The conventional wisdom that Latinos are reliable members of a liberal coalition of people of color has never been exactly right: Between a quarter and a third of Latinos have voted Republican in almost every presidential election for the past half century. Donald Trump grew his share of the Latino vote in 2020 compared with 2016, and he may be growing his share still. A November Wall Street Journal poll found that Hispanic voters would be evenly split if Trump ran against Joe Biden in 2024. They were also evenly split when asked whether they would vote for Democrats or Republicans if the midterm elections were held that day. The survey pool was admittedly a small one, but the possibility of a continued rightward shift is shaking Democrats’ confidence.
How, I am often asked, can so many Latinos be willing to vote for Trump or his acolytes after he spent four years in office maligning them?
In some ways, it’s an insulting question, because it presumes that non-Latinos know our interests better than we do. I didn’t support Trump, but my grandfather did. For a long time, Latinos like him have gravitated toward the Republican Party because of their belief in free-market capitalism, their opposition to big government, and their religious and cultural conservatism. Many appreciated the booming economy of the Trump years, and worry about inflation today. It’s ridiculous to imagine that Latinos would all think, or vote, the same. There are more than 60 million of us—representatives of different national groups, with different accents, histories of migration, and cultural tastes. Has such a varied group ever formed a solid bloc?
But America’s inability to wrap its head around a fifth of its population suggests a deeper misunderstanding. It has to do with an ignorance of Latino history—a messy history of colonization that is far more important to grasping our political diversity than any poll result could ever be.
Too few Americans learn this history, in part because Latinos are rarely central to the ideological debates over race and racial justice in America. Or, more precisely, we are props in those debates, our story reduced to a simple tale of oppression consisting of the violent erasure of our Indigenous heritage, resistance against colonialism, and victimization by imperial powers. In this view, only Latinos who are unconscious of their own inheritance would fail to align themselves with the left. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York put it in an interview, Latino politicians often advance “really problematic policies” because they don’t “know who they are.”
But who we are is complicated, and the future that many Latinos imagine—for ourselves and for our country—does not fit neatly into the prevailing culture war. To understand that, it may be helpful to pause the angst over which box Latinos will check on their ballots this year or in 2024, and consider what can be learned from the past.