Another headline about Latinos supporting Trump, another moment for hard truths

Mi gente, and I mean all of you — those who welcome with delight the plethora of headlines about Donald Trump’s gains with Latino voters, and those who despair when seeing them — we gotta talk.

The positive side of all those headlines and stories: we Latinos are increasingly civically engaged, and the news organizations that too infrequently notice us at all are paying attention now.

On the negative side of all those headlines and stories: underlying them is an annoying paternalism. “What could Latinos possibly be thinking?” Or, “They are voting against their own interests!”

As if we Latinos (who can’t agree on which Spanish word to use for cake) should be an uncomplicated political monolith, just to make it easier to flatten us into a two-dimensional photo to be looked at every four years.

As if, respectfully, we aren’t allowed to be as wrongheaded in our choices as the next demographic.

Yes, the increase in Trump support among Latinos is newsworthy, but let’s not get it twisted.

Whether Trump gets elected is going to hinge less on the Latino share of the vote (we are 14.7% of all eligible voters) than on the largest single group of voters in the nation, which constitutes 40% of the electorate: white women. In 2016, 54% of white women voted for Trump, and in 2020, 55% did (according to a 2021 Pew examination of the 2020 electorate). Perhaps a raft of headlines about that are in order …

But back to us, mi gente.

Why are some of us voting for Trump — a politician who has deliberately and incessantly dehumanized immigrants by describing them as animals, poisoning the blood of the country, and genetically predisposed to commit crimes — when some 38% of us are immigrants ourselves, and another 34% of us are either second generation or the U.S.-born child of at least one immigrant parent?

This is exactly how authoritarians lay the groundwork for atrocious policies to follow.

I mean, remember, Trump has promised to enact mass deportations, and he has made it clear that this applies to even immigrants legally residing here under Temporary Protected Status (which includes everyone from Afghans to Ukrainians). He has also recently pledged to use the same law to change citizens into noncitizens that was used to create incarceration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II — so really, none of the 72% of Latinos I mentioned before should think of themselves as beyond reach.

Are we OK with having our parents and grandparents, our neighbors and the co-congregants at our houses of worship — many of them survivors of life under repressive or authoritarian regimes, or people who moved here to escape violence — worry that they will be marked as a nebulous existential threat to the nation just because of an immigration status that, even if legal, has made them “other” and disposable in a politician’s twisted definition of America?

My own parents (my father a U.S. citizen, my mother a Guatemalan) moved here from Guatemala after our family was personally impacted by the horrific goings-on of the 36-year undeclared civil war there, and honest to God, the marks of that continue to be present for me — even as a U.S. citizen from birth and after decades of living in the U.S. Were my mother alive today, I would do everything in my power to make sure that any politician who called her names, tried to zero her worth in her neighbors’ eyes, and threatened to send her away was relegated to the dustbin of history.

But maybe it’s the remaining 28% of Latinos — U.S.-born, whose parents or grandparents, etc., were also U.S.-born and therefore much further removed from the immigrant story — who are the supporters of virulently anti-immigrant politicians? That would be a narratively satisfying explanation, right? Except we all know the hard truth: We’ve also heard anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from Latinos who don’t have the generational remove as an excuse.

An explanation, of sorts, comes via journalist Russell Contreras, currently with Axios, who reports that status may be what motivates anti-immigrant Latinos, by highlighting the theory of “Latinx Immigrant Resentment” (LIR). The theory, which seems to have first been named as such by the political scientist Flavio Rogerio Hickel Jr. in the spring 2024 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, posits that Latino support for anti-immigrant candidates stems from the blame they place on immigrants for how the “status” of the Latino community has been devalued. To distinguish themselves from immigrants, the theory explains, they will ally themselves with those using anti-immigrant language and proposing the harshest immigration restrictions.

It is uncomfortable to contemplate what LIR means. Without question, anti-immigration rhetoric has long been racialized. For decades, non-Latinos have indiscriminately elided “Latino” with “undocumented immigrant” or “foreign,” regardless of actual identity or citizenship status. My daughter, born in Hamilton, N.Y., still remembers having an 11-year-old classmate taunt her as “an illegal” when he learned she had Guatemalan and Mexican ancestors. Puerto Ricans routinely are asked to present their passports when going to renew their driver’s licenses or renting cars — because their fellow citizens assume them to be foreign by mere virtue of being Latinos.

» READ MORE: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. This is a recording. | Helen Ubiñas

Racialized immigration rhetoric has done a number on our sense of self-worth as Latinos. In 2018, a University of Colorado professor conducted research on how the racially and culturally offensive rhetoric during the 2016 election affected first-generation Latino undergrads. What he found was that there was a statistically significant impact on their self-esteem.

The rhetoric also obscures the reality of the colorism and racism Latinos experience here in the U.S. And, as made explicit in the theory of LIR, the rhetoric has prompted some Latinos to lean into the internalized colorism and racism we’ve learned both here and in Latin America, to make the argument that we are so distinct from the immigrants Trump reviles that nobody could possibly confuse the two. Beyond being deeply distasteful, that last rationale is right out of fantasyland. Once the immigration dystopia is in place, it’s game over, no matter how you parse it.

If you were an alien — and by that I mean a sentient being from another part of the universe — and you set down on Earth during this electoral season, you would have a hard time understanding that the “illegals” Trump and the Republican Party politicos have harped about incessantly in political ads are actually our fellow human beings — and that they contribute to the nation in myriad important and incontestable ways.

» READ MORE: The Trump Threat | An occasional series by The Inquirer Editorial Board about the risk posed by a second Donald Trump presidency.

This is exactly how authoritarians lay the groundwork for atrocious policies to follow. I know, I know — you’re all tired of hearing that comparison, but unfortunately for me, I can’t unsee the signs. I was a kid who lived through a succession of authoritarian “mano dura” regimes who sold themselves to otherwise decent people in exactly the ways we’re seeing now.

The hardest truth to accept, mi gente, is that authoritarians and wannabe authoritarians will try to sell themselves to you by talking of things that are actual worries and concerns — like the economy — and blame it on someone, preferably someone who has little power and even fewer protections. Then, they stoke our vanities by assuring us they don’t mean us — even as they escalate and widen ripples in the blame game they’ve been playing. In the end, the only people who aren’t caught in the destructive power of those ripples are the authoritarians themselves.

Historian Timothy Snyder, who knows a thing or two about tyranny, warns: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. Individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.”

Mi gente, despite the headlines, let’s make sure that isn’t us.