What’s The Deal With The Latine Vote?
The diverse Latine experience, shaped by factors like immigration status, race and class, is too often oversimplified—both by outsiders and within our own communities.
Briana L. Ureña-Ravelo
Latine support for Trump surged in the recent election, with 46% of Latine voters casting their ballot for the former president. This marks a 14% increase from the 2020 election, where Trump picked up 32% of the Latine vote. These numbers are all that most pundits, pontificators and horrified spectators can talk about — and they seem particularly fascinated by the fact that one of Trump’s strongest sources of support came from Latine men, 55% of whom voted for him.
These numbers have also taken many within Latine communities by surprise, with an ensuing chorus of conversations wanting to understand or offer explanations for the why of it all. Many Latine people are now explaining just how much everyone got wrong about our communities, but even the conversations about Latine politics led by us can be insufficient — primarily because of a misguided sense of “our” community.
It’s easy to say that it’s just outsiders who “don’t get” us, but we vastly misunderstand and mischaracterize ourselves, over and underestimating our politics within the U.S. political and social paradigm.
This summer, I attended a progressive Latine organization’s offsite Democratic National Convention event at a bar in Chicago. The event featured a panel and musical performance. Present were the who’s who of young, progressive Latine politics and nonprofit community organizing, including journalists, area aldermen, politicians and progressive career people. I was truly astonished at how out of touch most present seemed to be about the upcoming elections and the politics of Latine people. They danced around the topic of Trump support or otherwise waved it away as “our people” being “fooled.” They made no mention of the tensions that are growing between long-term Latine people in the U.S. and newly arrived Venezuelan migrants, which I thought was irresponsible. Were they not seeing the same reports and footage I was of increasing antagonism from Mexicans toward incoming Central American, Venezuelan and Haitian migrants, both stateside and abroad? One panelist suggested that ads targeting the Latine vote should have “our music in it.” It all felt infantilizing and condescending — and there was no plan to tackle the increasing wave of right-wing and fascist politics in our communities.
It’s important to note that Democrats ran a campaign like they wanted to sorely lose with Latine voters. For further insights, I reached out to Latine people in communities particularly versed and affected by the rhetoric and policy of the Republican and Democratic parties, and those who are all too familiar with anti-Blackness within the Latine community.
Caroline Cotto, a queer West Indian woman from Puerto Rico, is a sociology and psychology major with an academic focus on undocuqueer politics. She told me that while Trump has been “explicitly racist, sexist and xenophobic,” it’s also worth noting that Vice President Kamala Harris showed little interest in the well-being of marginalized communities while running for president. Cotto cited how candidates’ messages shift between their campaigns and their actual policies once in office. As one example, President Joe Biden and Harris promised to usher in a “fair, orderly and humane immigration system.” Not long after, Harris traveled to Central America and told Guatemalans, “I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come.”
Regarding the role faith and religion play in the vote, Evangelicals are a large mobilizing base, and some have claimed their influence among the Latine community. It’s true that Evangelicalism is becoming increasingly prevalent among the Latine community, and evangelical and fundamentalist Protestantism is the backbone of the Republican party. But this type of Christianity only accounts for a fraction of Latine voters, so while this is a growing political force, it isn’t the primary one. Catholicism still plays a major role in the lives of the Latine community, which shapes views on abortion and LGBTQIA+ issues. While having colonial European roots, the hierarchal faith and its veneration-based traditions are still largely embraced, and these long-held bastions are not to be torn down.
Ja’Loni Amor Owens, a Black lesbian Latine person of Puerto Rican descent, is a Muslim feminist writer, lawyer and community care worker. They said it’s important to understand that Latin America’s history of colonialism has spread Christian nationalist ideologies that are now deeply embedded in many Latine communities.
“Right-wing politics in the U.S. reflect the traditionalism and patriarchy that many Latines grew up around and still see as ‘community,’” Owens said. “This reality means some white Latine find that right-wing politics are familiar and affirming. The Christo-fascist tendencies of the Republican Party, which includes anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-trans and anti-abortion at its foundation, are always more appealing.”
This is why Democrats ran on a reactionary, dismissive and out-of-touch center-right platform that prioritized appealing to conservatives while ignoring the demands and needs of many in the Latine community. The fallout for that is on Democrats. The Latine vote did play a crucial role in Trump’s victory, but we also need to talk about the state of politics within the community beyond what happens at the ballot every four years.
First, who are Latine people? We are not one culture, community, people, race, tribal affiliation, class or documentation status, and there is vast diversity within these and other categories. Yet when we pay lip service to the Latine community, by and large, we are talking about a simplified light, non-Native, non-Black, white and Mestizo monolith living in major coastal or border cities, ascribing their experiences onto everyone else. In recent years, there’s been a bigger push to talk about these differences, often led by Black and Indigenous members of the Latine community, but nothing seems to change and here we are again being discussed as a monolith. The variety here and in our home countries, including class, country of origin, immigration status, race, skin color, casta and class positions, lend to our experiences. But these experiences are too often reduced to simplified caricatures — not just by outsiders, but by us, too.
Our experiences with state violence and systemic oppression predate our families coming to the U.S. Whiteness and national indoctrination also start in our home countries long before we get here. There is a misconception I’ve heard parroted by many Latine people that race is “an American thing,” that “we don’t do race” like Americans do. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Latine people come from colonized, Catholic-majority countries with deeply rooted casta systems, horrific track records on femicide, some of the most restrictive abortion laws on the books, assimilationist policies of mestizaje, denaturalization laws most notoriously seen in the Dominican Republic against Dominicans of Haitian descent, legacies of slavery that in some cases continue today, political violence against land defenders, dispossession, sexual violence and genocide enacted against Black and Indigenous communities. In short, we come here ready-made for MAGA. The racism and bigotries of Latine communities are deeply rooted in our colonial histories. Race, anti-Blackness and whiteness are not new concepts to us just because the language around these subjects might differ.
According to Dash Harris Machado, a Panama City-based public historian, documentarian, producer, facilitator and founder of AfroLatinx Travel, Latine far-right, fascist, racist nationalistic, xenophobic, religious and chauvinistic conservatism was first established in Latin America in the late 1400s — and it “fits neatly” within the U.S.
“The indoctrination is a seamless, borderless racial contract of white-Christo-fascism that bizarrely gets obscured and begged off as something uniquely U.S. when these beliefs are daily bread in Latin America,” Harris Machado said.
As conversations around the Latine vote continue to unfold, many in the community are explaining away the problem by taking the 2016 class reductionist route: Our communities have been some of the hardest hit by the economic downturn, and “economic anxiety” is what led many to vote Republican. While it’s true that we are experiencing higher unemployment rates than the national average, African Americans are experiencing an even higher unemployment rate. They also experience generational structural violence and inequality due to their unique history with the U.S. and because anti-Blackness is enshrined in every aspect of American life — the worst of which is felt by African American women. Yet this heightened economic anxiety did not cause them to vote Republican.
All of these complicated and sometimes competing facets of our identities need to be taken seriously to understand the powerful grasp of right-wing politics on the Latine community. And we must resist the desire to act protective and shroud and apologize for an increasingly problematic reactionary and racist political base. It’s not as simple as “Latine people want to become white and assimilate.” It is that many are merely expressing beliefs and politics they have always had and flexing social power they have always had access to.
Editor’s note: This article uses the term “Latine” in accordance with the author’s preference, rather than “Latinx” or “Latino” which is typically used in our publication.
This story was originally published in English at Prism. Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color, reporting from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.
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Briana L. Ureña-Ravelo is an educator, organizer, cultural critic and semi-retired punk scenester from Michigan, currently based in the West Side of Chicago. Her interests include the Midwest, Afro-Latine culture and history, Black and Indigenous resistance and futures, abolition, sweets, DIY music scenes and her cat.
