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Author sets out to understand the rightward drift of Latino voters

Paola Ramos and her book, "Defectors."
Samantha Bloom and Pantheon Books
Paola Ramos and her book, "Defectors."

Back in 2016, before Paola Ramos started traveling the country reporting on the Latino community for outlets like VICE and MSNBC, she worked on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. And in the aftermath of Clinton’s defeat, Ramos realized the campaign had made a grave mistake. They’d assumed that Latino voters would find Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric repulsive, and that they would support Clinton in droves. Instead, a surprisingly large percentage of Latinos voted for Trump. Since then, his share of the Latino vote has increased. According to a recent NBC News poll, Latino support for Trump has more than doubled since 2016.

In her new book, “Defectors,” Ramos sets out to understand what she calls the “rightward drift” of Latinos in America. The book unfolds as a series of character studies, from which Ramos extrapolates the broader cultural factors that explain Trump’s growing appeal.

Early in the book, she introduces us to Anthony Aguero. Aguero is a self-proclaimed “independent reporter” who drives up and down the border filming migrants and refugees attempting to enter the United States. He frames his work as an attempt to document the existential threat to America.

Ramos joined The Show to talk about how Aguero’s story illustrates the complexities and contradictions of modern Latino identity.

Full conversation

PAOLA RAMOS: So much of our conversation was driven by Anthony just making sure that I understood, that he was part of this quote unquote, like "American life," and that those asylum seekers and the, the those I'm putting in quotations, that wasn't him. No. And it just sort of us versus them in rhetoric is, is so much of who Anthony is.

SAM DINGMAN: Right. And this is, this is a big part of building tribalism. It seems like being a part of the quote unquote “American tribe,” as opposed to whatever the other tribe would be is really important to him.

RAMOS: Exactly. And I think part of what I try and do in the book is, is to, to force us to understand where these sort of racial and ethnic grievances come from. Now, I think so much of our history as Latinos obviously starts with the weight of colonization in Latin America, right? And the way that the Spanish colonizers really institutionalize these higher keys.

And in the United States, I think when you have a Donald Trump and who's really fixated in creating the, who's part of the in group and who's the out group that can be pretty powerful for some Latinos.

DINGMAN: To that end, I wanted to ask you about, for me, one of the most moving moments in the sequence where you are talking to Anthony, it's towards the end of that section. And you do this thing, that you actually do several times in the book to great effect I think, where you just ask him this really direct emotional question you say, does it get lonely? Referring to the amount of time he spends driving around looking for migrants to film. And he tells you that he spends a lot of time when he is driving around like this with the radio off, just kind of writing in silence and thinking.

RAMOS: Yeah, oftentimes what I found with these characters is that everyone is kind of in their own journey to find belonging. I think Anthony, a widow, is someone that I think is painfully trying to really get Republicans to feel like Anthony is one of them.

DINGMAN: Yeah, I mean, it's such a powerful moment. He says to you, I think if memory serves, he says, I know people think I'm weird.

RAMOS: Yes, yes.

DINGMAN: And then he doesn't say anything else. But the reader is kind of left to reach the conclusion that he's just so desperate for what he's doing to make him not weird to somebody.

RAMOS: That's — exactly. When you have the option to identify with what you see is superior, you take it.

DINGMAN: Well, that's a perfect segue to the story of Isabel. Another one of your principal characters, tell us who she is.

RAMOS: Isabel is Afro-Dominican. She's a Trump supporter. She owns a hair salon in the Bronx. And so I think initially when you tell folks that, you know, Donald Trump performed really well in the Bronx, or that Donald Trump even dared to go to the Bronx during, you know, his campaign stops a couple of months ago, I think a lot of people laughed.

But, when you actually look at the numbers in the Bronx where Isabel lives, and Donald Trump made significant inroads there in 2020 compared to 2016 in the state of New York. That is where he actually started to perform pretty well. And it makes no sense at first, right? Because we're talking about a population like Isabel that are Afro Latino.

My conversation with Isabel was really revealing because what she explained to me is that one of the reasons why she really liked Trump was really around the way that Donald Trump made her feel safe, vis a vis Black people in America and vis a vis African Americans in America. It made her feel that if he were to be elected again, and she would not feel as threatened by them. She saw herself as an Afro-Latina, very racially different than African Americans in this country.

DINGMAN: It's one of the reasons that she's such a fascinating character in the story because, and this is quoting from the book, you say, “Isabel may just be an ordinary Dominican in her home country. But here white people will see Isabel as a Black woman and that immediately puts a target on her back, American culture will put her in a box label her and create a story about who she is before Isabel is able to tell her own story.”

And even in just hearing you give that description of her, it seems like, and tell me if I'm misunderstanding, Trump is kind of creating this warped permission structure for somebody like Isabel to say, “you can be an Afro Latina woman and you should be a Republican because I'm the one who's in this weird way, recognizing who you are and saying that blackness isn't that, Which is how many other people see you.” It's very messy, but it makes a weird kind of sense.

RAMOS: I wouldn't give Trump that much, that much credit or, or, or Republicans that much credit. What I do know and what I do see is that they have understood and that's why they ran with this during the 2022 midterms, right? The crime fear mongering, and which has now morphed into the migrant fear mongering like that tactic, criminalizing Black people. And now they're criminalizing immigrants. That works.

There's a reason why they were really, really spreading that message in places like the Bronx and really across New York among Afro Latino communities because they knew that that fear could resonate with a lot of Afro Latinos now, the sort of otherizing of Black people which again, it's an old political trope, right?

DINGMAN: So it's almost like they're saying, “come over to our side and we will protect you from the forces people think you are,” or something.

RAMOS: Exactly. Yeah. And someone to bring it back to is she would always refer to Black people as “them” when she talked about what are the top issues in your mind? And she would often say, you know, “protecting myself from them.”

And when I asked her and who do you mean by them? She meant in her own words, I'm quoting her, “Los Morenos,” Los Moreno and essentially saying it's Black people in America.

DINGMAN: So to close, Paola, there has been this very fundamental misunderstanding on the left. It sounds like about how the loyalties of Latinos in America are really taking shape and, and what the actual motivating factors are. What is your hope for the outcome of publishing a book like this?

RAMOS: Like, what do you think are the stakes of this continued rightward drift as you put it so much of what this whole system is built on and what democratic politics is built on is this idea that Latinas would be at the heart of the Democrats sort of multiracial, multiethnic coalition.

If you believe that Donald Trump is a threat, if you are sort of counting on Latinas to sort of counter the effects of Trumpism and the perceived danger of Trumpism that you need to understand what's going on with the Latino community. And those answers don't come in political language.

Those answers entail very uncomfortable conversations like the one that you and I are having, right? Because it's talking about racism, it's talking about colorism. It's talking about history and it's talking about political trauma is. I think everyone needs to take the time and the care and, and, and be intentional about having curiosity or around that defection. I think it's important.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Sam Dingman is a reporter and host for KJZZ’s The Show. Prior to KJZZ, Dingman was the creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Family Ghosts.
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