For some observers, Donald Trump’s gains among Latino voters in the 2020 election made little sense. Hadn’t Trump talked incessantly about building a “great, great wall” along the southern border? Hadn’t he called Mexicans “rapists” and migrants “animals”? Most Latinos still identify as Democrats, and in 2020 most of them voted for Joe Biden. But Trump still made some serious — and startling — inroads, especially along the border. Take Zapata County, Texas, where 94 percent of the population is Hispanic: Trump flipped it red.
The journalist Paola Ramos was among those who were shocked. Her timely new book, “Defectors,” explores the rise of the Latino far right. She explains that the movement isn’t limited to white Latinos who fixate on their European blood; she interviews Afro-Latinos like Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in organizing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “It’s clear that Latinos, too, can be white supremacists,” Ramos writes. Tarrio, like a number of other extremists in Ramos’s book, insists that’s impossible. “I’m pretty brown,” he once said. “I am Cuban. There’s nothing white supremacist about me.”
Ramos calls such disavowals “the Latin American racial dance,” which deploys “our mixed background as a means to disguise our own racism.” Ramos describes herself as a light-skinned lesbian Latina with a Cuban mother and a Mexican father. Growing up, she writes, “I worshiped the whiteness of my Spanish roots” and “erased my community’s Indigenous past.” Now Ramos, a former correspondent for Vice News and a contributor to MSNBC, is ardently liberal. “Defectors” is explicitly a work of advocacy journalism, intended for her fellow progressives, who have long assumed that Democrats could take Latino voters — with the possible exception of Cuban Americans — for granted.
She argues there are three forces that account for the attraction of some Latinos to far-right extremism: “tribalism,” “traditionalism” and “trauma.” Tribalism manifests as internalized racism and a desperate desire to belong. Traditionalism refers to conservative Christian beliefs and strict ideas about gender norms. Trauma comes from histories in countries marked by violent upheaval and autocratic regimes run by caudillos, or strongmen. All three elements, she says, flow from a colonial past that started with Spanish conquistadors and continued through American meddling during the Cold War.
Ramos recounts some tense interviews with people whose politics repulse her, even if some are canny enough to “say all the right things.” She talks to a conservative evangelical pastor while members of his congregation stand nearby, dressed in MAGA T-shirts and sporting holstered guns. She admits to feeling intimidated when meeting Gabriel Garcia, a Cuban American from Florida who live-streamed his participation in the Jan. 6 attack. But Ramos is struck by how “timid, nervous and extremely fidgety” Garcia turns out to be one-on-one. Tarrio, too, seems calmer and more thoughtful in private than the brash loudmouth he plays in public. Ramos’s empathy is formidable. As frightened as she is by the defectors’ politics, she is always curious to learn more.
Her book isn’t exculpatory; Ramos is clear that no matter her subjects’ motivations, nothing can justify hateful behavior. Yet sometimes she casts the people she meets as simple victims. In Ramos’s telling, Latinos have been “coerced into absorbing the essence” of Christian nationalism, whose “core tenets” have been “engraved” into “our psyche”; their “unique background has forced many to buy into American individualism and the belief that they must vote to advance their own specific interests as they intersect with whiteness, capitalism and Christianity.” There is obviously some truth here. But her habit of choosing blunt-force verbs and broad generalities can flatten a tangled dynamic into a tidy tale of cause and effect.
“At what point along their journey did the victims become the perpetrators?” Ramos wonders early on. It’s a loaded question. As she suggests elsewhere, the people she talked to see themselves as neither victims nor perpetrators, but as residing in the considerable stretch of space in between.
Ramos maintains that most Latinos share a version of her politics: “I am convinced that the vast majority of the nearly 64 million Latinos in this country are driven by a desire for social justice and equality. As Latinos, our ancestors’ journeys to the U.S., though individually unique, were all sparked by the promise of greater freedoms.” Perhaps. But such a sweeping assessment runs up against the fact that, as she puts it later, “we are flawed humans with complicated, painful histories.”
“Defectors” tries to navigate between two competing narratives: one adamantly optimistic that a “history of resilience and adaptability has primed Latinos to humbly shed any instincts to oppress and control”; the other a series of encounters with individuals whose life stories suggest otherwise. She rightfully rejects the assumption that Latinos are a “monolith.” But she keeps returning to a vision of a righteous, liberal Latino majority that can come across as, well, monolithic.
Toward the end of the book, Ramos introduces some men who became disillusioned with the right. One, a Border Patrol agent named Raul, voted for Trump in 2016 and then was fired from his job a couple of years later; it turned out that Raul was an undocumented immigrant who had been brought to the United States as a child.
“All along,” Ramos writes, “he was simply a puppet of the system, not someone with a real voice.” No doubt it’s comforting to suggest that Raul is “simply” a product of structural forces, but as Ramos herself surely knows, every person she talks to is — for better or worse — much more than that.
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