Latino Voters Are Not A Monolith (Photo Credit: NBC)
“I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, okay? Do I need to say more?”
This quote from Senator Harry Reid (D) could easily have been on the news last night—but unfortunately, it is more than a decade old. All these years later, politicians have yet to enlighten. To them, the Hispanic vote is like a child that just won’t behave, and the shocked Democratic party is like a doting parent, struggling to understand what, exactly, keeps going wrong. In the 2020 presidential election, against all odds and in spite of most predictions, President Trump managed to expand his Latinx base significantly, earning 32% of the overall Hispanic vote. So how did Democratic politicians fail to gauge the Hispanic community yet again? What did they overlook?
The problem lies at the word level: the term “Latinx voter” stands in for dozens of individual ethnicities and cultures, as incomplete as it is all-encompassing. Thus to better understand and highlight the diversity of “Latinx voters,” The Tory spoke with three Hispanic students of varying ages, genders, and ethnic backgrounds. Their opinions on Trump, Biden, the election, and the way Hispanics have been coded by politicians and their own community all point to a desperate need for deeper analysis and fresh terminology when it comes to the ever-elusive Latinx vote.
All three students, identifying as left-leaning, cast their votes for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. It is a decision Bolivian-American senior Sivan Tretiak calls “the lesser of two evils.” “I think for a lot of people, and specifically for me,” Tretiak explains, “the main factor was Donald Trump.” He is not alone in his assessment: in October, Pew Research Center found that less than half of Hispanic voters expressed confidence in the Trump administration’s ability to handle major policy issues like coronavirus and race relations. Ana Villada, a Colombian-American first year interested in studying Politics, found herself particularly unnerved by the president’s approach to environmental policy. “I took a class called the Environmental Nexus this year,” she says, “…and it really allowed me to see what policies Trump had put into place that weren’t really good for the environment.” Joe Biden, by contrast, “at least recognizes that there are problems that need to be fixed,” which Villada calls “a huge step forward.”
For Politics senior Jorge Pereira, opinions on the Trump administration are inextricable from identity and family history. “I think this kind of does center around my Cuban-ness, and hearing my family speak so much about their experience with authoritarianism in Cuba,” he says. The “authoritarian tendencies” he saw in Trump deeply concerned him: “Once you start delegitimizing political opponents or casting them as enemies, or saying that the enemy is the media of the state, I think those notions are very anti-democratic and they’re not fruitful to a healthy democracy. That really scared me, because I remember growing up and hearing so much about how Castro had done similar things,” Pereira adds.
However, students are not without their doubts when it comes to Biden’s ability to represent and defend the Latinx community. While the Democratic party might make “an outward show of support,” Tretiak would be reluctant to call Biden “a great champion” for Latin-Americans. “It’s no secret that he was a segregationist,” Tretiak says, noting that Biden and Obama were “big deportation guys.” “He’s been against these sorts of civil rights legislation in the past. So when it comes down to it, I don’t think we can trust him.” Tretiak, like many Hispanic voters, also distrusts Biden’s willingness and ability to fulfill the many promises he made to Latinx voters during his campaign. Having been disappointed by Democratic candidates time and time again, he is wary of getting his hopes up for meaningful change. “They’ve been saying for years that, ‘We’re going to make it easier to immigrate here legally,”’ explains Tretiak. “And it doesn’t really happen…they’re always promising that they will look out for us, and then they never get anything done.”
Most of all, however, students take issue with the generalized approach adopted by both the Biden campaign and the larger Democratic party with regard to the individual needs within the Latinx community. Pereira, a long-time resident of Miami, Florida, notes that Biden’s campaign strategy led to devastating losses in Miami-Dade County, a key Democratic stronghold in the swing state. “One thing I think has to be addressed is that the Latinx community is not a monolith,” says Pereira. “It’s very heterogeneous, and I think Biden’s disastrous performance in Miami-Dade county is an example of that. There is a very conservative community down here…and I think that moving forward, I think it’s important to really address the individual concerns of Latinx communities.”
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that when asked what they wish people knew about Latinx voters, all three students answered the same thing: we are more diverse than you think we are. “It kind of bothers me,” confesses Villada, “when Latinx voters are all grouped into one. If you think about it, all the countries are very different with different cultures and ways of thinking. I think separating it more, at least by region, I’d say that’s my biggest thing.” Tretiak takes this one step further, arguing that the language used to define Hispanic voters is ultimately useless. “I feel like there is no actual ‘Latino voter.’ It’s not a useful category, because the Latino vote is so diverse,” he says. It is a diversity that extends far past ethnicity: as a first-generation college student in a family of immigrants, Pereira explains that “there’s a very big generational gap between voters. There is a lot of difference between immigrants and first generation born Latinos.” Villada agrees, arguing that “older Latinx people,” who frequently come from religious, conservative backgrounds, “think very, very differently from younger generations.”
While the Democratic party’s perpetual misjudgment of Hispanic voters is troubling, perhaps more troubling are the divisions the 2020 election has revealed within the Latinx community itself. Conservative Hispanics have been derided as “sycophants” and “opportunists” by their more liberal counterparts, and even accused of betraying their heritage by voting for Donald Trump. It is an attitude most students vehemently oppose: Villada argues that in order to achieve a greater degree of unity in the future, stronger, more meaningful efforts must be made to “try and understand conservative Latinx people, and not just push them to the side.” Though she doesn’t agree with conservative policies herself, she nevertheless understands where conservative Hispanics are coming from. “It is kind of frustrating when Americans—especially really liberal Americans, who don’t understand the history of communism in Cuba and socialism in Venezuela—it’s kind of irritating when they get upset at those people for not voting Democratic. You don’t understand,” the first year says. “You haven’t been through it.” But Tretiak also understands the history behind the emotion: many Hispanics, he explains, resent those who side with the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies, accusing them of “pulling up the ladder” they once used themselves. “There’s this feeling of being betrayed by someone who’s saying, ‘I came here legally, and now I want strong immigration restrictions on those bad types of immigrants’…you’re no better than us, you were just a generation before. I think that place of hurt is where that ‘you’re not a Latino’ thing is from. I guess it’s like our only thing to say against it in a moment of anger,” the senior says.
On the other side of the aisle, liberal Hispanics living in more conservative communities have also struggled with alienation and disenfranchisement. Pereira, who grew up in a conservative suburb of Miami, explains that he was labeled a “communist” by certain members of his family during the 2020 election—it was the first time this had happened in his life. “There has been a lot of tension in my household…” the senior admits. “It’s definitely not comfortable talking to family about politics. I think that there is that expectation of voting for a Republican.” He believes this tension to be damaging, a sentiment Tretiak confirms: no matter what party someone affiliates with, “this sort of exclusion is toxic, and it’s dangerous.”
So how can we escape this cycle of generalization and alienation? Pereira has a potential solution: “If we truly want to achieve a post-racial society,” he argues, “…we can’t use race as a label that identifies your political affiliation. Not every Latino votes for a certain candidate just because of race.” In other words, we have to go back to the drawing board—we have to redefine our terms, acknowledging and celebrating the diverse voices within the Hispanic community. We need to “spread a message of equality,” Villada contends, “unifying all of us.”
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