Man, we Latino men have it rough.
Americans have demonized us as criminals, buffoons, lechers, invaders, criminals and job stealers since the fall of the Alamo. Latino culture typecasts hombres as eternal machos always a few drinks away from brawling or bawling. Educators view us as underachievers. The political class long stereotyped Latino men as a sleeping giant who could change the country, if only we showed up to vote with the same enthusiasm as attending a Raiders game or lining up for a sneaker drop.
And then came Donald Trump.
So many of us fell for his siren call that 48% of Latino voters of all genders chose Trump in 2024, the highest percentage ever captured by a Republican presidential candidate. Progressives immediately blamed Latino men for Trump’s victory while holding up Latinas as the brave heroines who stood up against tyranny.
The blame game continues. A study released this month by UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Institute basically paints Latino men as little better than MAGA minions, trumpeting a gender gap on standing up to this administration’s deportation deluge, defending democracy and “fighting the Trump agenda.” To the media and to outraged internet commentators, it didn’t matter that two-thirds of Latino men had responded that each of those three issues was “very important” or “somewhat important.”
We just aren’t anti-Trump enough, which marks us as alien to the president’s critics. The UCLA paper’s cover page even features a red man and a blue woman conversing in what look like Aztec speaking glyphs — as if the sexes can’t understand each other and probably never will.
To explain the Latina-Latino political chasm, UCLA offers hypotheses straight out of “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.” The women supposedly work more in caretaker jobs like teaching and healthcare, softening their views toward the least of us. The men are in blue-collar sectors with a Darwinian outlook. But it doesn’t take a fancy academic paper to come to that conclusion — all you need to do is, you know, talk to Latino men.
When Trump descended that damned escalator in 2015 to announce his first presidential run by sliming Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, I knew that this racist excuse for a leader — the most anti-Latino politician in our nation’s history — would nevertheless appeal to many Latino men.
The reasons were evident: Trump’s fame. His strongman persona. His riches. His default setting of, as we Mexicans say, me vale madre — I don’t give a damn what people think. Yet three successive Democratic presidential campaigns willfully ignored these flashing sirens, instead insisting that Green New Deals and diversity, equity and inclusion programs would appeal to working-class Latino men.
Pundits thought we were still motivated by the radical politics of the Chicano movement, as previous generations were. What they didn’t realize was that assimilation had transformed Latino men into the modern equivalent of President Nixon’s silent majority.
I’ve always thought Latino male Trumpers were deluded — but I’ve always understood where they’re coming from. They’re believers in rancho libertarianism, my neologism for the individualistic politics exemplified by the Mexican men who raised me and who I grew up with.
Rancho libertarians, like their Scotch-Irish cousins from another mother, are forever skeptical of government, respect insurgents who want to take on the establishment, love their people and subscribe to a bootstraps approach to life. Not as praiseworthy is a tendency to dislike being told what to do, and in proving a point, to not only cut off their nose to spite their face but to lop off their heads as well.
No wonder so many Latino men went for Trump. To quote another Mexican saying, por eso estamos como estamos. That’s why we’re the way we are.
And look at what it’s earned us.
MAGA has been a miasma on this land, but especially for the blue-collar Latinos whom Trump increasingly courted with each election cycle. Immigration agents have arrested U.S.-born Trump supporters and thrown their friends and family members into squalid detention centers to await certain deportation. Diesel and gas prices are outrageously high, after Trump started a war with Iran that seems to have no end.
Nothing has degraded more for Latino men, however, than the simple pleasures of life.
When my dad and my brother had a pool party for some cousins and their children last month at our Anaheim home — no more than 15 people — the cost of carne asada, chicken, chorizo and tortillas from a local carnicería was more than $200. That side of the family never supported Trump while not exactly being wokosos, either. As Spotify blasted Antonio Aguilar and Banda El Recodo, they complained about the economy and the Republicans who have rubber-stamped the Trump agenda, when we should have been talking about the Dodgers and vacations back to our ancestral Mexico state of Zacatecas.
If my Arellano cousins are ready to stick it to Trump on election day, so should the Latino men who supported him two years ago.
In 2024, Latinos were the pivotal vote that delivered swing states to Trump. In this year’s midterms, Latino men are the swing vote within that constituency, from congressional races once considered safely red in Texas and Florida to local elections across the country. It’s gotten so dire for Republicans that Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar put out a television ad warning Trump that “the same Hispanics who brought you to the White House … feel betrayed today.”
Honor remains big among rancho libertarians, and no politician has insulted the Latino way of life more than Trump. Helping to flip the House and Senate to the Democrats wouldn’t end his influence, but it sure would help. Plus, it would be a perfect rebuke to a pendejo who fooled too many good Latino men.
American society, whether the left or the right wing, will never fully accept us. We’ll always be thought of as too conservative, too dumb, too reactionary, too violent by too many.
Well, if we’re going to be loathed, we might as well stand on the right side of history. It’s time for Latino men to stand up and hit Trump with another Mexican saying:
Ya, güey. Enough already, man.
The post Heads up, Latino men: The future of democracy hangs on your vote appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
