The morning after the election, my social-media feed was flooded with posts expressing shock and dismay over Donald Trump’s return to office. But there was also relief and joy, and even celebration over what some hailed as a victory for Christianity. Many of those celebratory posts came from Latinos, including some of my own family members. 

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. The Trump campaign capitalized on the opportunity to reach groups of voters that Democratic leaders and strategists have taken for granted. Latinos, we now know, are one such group. 

But I understand why many would be surprised. Trump campaigned on promises of mass deportation, and he persisted in indiscriminately labeling immigrants as criminals; at one of his rallies, Puerto Rico was referred to as a “floating island of garbage.” In spite of that, Trump made gains among Latino voters of almost 12 percent over 2020, with close to 42 percent of Latinos voting for him this time around. 

But the idea of a “Latino Red Wave” obscures some important nuances. Out of all Latino groups in the United States, only Cuban Americans voted over 50 percent for Trump. This is unsurprising, given that community’s historically strong affiliation with a party that consistently decries communism and socialism. (Growing up in Hialeah, Florida, I often heard people  parroting phrases like “Democrats will destroy democracy because they are communists,” or “our American values are under attack from a godless socialist party.”) Mexican Americans—the largest group of U.S. Latinos—gave Trump 33 percent of their votes, while Puerto Ricans gave him close to 37 percent. So it would be misleading to claim that the majority of U.S. Latinos support the president-elect. Nonetheless, Latinos, especially men, seem to be shifting toward the right over the past three elections. About 46 percent of Latino men supported Trump, whose strongman rhetoric and braggadocio (the “macho effect”) may explain his appeal among not just Latino males but men of other ethnic and racial groups in general. 

Why would Latinos vote for someone who seems to despise them? Political pundits mainly point to the economy. But while the economy was a major concern for Latino voters, there is much more complexity to the Latino electorate—and to Latino identity. In her insightful book Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for America, journalist Paola Ramos challenges the narratives that she claims have obscured the often contradictory ways Latinos understand themselves. “This is not a book about the ‘Latino vote,’” she writes. “It is about how mythologies about Latino identity ignore the very real political and cultural changes brought about by the MAGA movement’s efforts to court Latinos. Left unexamined, these changes are causing a ripple effect, exacerbating the crisis of American democracy.” Dispelling myths, especially those about what we understand as “identity,” means confronting inconvenient facts.

Ramos draws attention to three overarching influences that contribute to increased Latino affiliation with alt-right extremism: tribalism, tradition, and trauma. She fleshes each of them out in sections centered around interviews with Latinos engaged in the kinds of activities usually associated with white supremacists or xenophobes. 

The section on tribalism makes clear how some Latinos internalize racism and discrimination. Ramos interviews a Mexican American border vigilante in Texas, a staunch Latino defender of colonial Spanish monuments in New Mexico, and an Afro-Latina hairdresser in the Bronx who harbors anti-Black views. Though each identifies as Hispanic, none seems to identify with immigrants or with Afro-Latinos. Ramos suggests that self-hatred may play a role here, which can compel some people to commit to the mores and markers of a nationalistic tribe in order to relieve it; by purging their racial markers, they can attempt to approximate whiteness in an effort to assimilate. Narratives of Latino mestizaje (mixed race), according to Ramos, tend to exalt Spanish ancestry and denigrate Indigenous roots. This is something else I remember from growing up in Hialeah, where it wasn’t uncommon to hear racist remarks about Blacks or los indios (“Indians”) in the grocery line or on the school playground. And it’s not hard to see how regular exposure to such rhetoric—without it being countered by education or solid social support—could sow shame and anger over skin color and ancestry. 

“It’s clear that Latinos, too, can be white supremacists,” Ramos writes. “We can espouse and push principles, systems, and beliefs that uphold racial hierarchies and preserve structural racism.” Not all Latinos are anti-racist and anti-oppression, though Ramos does believe that the vast majority of Latinos “are driven by a desire for social justice and equality.”

The robust section on traditionalism “focuses on how our conservative moral values, coupled with colonialism, affect our role in the Christian, culture, and information wars.” As is true of the wider U.S. population, Latinos are susceptible to simplistic us-versus-them rhetoric, particularly when accompanied or amplified by disinformation. Slogans like “taking the country back for God” and “Make America Godly Again,” rooted in Christian nationalist paranoia, reinforce the notion that progressive “wokeness” is a moral threat that leads to godlessness. This is in keeping with white Evangelical culture wars of the past: communists, hippies, gays, satanists, immigrants, and feminists have all been targeted in the battle between good and evil. Our “Christian nation founded on Christian principles” serves as a useful construct in advancing a conservative fundamentalist version of the faith that opposes abortion and LGBTQ+ rights and that is hostile to non-Christian immigrants. At stake for what is called “God’s Army” is nothing less than America’s national identity.

Ramos underscores the centrality of Latinos to U.S. Evangelicalism. “From high conversion rates [from Catholicism] to high levels of religiosity to the unique significance of faith in our cultures, Latinos are some of the most effective recruits for Christian nationalists,” she writes. It’s worth remembering that the “Evangelicals for Trump” campaign was launched from an Evangelical megachurch in Miami led by a conservative Central American pastor.  

In perhaps her most personal chapter, Ramos discusses how even progressive Latinos struggle to accept the LGBTQ+ community. Dominant sociological and theological narratives portray Latinos––like their white Evangelical counterparts––as favoring traditional, patriarchal family arrangements. The family structure is particularly important for Latinos, Ramos argues, since “the colonial patriarchal system––with its rigid, fixed, and binary norms––has offered countless Latinos in the U.S. a minimal sense of order and power.” The home thus becomes the place where Christian values and morals are preserved. 

But nothing threatens this sense of control, order, and power within the home more than transgender people. And in a media-cultural environment where popular podcasters like Joe Rogan equate trans rights with a “collapsing civilization” or Moms for Liberty decry gender-affirming care as unholy, anti-transgender ideology can spread from conservative Christianity even to liberal-minded Latinos. (A Miami-based Latina member of Moms for Liberty has advocated for putting LGBTQ+ schoolchildren into separate classrooms.) “Transgender people seem to have aroused a type of moral panic and visceral disgust that has propelled a segment of Latinos to join forces with an American far right that is unleashing some of this country’s darkest, most violent, and hateful forces,” Ramos writes. Threats to gender-binary paradigms and “traditional” family values are a major, if still underexplored, reason for religiously inclined or Evangelical Latinos to adopt alt-right ideologies and politics. 

The sense of stability is further threatened by fears that the United States will follow along the path of Latin American countries racked by decades of political upheaval. Many Latinos, Ramos writes, worry about the U.S. becoming a failed state, and believe that only a swaggering, confident strongman can ensure the preservation of a capitalist society underpinned by traditional Christian morals and values. Ramos argues that they’re willing to accept that “the promises of autocracy at times outweigh those of democracy.” (This might explain the popularity of, for example, Salvadoran strongman President Nayib Bukele, known for extreme zero-tolerance policies.) 

As Defectors makes clear, the reasons for Latinos’ defection to alt-right movements and ideologies are complex and intertwined. But the common thread is the history of colonization and its psychic and emotional toll on Latinos. “How far can the colonized mind bend?” wonders Ramos. The book concludes by noting that “to be Latino in America means that we embody histories and forces that make us susceptible to being colonizers despite having ourselves been colonized. But we don’t have to succumb to that impulse.” 

I agree. A major form of resistance to the colonizer impulse is to revisit traditional narratives about what it means to be Latino in the first place. Latino identities are complex, layered, and influenced by colonization, the specter of white supremacy, strict understandings of gender binaries, and the privileging of heterosexuality and the traditional family. Unlearning hatred and cultivating self-love is the task before us. We Latinos must start complicating our identities, moving beyond the scripts already grafted to us even by our own communities and traditions. 

Ramos highlights the courage of transgender people. Despite living in a society that tells them who they must be, transgender individuals seek to be otherwise in an effort to write and live their own stories one day at a time. Complexity is a hard sell for political parties that bank on simple binaries of good-versus-bad, us-versus-them. If Latinos can teach this country anything, it’s that there is no singular Latino identity or any one narrative that can capture lives neatly. Once the majority of Latinos themselves recognize and celebrate this, the prospect of unprecedented unity in diversity might emerge, truly shifting the political, social, and religious narratives of this country in unforeseen, complex ways.

Defectors
The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for America
Paola Ramos
Pantheon
$28 | 256 pp.