NPR
As we head toward another presidential election, we’re seeing a shift in the politics of American Latinos – believe it or not – to the far right. Now, a Latino immigrant being a white supremacist might sound antithetical, right? And yet there are a lot of examples of exactly that – people like Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the Proud Boys and one of the masterminds behind the insurrection on January 6, or Mauricio Garcia, a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi sympathizer who shot and killed eight people at a mall in Allen, Texas.
And while these men are extreme, violent examples, their stories do reflect a real shift. I mean, over the last eight years, I’ve watched many of my own family go from rarely talking about politics to wearing MAGA hats and attending Trump rallies. And it’s Trump-supporting Latinos that some pollsters believe could decide this election. So how did we get here? Mexican Cuban American journalist and author Paola Ramos believes the answer has been right in front of us all along.
PAOLA RAMOS: We’re staring at a Latino voting bloc that is so fundamentally different from what it was 30 years ago.
LIZARRAGA: That’s the subject of her new book, “Defectors: The Rise Of The Latino Far Right And What It Means For America.”
RAMOS: You’re staring at a bloc that now feels a permission to sort of speak and act and be whomever they want to be. And at times, you know, what I find in the book is that that, at times, aligns more with white America than with sort of our idea of brown America.
LIZARRAGA: Today we’re unpacking what’s behind the rise of conservative Latinos in this country and how that’s changing the face of the far right.
Paola Ramos is an author and award-winning journalist. While reporting across the country over the course of the last two presidential elections, Paola has been fixated on trying to understand one story in particular – the political and cultural changes that have led more and more U.S. Latinos to the far right. And that’s the focus she writes about in her new book, “Defectors.”
RAMOS: So the definition of defection, you know, in essence, is this idea of an abandonment of loyalty, you know, an abandonment of a presumed solidarity to a certain group. And I think when I think about Democratic politics, it is based on this idea that, you know, Latinos have this fundamental loyalty to each other as a community, as a voting bloc and as one. You know, it’s kind of based on this, like, linked fate phenomenon, which argues that, you know, members of the same sort of ethno-racial group, of the same background will naturally feel compelled to sort of support one another.
And I think in many ways, that’s the way in the framing that a lot of folks have understood the Black vote. You know, there’s a reason why the Black vote is so unified, you know, and is walking in the same line side by side. And so, you know, part of the idea of this book is that, actually, part of the story of being Latino has always been this temptation to defect, you know?
And I think part of that temptation is because to understand us, you know, to understand our history, is to understand that, yes, we’re there for each other and, yes, we’re a community. And you can argue that we’re – you know, that the solidarity is strong. But to understand this also is to know and to recognize that as Latinos, we have this temptation to buy into, like, American individualism, you know, and advance our beliefs in ways that intersect with whiteness, in ways that intersect with Christianity, in ways that intersect with capitalism.
And so the art of defecting has always been part of us. You know, this temptation to, you know, let me go where, like, the white power is – we’ve been doing that, you know? Let me go with, like, where Christian nationalism is. Let me do that, you know? Let me sort conform to the majority even though I feel like I’m in the minority. Let me do that. And so it’s kind of this, like, dance that we’ve all sort of done. And I say us because I’ve been guilty of that as well in my own personal life, you know, of trying to sort of assimilate and go to where white people are because I always…
LIZARRAGA: (Speaking Spanish).
RAMOS: (Speaking Spanish), no? Yeah.
LIZARRAGA: (Speaking Spanish).
RAMOS: (Speaking Spanish). It’s part of what it means to be Latino in this country.
LIZARRAGA: So before journalism, Paola, your career was in politics. So tell me about what brought you here, to writing this book.
RAMOS: The idea originated, really, in 2016. And so back then, I was a staffer for the Clinton campaign. My fancy title back then was deputy director of Hispanic press. And so it was this idea that, in front of someone like Donald Trump – you know, someone that was saying that people that were coming from Mexico were criminals and rapists – in the face of someone like him, the theory of Democratic politics was that Latinos would sort of rise in these, like, unprecedented numbers. And that wasn’t the case, right? You see that less than 50% of Latinos actually showed up to vote, and then you fast-forward to 2020. You see then suddenly that Donald Trump does between eight to 10 points better with Latino voters in 2020 than he does in 2016.
And so part of the idea behind “Defectors” was understanding what was at this heart, you know, of this very small but growing group of Latinos that found something appealing in Trumpism and in the far right and some folks even in extremism. And so it was an attempt to sort of undo, you know, a lot of these lessons that I had learned in Democratic politics and get to the hard questions of, what is this rightward shift really about?
LIZARRAGA: Yeah. Your book is also about understanding that shift, like, not just what’s behind it but also what’s being said or revealed through that shift. Can you talk about what you uncovered through this reporting?
RAMOS: Absolutely. So I think the easier way to analyze an alleged rightward shift among Latinos is to say, well, and that’s the product of Trumpism, you know, and that’s the product of politics. And so kind of what I find in “Defectors” and what I find through my research and the conversations is that politics is not enough to sort of get us to the root of the rightward shift.
I think the hard work is in understanding that what is happening is a consequence of the psychological forces, the historic forces, the cultural forces that many Latinos carry with them in this country. And what I mean by that is understanding that as U.S. Latinos, we carry the weight of a lot of racial baggage from Latin America and a lot of baggage of what it has meant to have the sort of colonized mindset and a lot of baggage of the political trauma. And none of that manifests neatly at all in American politics.
I think for many years, you could argue – and we see, you know, the way that Latinos really much align with Democratic politics. But now we’re staring at a Latino voting bloc that is so fundamentally different from what it was 30 years ago, right? I mean, right now we’re staring at a voting bloc where third-generation Latinos are the fastest-growing segment within Latinos. And so you’re staring at a bloc that now feels the permission to sort of speak and act and be whomever they want to be.
And at times – you know, what I find in the book is that that, at times, aligns more with white America than with sort of our idea of brown America. You know? And so it’s less about the politics, you know, and more about the, like – understanding the really, at times, painful history, you know, that I think we don’t do a good job in politics. And even culturally, like, even among our families, to understand, like, what does it mean to have come from families where, like, caste systems were, like, implemented and ingrained, you know, where being gay was not permitted for so many years, where there’s all these taboos, where fleeing communism carries a kind of trauma – like, what does all of that mean?
LIZARRAGA: Yeah. So I do want to get into some of the identity issues behind this movement and some of the people you spoke to who really characterize this identity struggle, whether they realize it or not. You start your book with a man named Anthony Aguero.
RAMOS: So yes. So, like, Anthony Aguero, for the listeners that don’t know who he is – so Anthony Aguero – right now, if you go to the southern border, you go to Texas, you go to Arizona – and he’s a guy that – he’s in his 30s. You know, he sort of drives up and down, obsessively, the southern border, typically with a selfie stick and his phone, a small camera, a GoPro. And what he does during the days is essentially do many livestreams of himself, as you said, Lori, like, patrolling the border, and in that is essentially obsessively trying to capture migrants and asylum-seekers that are crossing the border. And you can find his livestreams on YouTube. For many years, they were on Facebook. They deplatformed him.
LIZARRAGA: Oh.
RAMOS: Now he’s on Telegram. He’s on Rumble. And sometimes he goes on Twitter, many times under this sort of label of Border Network News. And so he basically just spends every single day at the border, just trying to capture this. Now, what is driving his obsession is this idea – and I spent time with him. I spent a whole day sort of, you know, doing that journey with him.
And what drives his obsession is this idea that there is a, quote, unquote, “invasion at the southern border,” you know, and that he fundamentally believes that the asylum-seekers that are coming into the United States are a threat to the country. He believes that particularly migrant men – which is really what he’s really fixated on – that migrant men are posing a threat, you know, that there’s a sort of leniency to be criminals among them. And so that is kind of what his content captures. He’s also – was very famous because he did – he helped Marjorie Taylor Greene do a tour and Laura Loomer do a tour of the border. And so he’s someone that Republicans have also, like, tapped into as sort of their eyes on the ground.
LIZARRAGA: He’s such a prime example of how, like, so many of the people you spoke to, descendants of immigrants – how they can so quickly take on this anti-immigrant rhetoric and politics of the far right. And in your book, you argue that this progression is actually kind of perfectly logical. Can you explain that?
RAMOS: Yeah. I mean, what’s interesting about an Anthony Aguero is, to your point, like, he comes from an immigrant family. You know, when you talk to him in English and in Spanish and in Spanglish, like, he has a frontera accent. He’s a brown man. And then when you dig deeper into it, you start to unpack, like, why he has really, really leaned into this far-right, anti-immigrant rhetoric. And part of that fixation is trying to kind of, like, tell white America that he, too, belongs, you know, that he’s not one of them. He’s not them.
LIZARRAGA: To create the distance and keep the distance.
RAMOS: Exactly. And so I think what’s interesting about Anthony – it reflects the moment that we’re in. There’s a lot of Latinos out there that are warming up to the idea of mass deportations and they’re warming up to the idea of building a wall. And Anthony is a reflection of the way that, like, Latinos have changed, right? Right now, I mean, he’s first-, second-generation Mexican American. Like I said before, like, it is third-generation Latinos, right? It is the children and the grandchildren of immigrants that are the fastest-growing segment of Latinos. And what that means – if you just are even thinking about the, like, Latino, like, voting bloc, what that means is that the majority of Latinos here are U.S.-born. They’re under the age of 50, and they don’t speak Spanish. They’re speaking English.
And so there is this detachment from themselves and sort of their immigrant stories. The fear among some Latinos is that white America will continue to look at them as these perpetual foreigners in the country. There is this fear that they will always be lumped into, like, the immigrants and the asylum-seekers. And part of that anti-immigrant sentiment is real. Like, if you look at the research that’s out there – and there’s, like, multiple surveys, including some from, like, Cambridge University, that show that as the rise of Mexican immigration increases in certain counties, white people’s attitudes towards Black people becomes more positive and their attitudes towards Latinos, their Latino neighbors, becomes more negative.
LIZARRAGA: Wow.
RAMOS: You know? And so, you know, it’s not to justify at all, but is at least to get us to understand where it all comes from, and it is to prove a belonging. And part of – sometimes it leads people like Anthony Aguero towards nativism and extremism.
LIZARRAGA: Right. And it feels like that’s what Republicans are tapping into.
RAMOS: Exactly, because what Trump does very brilliantly is that. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, like, lately in his ads – you know, it used to be in 2016 and in 2020 the way to target Latinos were Latinos for Trump. And now he changed it. Now it’s Latino Americans for Trump. And so what Trump is so convinced about is that Latinos have assimilated so much that they, too, can tap into the nativism and that they, too, can tap into the anti-immigrant sentiment.
And that’s why that keyword, Latino Americans for Trump, is so targeted, you know – because it kind of gives some Latinos the permission, the illusion that they too are part of white America and that by belonging to Trumpism, they get to do something that is so powerful, and that is to otherize others, you know, and to point fingers at the border, to point fingers at the other brown people, at the other asylum seekers and to, again, sort of believe in the illusion that Trumpism accepts them.
LIZARRAGA: I am curious. Let’s talk about the numbers. What other stats reiterate the story that you’re telling about this alignment and about this shift to the far right?
RAMOS: Yeah. So I’m thinking of the election. So right now if you look at the polls and – you do get a sense that Trump will continue to do slightly better with Latinos. And I want to be super-clear, right? Like, when we’re talking about the November election, there really is almost no scenario in which Donald Trump wins the Latino vote, right? Like, that’s not kind of what the story is about. The story is about the inroads – the very small inroads that someone like Donald Trump is and will continue to be making with Latinos. And poll after poll does indicate that he will be somewhere between 38% and 40% of the vote, and that someone like Vice President Kamala Harris will barely meet the 60% threshold.
And, again, I just want to ground us in, like, what this means because what’s kind of, like, my fixation is that, like, Latinos were supposed to be the heart of the Democratic Party’s future. And here we are, facing a completely different scenario that is at least forcing us to challenge that – that it is 30- to 40% in Trump’s side in November. It is a Latino electorate that is warming up to mass deportations. It is a country that is warming up to these conspiracy theories. You have Republicans where nearly 50% of Republicans – and that, too, includes Latinos – where nearly 50% of Republicans believe in The Great Replacement theory.
You know, you have over 40% of Americans across the aisle, across ethnicities, that believe that newcomers, quote-unquote, “are fundamental threats to the United States.” You know, you have Americans across this country falsely believing that immigrants and undocumented folks are here to vote illegally. And so part of the story, too, is that, you know, as Latinos, we’re not immune to that. We, too, are partaking in those conversations. And I think the interesting thing is what we’re about to witness, you know, in this election. We’ll see where those numbers take us.
LIZARRAGA: Coming up, we ask Paola Ramos about the next generation of Latino voters.
RAMOS: We don’t know what it means to now be a third-generation Latino – hold power in this country, speaking in Spanish, listening to Bad Bunny, like, demanding more power from Democrats, like, you know, being queer and Latino. Like, we don’t know.
LIZARRAGA: Stay with us.
Lori – just Lori – CODE SWITCH.
Paola Ramos has been studying Latinos as a voter bloc for years. As someone who started her career working in Democratic politics, she’s watched as Latino American voters have been courted and won over by the far-right politics characterized by the MAGA movement. Her new book digs into why this shift is happening. And what she found was more personal than political, an identity crisis born from the pursuit of the American dream and this deep desire to belong, even if that’s at the expense of your own community.
Something that really struck me and stuck with me was this theme of disgust – that you learned that, like, even more than hate…
RAMOS: Yeah.
LIZARRAGA: …Disgust is actually the primary driver of dehumanization.
RAMOS: Yeah.
LIZARRAGA: So you’re talking already about how that is used by the people you…
RAMOS: Yeah.
LIZARRAGA: …You know, are interviewing to distance themselves from other new immigrants and from, like you say, the Democratic Party and from the LGBTQ+ community, for example. So I’m curious. How was that experience for you as a journalist but also as a queer woman?
RAMOS: I mean, well, I’ll say – I’ll start by saying this. Like, one of the coolest parts of this book is that, like, yes, it’s politics, and, yes, I spent a lot of time having these, you know, interviews that are obviously in nature political. But the best thing was when I got to talk to, like, scientists and psychologists. And to your point, like, one of the people that I talked to was Bryn Nelson, you know, this scientist that had spent so much time studying the science of disgust. And what I wanted to get from someone like him was to understand, like, what is at the heart of dehumanizing someone, you know?
And to your point, what he said is it is actually – it is the science of disgust, you know, that is stronger than fear and anger. And it is if you get someone to feel disgusted at someone, then you give them the permission to dehumanize someone. And so I think of the way that, you know, like, some Republicans have targeted so many Latino communities using these, like, transphobic and homophobic imagery. Even right now I think of the way that, like, the country is dehumanizing, like, Haitian…
LIZARRAGA: Absolutely.
RAMOS: …Migrants, you know, using these extremely – like, this very specific imagery. And at the end of the day, I keep thinking of Bryn Nelson because it has to do with disgust. How can you get an entire population to really feel, like, grossed out by something?
And, you know, the only way this is related to the book is because I think when I’m having these conversations with some Latino conservatives and some Latino evangelicals that are sort of, you know, wondering if they’re going to go towards the Dems or Republicans, what I’m feeling among some of them is that it is when they start talking about the LGBTQ community, particularly, like, trans folks, that you get the sense of, like, visceral disgust from them. You know? And, again, it’s because that’s infused with mis- and disinformation and also infused with the history, our history in Latin America…
LIZARRAGA: Yes.
RAMOS: …Where these, like, gender norms – you know, I don’t have to tell you. Like, these gender norms and sexual norms have been so deeply ingrained for centuries, you know, from the doctrine of discovery all the way until recently. I mean, I keep thinking of – like, one of the best parts of doing research for this book was, like, I did a little bit of research on, like, what were some of the journals of, like, the Spanish conquistadors when they were, like, first getting to Latin America. And I found some quotes from, like, Francisco Pizarro, like, a Spanish colonizer and when he gets to Ecuador and he suddenly is faced with these, like…
LIZARRAGA: Yeah.
RAMOS: …Effeminate men, you know, these effeminate, Indigenous men.
LIZARRAGA: Yeah.
RAMOS: And he’s so appalled, you know? And then you have, like, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, another Spanish conquistador. And he goes to Panama, and he then orders the execution of, like, over 600 too-spirited Indigenous individuals. And ever since, it’s that sense of disgust that’s been ingrained century after century after century in Latin America to the point that then, you know, for me growing up, like, it took me so long even to, like, come out to my Mexican family because of the taboos and to the point that now, like, when I’m reporting at the U.S.-Mexico border or when I’m in Latin America – I love it so much. But I still carry, like, the weight of the taboo on my shoulders.
LIZARRAGA: Totally.
RAMOS: You know? Like, I’ve never not tense. I’m never, unfortunately, like – and I don’t know how much of it has to do with just – you know, like, maybe I don’t give people enough credit. But I’m always – have, like, this, like, shield, you know? How is this man looking at me?
And I’ll give you a recent example. It literally just happened to me two days ago. Like, I was in Arizona. I was talking to a Trump supporter about the border. And we were getting in a back-and-forth. And then suddenly, this man comes out of nowhere, and he starts walking towards us, and he just keeps staring at me. And that stare is a stare that I’m, like, very familiar with, you know, which is typically a stare of, like, straight men that are wondering, like, who is this person that is kind of, like, challenging power and challenging these dynamics? And it’s always the same stare, you know? I’ll say it. It’s kind of a stare of disgust.
And the man was staring at me. And he was armed ’cause we’re in Arizona, and he was armed. And he just – and he looked at me, and he stopped me in the middle of the interview, and he said, look at you. You’re just a radical lefty. And I looked at him, and I was like, what makes you say that, sir? And he said, it’s just the way you look. You’re giving me – that’s what you’re saying. It’s the way you look, and that says everything. You know what I’m saying? Like, that’s it. What does he mean by that? Essentially, quote-unquote, “look at this gay woman in Arizona questioning, you know, this Trump supporter.” And literally, he just kept saying, it’s just the way you look. I know it. And that’s what I mean, you know? Like, you can’t…
LIZARRAGA: It makes me so afraid for you just thinking about – like, of him approaching.
RAMOS: Of everyone. Yeah. I mean, that’s just, like, the state of politics right now, you know, that you – people feel, like, emboldened and empowered. And I think it comes down to the same thing, which is, like, the sense that, like, some people feel that their, like, traditions and their norms and their power dynamics are slipping away. And that’s so scary for some people.
LIZARRAGA: Yeah. Do you think that, on some level, that – what you’re describing about how you were treated is a small example of what Latinos are up against in this country, feeling so otherized that they’re willing to…
RAMOS: Yeah.
LIZARRAGA: …Otherize someone else?
RAMOS: Yeah, I mean, maybe. Like, I think even for the most privileged of us – I mean, I’m so immensely privileged. But I do believe that the journey to sort of, quote-unquote, “reach that American dream” – it’s really painful.
LIZARRAGA: Yeah.
RAMOS: You know? And that journey to assimilate is extremely painful for everybody, no matter who you are. And I say that repeatedly to Latinos. Like, don’t forget, you know? Like, there’s this tendency for us to act as a majority, and we’re so close to it. We are the largest minority voting bloc in this country. But do not forget that time and time again, you know, we have been neglected and ignored, and it doesn’t matter who you are.
And so I think that pain is real. I think the idea that, like, so many Latinos are treated as these, like, perpetual foreigners – like, I think that’s real. The research backs it up. I think the anti-immigrant sentiment – it affects every single one of us in subtle ways. I mean, I’ll tell you. When I first got to college in New York City, they put me in the ESL class, you know, because my English was so bad back then. And I was so ashamed initially of being part of an ESL group in an American college because in my mind and in my head, you know, what power meant and what success meant was to conform to whiteness. You know, it was to step into those other rooms.
