyond their control. They are not agents, but the playthings of a poisoned history.
I have never voted for Trump. I don’t trust him. I don’t like how he scapegoats undocumented migrants, who are among the most hard-working and vulnerable people in the United States. I protested the child-separation policy in 2018 and plan on doing so again if it is reinstated.
That said, I refuse to believe that everyone who disagrees with me is pathological, a victim of trauma, tribalism, or an evil tradition. Or rather, I do not believe that Latinos are any more influenced by those things than anyone else, or that they are less capable of transcending those things. It’s a matter of respect. A few years ago I had a conversation with a middle-aged Ecuadorian man who supported Trump. “Do you think he was being racist when he referred to immigrants from south of the border as ‘rapists’?” I asked. “Yes,” the man responded. “Are you offended?” I asked. “No,” he answered.
So why did that guy vote for Trump? Even after our discussion, I’m not sure. You couldn’t say he didn’t care about racism—he was certainly angry about the racism of a white restaurant owner he told me about, who paid the undocumented Latino employees less than the white people working in his kitchen. Maybe my Ecuadorian friend voted for Trump because he was a small-business owner, and small-business owners tend to want lower taxes. Or maybe he believed that Trump would protect “Christian values” as that man understands them. Whatever his reasons, I am sure they were not simply the pathologies of a toxic Latino culture.
Ramos and Baldelomar speak as if Latino identity were currently diseased. But our history, while indeed plagued by some bad ideas, is also full of antibodies. Ramos and Baldelomar seem to think that traditional Christian morality is an inspiration for intolerance and extremist politics. But for the majority of churchgoing Latinos, Christian morality means decency, love, and sacrifice. Nor is the traditional Christian morality of Latino cultures incompatible with tolerance or puritanical about sex, as their dance and music testify. Likewise with race. Racism and “colorism” certainly exist in Latino communities. They have their roots in the Reconquista and the subsequent Spanish mania for “blue blood” purity. (You can always find a Latino who proudly claims to have a 100-percent-European heritage—a statistically unlikely claim). But that purity is fake. Ethnic homogeneity is an illusion. Latinos have known this at least since the nineteenth century, when Simón Bolívar proclaimed that Latinos are a mixed race, and that even the Spaniards are no longer a purely European people but have been transformed by their encounter with Amerindians in 1492. As early as the sixteenth century, the Peruvian writer Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was proudly declaring himself a “mixture of both nations,” Spanish and Amerinidian, “and I am honored by it.”
I don’t like the trend of reformulating Latino identity in order to make it something more politically palatable, or “problematizing” it when it fails to behave as some hoped it would. For a while, this trend included trying to replace “Latino” with “Latinx,” even though the -nx phoneme does not exist in Spanish, and even though it is generally bad form to tell people how they should refer to themselves. The trend still involves defining Latin American civilization in passive terms, as if the most important thing about it were its relationship to European colonialism—as if Latin American nations hadn’t also engaged in imperialism, or started wars of their own. The trend includes asking questions like, “How far can the colonized mind bend?” As if Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, born in a Spanish colony, were not one of the greatest poets in world literature. As if the Christians of colonial New Spain could not fathom the significance of Our Lady speaking in both Nahuatl and Spanish. As if Hispanic civilization were not just as rich and vast and various as Anglo-Saxon civilization, with all the good and bad that implies. How far can the colonized mind bend? As far, history tells us, as any other kind of mind.
