Latinx Files: What does Trump's victory say about Latinidad?

One of the first people I reached out to in the aftermath of the election was Mike Madrid. I had last spoken with the political consultant in June, after the release of “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy,” an insightful book that gave a deep analysis of the Latinx electorate and what it cared about. Back then, Madrid, a Never Trumper Republican and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, said that if Donald Trump won the election, he would do it with a historic share of the Latinx vote.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. According to exit polls, Trump received 46% of the Latinx vote, with 55% of Latinx men voting for him.

I thought a lot about what Madrid told me after it became clear that Trump would be returning to the White House, so I called him up to try to make sense of what happened, and what Trump’s victory says about Latinidad. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I was rereading our last Q&A and some of the points you made proved to be almost uncanny — that if Donald Trump won, he would do it with a historical share of the Latinx vote, which happened. You also pointed out the failure of the Democrats in taking this massive, diverse population for granted for a long time. Any initial thoughts about what happened Tuesday?

I’m not at all surprised. I’m disappointed, not in our people but that the political system made this a viable option. None of this had to happen.

I’m no oracle here, but I’ve spent two years of my life knowing that I didn’t really have a home in the political system anymore after I turned on Trump and turned on the Republicans. I had the expertise and I wanted to be helpful because I saw the train coming. I saw the big shift coming in 2020 with the Lincoln Project and I wanted to write a road map [for Democrats] to avoid all this. I was raising alarm bells publicly, and yet they were saying, “No, it’s not happening.” And it happened.

I expected maybe a trickle, 2 or 3 more percentage points this year, but it ended up being bigger. At this point, how many more times do you have to lose Latino voters to Donald Trump before you acknowledge that you have a big foundational, fundamental problem? There’s a policy problem. You’re not the party of the working-class people anymore.

In our last conversation, you said that it didn’t matter for working-class Latinxs that the Dow was at an all-time high because they weren’t really seeing that in their paychecks. Did that lack of proper messaging from Democrats play a major factor in this election?

It’s deeper than that. When the last New York Times/Siena College poll [before the election] came out, it showed that 20% of Latinos believed that the economy was good or excellent. For an incumbent party, that’s a five-alarm fire. Moreover, they asked Latinos about which party they believed best understood people like them. The majority said the Democratic Party. But when they asked whether Latinos thought that the Democratic Party would do anything to improve their personal life, the answer overwhelmingly was no. They don’t have a communication problem. They’ve got a believability problem. After decades of saying “We get you, we hear you, and we understand you,” Latinos are saying, “We don’t believe that you guys are going to make anything better.” And they haven’t. You look at states where these shifts are happening, and in most of them Latino quality of life and affordability is not improving.

The problem is that they’ve missed the through line that they need to talk to Latinos like blue-collar, working-class people. That’s all they need. They don’t need to know what part of Mexico you’re from, or when your people came from Puerto Rico, or if your people were there during the Batista regime in Cuba. They need less academics and they need more blue-collar union guys on the line taking the temperature and talking to Latinos who live paycheck to paycheck, people who know what it’s like to have to get a payday advance to buy diapers. That’s what they’ve lost.

That’s the beauty of what Trump did. His outreach operation was called “Latino Americans for Trump.” It’s brilliant. They get where the vote is going. They’re going to speak aspirationally to these guys. They’re referring to them as Americans with a deep, strong ethnic sensitivity, but prioritize their American identity first. With the Democrats, it’s the Tucson restaurant with the sombreros and mariachi, and “Latinos con Biden” and “Latinos con Harris.” They’re too calcified in their structure. The operation they built worked for Latinos 25-30 years ago, and they can’t get past that mind frame. They’re just conveying to new generations that they don’t get it. The Democrats have been steadily losing more of the Latino vote since 2016. Once was a mistake, two is a coincidence and three is a trend. We’re on five out of six races now, 2018 being the exception. How many more red flags do they need to learn that they need a reboot? Not reform. They need to start over and reimagine what they’re doing.

Something that struck me about election night coverage was this desire by the networks to quickly explain the Latinx vote and why it went the way that it did. At some point, I turned on the NBC broadcast and Chuck Todd was claiming that one of the reasons Latinxs voted for Trump was because of school choice, which blew my mind because the data doesn’t support that claim in the least bit. It made it painfully obvious to me that there is this massive fundamental misunderstanding of who the Latinx electorate is, not just by politicians, but also by many members of the media.

One-hundred percent. The reason my book is called “The Latino Century” is because this is a story of how our institutions aren’t ready for the rapid pace and change of what’s coming, and that includes the media. When I heard you say that, I thought, “Oh, he’s talking about 1980s Republican messaging to Black families.” That’s what we used to do in the ’80s and ’90s; we would talk about school vouchers for the Black community. I guarantee that’s what he was talking about.

What we’ve been consistently getting from our political establishment and media institutions is that we’re Catholic, that we are machista, are exclusively Spanish-speaking and that we’re all recently migrated and are therefore worried about being deported. We’re fighting all of these stereotypes that are not reflective of where the community sits today. I want to challenge both parties to look past that mindset because if they’re left to their own devices, Republicans will continue to think that all Latinos are anticommunists and Democrats will keep hiring mariachi bands and speaking at Cinco de Mayo events. How do you build a specific Latino economic agenda around that? For 30 years, Latinos have been saying that the economy is their No. 1 issue.

This flattening of who Latinxs are cuts both ways, doesn’t it? Something that stood out to me post-election was the amount of people trying to grasp the reality that so many of our tíos, cousins, siblings and even parents would actually vote for Trump. The common through line was that anyone who voted for him was just a self-hating Latinx. It highlighted how, for as much as we love to say that we aren’t a monolith, so many of us fall into that way of thinking, and I think it’s something we have to collectively reckon with.

Yes, absolutely. Moreover, it is also challenging Latinidad. We as a people, for what I would argue are demographic reasons, especially Mexican Americans in one direction and Cuban Americans in the other direction, have identified a partisan affiliation as part of our ethnic identity. The farmworkers’ movement, Pete Wilson, Prop. 187, Joe Arpaio, SB 1070 — these were issues that helped the Democratic Party become part of our ethnic identity in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and even in the early 2000s. That’s entirely understandable and appropriate. But as the Latino population started to explode, not just in size, but in terms of generational diversity, things started to change.

I wrote in my book about my mother taking me to farmworker strikes because she wanted us to see that as part of our identity. But my experience was not the same as my parents being farmworkers. There’s an attempt to hold on to culture and pass on those experiences. What we’re learning is that, generationally, this only goes so far. It’s not unlike what’s happening with younger Blacks who don’t remember the civil rights movement. It’s not as compelling as it was for their parents and their grandparents, because it’s not their lived experience. And I think that’s what we’re seeing with Latinidad. It’s expanding big time. You can be a third- or fourth-generation, English-speaking-only Latino in Las Vegas and you’re considered Latino just as somebody who came here from the Dominican Republic last week and is living in the I-4 corridor in Florida, speaking only Spanish. You’re both Latino, but what do you have in common? That generational rift can mean more than even country of origin.

That’s what’s really challenging our political elites right now. People who came of age during Proposition 187, these were young men and women taking to the streets fighting for ethnic pride 30 years ago. Meanwhile, 40% of Latino voters are under the age of 30. They’ve got no living memory of these foundational civil rights movements, but they came of age when Latinos were in positions of power. Getting a first is not a thing for them. The perception of representation is moving away from representation for representation’s sake and it’s moving toward results. And that is something that the 187 generation, those people who are 40 and over, don’t have an understanding of. For them, representation was the goal. As long as we have brown faces on the dais at the council meetings and on the legislative floors and in the halls of power, that was an accomplishment. And that’s not what young people are saying. They’re saying, “So what? I’ll vote for Bernie Sanders, this 83-year-old white dude from Vermont, or for a carnival barker from New York named Donald Trump if I think he’s going to get results over somebody who looks like me.”

Let’s talk about the nastiness that arose on social media in the aftermath of the election. Each cycle, there appears to be this collective desire to find a scapegoat to blame for the outcome, and one group brought up a lot were Latinxs, specifically Latinx men. I’m not trying to excuse or justify how they voted, but some of the comments I saw said things like, “Well, I hope you enjoy the deportation camps.” Not only is it an awful thing to say, but it also perpetuates this stereotype that we are all recently arrived immigrants. It’s very telling of how non-Latinxs see us as foreigners.

This is a sentiment I’ve seen overwhelmingly from white progressives. For them, if you’re Latino, you’re an immigrant, and if you’re not then your family is. I also saw some Black men posting things like, “We did our job. You didn’t. Enjoy what you’re going to get.”

I think white people and Black people see Latinos as a version of Black, because in America, nonwhite means Black. They expect us to vote a certain way, and when we don’t, one side will be saying, “You’re a sellout and you’re leaning into whiteness,” while the other is saying, “What are you doing? Why aren’t you voting like a minority?” That has been the rule structure in this country for 450 years, and Latinos are challenging that because we as a whole are multiracial. That’s why the first chapter of my book is called “Beyond Black and white,” because we have to understand how our growing presence is changing America.

So, where do we go from here?

Where does Latinidad go, or where does America go?

Both.

Well, I think the next obvious question is, is this the beginning of the end of Latinidad? I was talking to [Times columnist] Gustavo Arellano about this. I interviewed him for a podcast and I said that we were witnessing the end of Latinidad. This country isn’t a bland melting pot anymore. It’s more of a menudo. We’re not really becoming white because of how big our community is and how fast it’s growing. We are losing some of our anchor culture, but we’re also gathering adherents from interracial marriage. Latinos have some of the highest rates of interracial marriage. If you’re a third-generation Latino, you’re more likely to marry someone who is not Latino, and so what ends up happening is that we’re bringing more people into the culture. America is becoming more like us just and we’re becoming more like it. Look at Bad Bunny. He’s one of the top artists for all Americans, not just for Latinos, and he only does songs in Spanish. This is different from what we saw at the turn of the last century, when the Irish, Italians and Greeks became white. The newer generations are more racially and ethnically diverse than any other generations America has ever produced. This is a new feature of American identity.

You mentioned that the newer generations are losing our anchor culture, and there’s certainly a lot of truth to that. After all, what have been considered traditional markers of Latinidad — being immigrant, Catholic and speaking Spanish — are becoming less reflective of who we are and who we have become. So what then are the things that bind this community of more than 70 million people together? What are our commonalities? How do you mobilize this amorphous group of people? It seems to me that you go about it by focusing on one of the things that is still true about most of us, which is that many of us are still working class. Would that be a fair assessment?

I believe the through line is the working class. That is going to be the bond that crosses the diasporas and the variations within our own generational differences as Mexicanos and Latinos. Now, will that change in a generation? I hope so. Yes. But being a multiethnic working class, one that is unique and distinct in American history, that is the glue that is going to hold us together. That is the most common through line, especially at a time when the classes are separating.

One of the things I was really looking for after the election was whether there would be a difference between the working class in the Rust Belt, which is white, and the working class in the Sunbelt, which is brown. Ironically, Kamala Harris was trying to increase the white share of the vote and Trump was trying to increase the Black and brown share of the vote. In 2016, Trump was trying to get the white share of the vote, and now he’s doing exactly opposite. We’re crossing the Rubicon. The working class has changed. One of the fastest growing segments of the working class is Latinos. There are ethnic sensitivities, but that is not the dominant way the working class views the world. The dominant way the working class views the world is as the working class. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t affinities for being Black, white or brown. But the unifier is that working-class ethic. You’re not trying to get rich. You’re just trying to make a decent life for yourself and give your kids a better future. That’s the blue-collar contract, and that’s what Latinos feel is slipping away from them. Their parents came here for that opportunity — they struggled and survived scrubbing floors, cleaning toilets and cutting lawns so their children wouldn’t have to. And what many Latinos are realizing is that they’re going to college and they can’t make it work. They can’t afford that American dream. That blue-collar contract is no longer working.

Latinos might feel like Democrats get them and understand them, but they also feel like their lives did not materially improve when they were in charge. Meanwhile, this other guy is saying, “Hey, let’s tear down the system. Let’s be America first and take care of our own. Let’s stop sending money to Ukraine and start investing it here.” Struggling, young Latino men are seeing this and making a choice between the Democratic Party, which talks to them like they’re a Spanish-speaking undocumented immigrant, and the Republicans, who are saying they’re American first. Yes, they’re proud Latinos, but which side would they go to war for? The bald eagle or the fierce eagle sitting on that cactus with a snake in its beak? There’s romance and beauty to ancestry, but I’m under no false illusions of where people’s loyalties lie. That’s how Republicans are talking to that group.

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