White supremacists have used the ideas at the core of the Protocols [of the elders of Zion] in different ways over the years, replacing Jews as the source of their paranoia with other marginalized minorities. Yet the Great Replacement theory’s outlook on migrants and descendants of immigrants from Latin America has become the most consistent and vibrant manifestation of the Protocols since its initial dissemination.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is visceral. It is tribal. And it provokes a feeling that can transcend lines of race and ethnicity, because it taps into one of our most essential human traits: our core sense of identity and belonging. Contrary to public opinion, research suggests that anti-immigrant feelings are less correlated to economic anxieties and more to cultural identity. Jens Hainmueller, a professor at Stanford University, and Daniel Hopkins, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, reviewed more than one hundred studies about attitudes toward immigration from over two dozen countries. These concluded that nativism isn’t rooted in the “they are stealing our jobs and lowering our wages” narrative, but rather in native-borns’ perception that newcomers are distorting their national identity and cultural norms. Notably, their research found that natives are more concerned about whether immigrants speak the country’s native language than with their race and ethnicity. In other words, the more immigrants can appear to perfectly blend into that image of America—one characterized by unique norms, culture, and language—the less threatening they become.

Xenophobia runs so deep it can subdue even this nation’s deepest source of hate: anti-Blackness. A 2021 Cambridge University study investigated the way white people’s attitudes toward Latinos and Black Americans shifted between 1970 and 2010. Over those forty years, they found that as Mexican immigration increased, white people’s hostility toward Black Americans decreased while their disdain toward Latinos grew. In areas with high surges of Latino immigration, the gap in white sentiment toward the two groups was even more accentuated. The researchers wrote: “in parts of the United States that experienced larger increases in the population share of Mexican immigrants, we found that White Americans over time rated Black Americans more warmly on the feeling thermometer—as negative attitudes toward Latinos grew.”

• reminds me of changing opinions of Asian laborers historically also. every time a new group started becoming more prominent in immigration (Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, etc.) sentiments grew more negative and started characterizing them as worse comparatively to previous groups

In 2016, a Pew Research survey found that more than half of Latinos reported experiencing discrimination. Interestingly, their survey found that U.S.-born Latinos (62 percent) were more likely than immigrants (41 percent) to say they had experienced unfair treatment or discrimination. Perhaps because in daring to claim an American identity, U.S.-born Latinos are more likely to face barriers to inclusion and belonging—constantly having to prove that they are worthy of being considered “real Americans.”

• this first part follows a private citizen who stalks migrants to turn them in to border patrol. it's... yikes. biggest thing noted here is the difference in what these people are imagining or projecting onto migrants from latinx countries -- the phantasm at play here. even claims that this imagination and tapping into tribalism is their greatest weapon. which really has me thinking. like there's the material difference of having arms or not re: CBP, ICE, the U.S. military in general, but also how we/they decide to use them is political and ultimately comes from imagining a certain enemy. it's interesting how ideas =/= reality but ideas and imagining something different (for good or bad) are requisite for rallying groups of people to take action. to encourage others to imagine a more compassionate world, we have to figure out how to diffuse these other dog-eat-dog type of imaginations. it's seems impossible for people not to imagine stuff about another group of people (re: placing them along the axis of "threatening" vs. "nonthreatening" and likewise "belonging" or "not belonging"), so a lot of the work of arguing for human dignity and shared access to resources requires stoking an imagination that places groups of people -- hundreds and thousands of people that no individual person will get to know one on one -- into the welcome category. recalling that one ad campaign that made people more accepting of immigrants and it was through featuring a married immigrant couple talking about how they always start their morning dancing together to beyonce... none of this is new information to me but it always gives me a bit of surprise when I reconsider it again.

• people will truly go through such lengths to prove their loyalty to a system that doesn't even want them & believe that their fervent nativism will save them. people are also extremely good at pretending like their circumstances are unique and deserve a pardon

• nativism is primarily about cultural identity; many of Trump's gains were in Latino-dense areas like Imperial County of California

• Latinos are the demographic that support relocation political stunts the most

• long history of instances of siding with border police: Colonel Santos Benavides vs. Juan Cortina

• Responses to Christopher Columbus, Juan de Oñate statues is less about what people see in the colonizers/historical fact and more about what they see in themselves (re: identification)

Pérez recalls being struck by the way his Latino students would empathize more with almost any other minority because of built-in stereotypes they had about Chicanos. They would feel great compassion for the struggles of Muslims, LGBTQ+, or Black people but feel a disconnect from their own history of resistance as Chicanos. “It’s so ingrained into the culture,” he said to me, “that we don’t deserve the same treatment, or the same status, or the same accommodations.” All around us, we’ve seen people discriminate against Indigenous Latinos time and time again.

• Perez coined the term "fantasy heritage" to explain this disconnect. Latinos who want to be white adjacent seeing themselves more as "Spanish"

..in the 2020 U.S. Census, which showed that the percentage of U.S. Latinos identifying as multiracial soared from 2.6 million in 2010 to over 18 million in 2020. It also showed that the number of Latinos who identified as “white alone” significantly decreased by more than 50 percent.

• Just quoted this for the stat, not related to the above.

• Ramos says that Latinos hold both feelings of being the oppressor and the oppressed Some Latinos have used their ties to Spanish colonizers as an entry point to join extremist groups like the New Mexico Civil Guard.

Dr. Cecilia Márquez, a history professor at Duke University and author of Making the Latino South, began researching this phenomenon in 2012. Márquez spent time navigating Stormfront, a popular white supremacist online forum. There, she came across a discussion space titled “Spaniards in the U.S.,” made up mostly of people who were ethnically Latino but proudly cast themselves as being of “pure” Spanish blood. Through her research, she found that many of these members disavowed any claims to their Indigenous heritage, framing Indigenous people as “the losers” and Spaniards as “the dominant winners.” “They talk about how they are descendants of the Spanish conquerors. Their claim to whiteness is through this legacy of Spanish conquest,” Márquez told me, referring to Stormfront’s Latino users.

“I did a family tree,” Daniel said.

“So, I’m assuming there’s no Indigenous blood there…?” I said.

Daniel paused.

“Well, no… I can’t say that because my sister did a DNA test and she found out she was actually 20 percent Mesoamerican,” he said, adding, “I mean, we’re all mixed at some point…And they call us ‘white supremacists,’ believe it or not.”
Daniel was eager to move on from exploring his Mesoamerican roots, because these did not inspire the same awe, empathy, and curiosity his Spanish legacy evoked. There it was: the wound of colonization. A wound that caused Daniel to overlook his Indigenous heritage while also weaponizing it against any claims of being racist. He did it so seamlessly and, frankly, in a manner that convinced me he truly believed what he was saying. Daniel proceeded to say that “all Mexicans” were essentially Spanish and lauded the Spanish Empire for protecting Native Americans’ identity when they settled in New Mexico. “They didn’t really conquer anybody,” he said. This was the truth Daniel had been trained to believe. He places his faith in an identity viewed through the prism of Eurocentrism. While the rest of the United States told Daniel he was a “Latino” or an “other,” he grew up in an insular world that told him otherwise. His loved ones taught him about his family’s Spanish legacy; he read books about Spanish history and attended schools that were named after Spanish settlers.

...

Ironically, Daniel never felt like a minority until he reached what he viewed as the motherland, the place he expected to feel seen. While in his home state of New Mexico, Daniel created an identity based on talking, breathing, and living his Spanish heritage. Yet he did not visit Spain until 1995, at age thirty-two, and that’s where he became conscious of what made him different.

“How was that?” I asked.

“Surreal,” he responded. “In Spain, I was just another American tourist. I loved it, but I didn’t feel an emotional connection.”

I imagine it was a similar feeling to what I experienced when I visited Cuba for the first time. So much of who I was revolved around this tiny island that had, from miles away, shaped crucial parts of my identity and political views. For years, my mother’s and grandparents’ stories about communism and repression became part of my own conviction, and I treated their pain and trauma as if it were mine. When I landed in Havana at the age of twenty-seven, I was expecting to immediately feel like I was at home, but it took a while to even admit to myself that I felt slightly out of place there. It almost felt like my identity made more sense as an abstract feeling of yearning rather than being rooted in a concrete place on a map. If there is anything I learned from that trip, it’s that every fantasy is flawed and deserves to be interrogated. What, exactly, made me Cuban? Was everything I was taught as a kid true? Was it shaped by biases? These are the questions I confronted after that initial trip to Cuba. Back home from Spain, Daniel Ortiz processed his return to what he perceived as his motherland much differently. Whatever emotional disconnect he had felt there was eclipsed by a resolve to protect his fantasy heritage, which still felt real to him.

Although it is true that historically privileged lighter-skinned Cubans have migrated at higher rates, countless Afro-Cubans have also made the painful journey to the U.S. For example, during the infamous Mariel boatlift of 1980, it’s estimated that 20 to 40 percent of the Cubans who arrived on South Florida’s shores were Afro-descendants. In fact, along with New York and California, Florida has among the highest percentages of Afro-Latinos in the nation. But Afro-Latinos in the U.S. live at the intersection of race and ethnicity, and often have no choice but to navigate the country through the prism of Blackness rather than Latinidad—their cultures collapsed into the American racial binary. They’re routinely excluded from the types of privileged spaces in which I, a light-skinned Latina, grew up. That’s why, through the years, many Black Cubans who faced discrimination in Miami have ended up moving north to New Jersey, where they have felt more welcome amid its racial diversity and where there’s currently a large concentration of Afro-Cubans. And while there is a growing movement of self-acceptance among Afro-Latinos, some still remain committed to distancing themselves from Blackness. Not white, but not Black either.

One evening during high school, Led’s parents had people over at their house to watch a boxing match. Fight night was a huge part of Led’s youth. That night, several Dominican men were anxiously staring at the TV screen, raising their fists in the air as they cheered on and heckled the boxers, one of whom was Black. Led recalls that one of his father’s friends, a six-foot-four Afro-Dominican, kept making racial slurs about the Black boxer. At one point, Led looked at his dad’s friend and said: “But brother, you are Black, too.” His father’s friend paused and said: “No, soy blanco oscuro.” That translates into: “No, I am dark white.” That really stuck with Led. That moment reaffirmed just how much some members of his own community wanted to approximate themselves to whiteness, even if it meant blinding themselves to reality. Anti-Blackness runs so deep that it can distort even the reality of one’s own reflection.

According to UNICEF, most U.S. domestic trafficking victims are in fact U.S. citizens rather than undocumented immigrants, and according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the majority of fentanyl that is crossing the southern border is being smuggled through official ports of entry by U.S. citizens, not by asylum seekers.

• Latin American colonialism had a caste system of whites at the top and Black people at the bottom, along with indigenous people & the emphasis was on "mixing" aka trying to emphasize connections to whiteness. already was aware of this but it's interesting that Latin American countries are more likely to talk about indigenous roots than black roots

• Dominicans often distance themselves from blackness because they see it as representing their neighbors Haiti, which was 90% Black due to French slave trade. When the Haitians overthrew the French, they also occupied the Spanish Dominican-Republic to try to abolish slavery, and this has led to complicated feelings for Dominicans in terms of nationalist identities, and some Afro-Dominicans would rather claim whiteness through Hispanic-ness

“Antihaitianismo,” or anti-Haitianism, was elevated to state-sponsored ideology during Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship from 1930 until 1961. Early in his reign of terror, thousands of Haitians migrated across the border into the Dominican Republic in search of better opportunities and stability. Then, in 1937, Trujillo ordered his military to massacre approximately twenty thousand Haitians in the Dominican Republic, most of whom were refugees brutally murdered along the border region. According to historians, Dominicans of Haitian descent were also targeted. Trujillo’s genocide cemented a racist ideology that has since guided many of the Dominican Republic’s most controversial policies and narratives. Dominicans of Haitian descent are typically seen as “foreigners.” Dominicans born to undocumented Haitians can no longer expect birthright citizenship; countless Haitians have been deported; and the government continues to build a wall between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, much like the one Trump has championed in the U.S. Sagás has even found white supremacists in the U.S. praising the Dominican Republic’s anti-immigrant and anti-Black policies on far-right websites like VDARE. In 2022, the State Department issued a travel advisory warning “darker skinned U.S. citizens and U.S. citizens of African descent” to be careful, because the Dominican government had been detaining dark-skinned tourists under the assumption they were Haitian. The Black-dominated island has become a white supremacist’s dream.

• what????? unfathomable levels of cope here

• Black people are demonized in American media, while Afro-Latinos are mostly rendered invisible in Latin American media

In the early 2000s, a group of Latino men in California were exposed for, literally, hunting Black people. In 2006, four Latino members of the Avenues gang were convicted on conspiracy charges after brutally assaulting and murdering Black Americans over the course of six years in the predominantly Latino Los Angeles neighborhood of Highland Park. This case relied on the prosecutors’ ability to demonstrate that these Latino gang members were deliberately and systematically targeting and attacking Black Americans (none of whom were members of rival gangs), attempting to drive them out of Highland Park merely because of the color of their skin. The case marked the first time federal hate crime laws were used against a nonwhite criminal organization. In the past, the Department of Justice had employed such civil rights provisions to go after white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan or skinheads. This time, a gang of color was prosecuted as a hate group.

For instance, by the eighteenth century, the Spanish kingdom institutionalized a policy known as Gracias al Sacar, which allowed certain mixed-race individuals with African blood to purchase their whiteness through the Spanish monarchs. People could pay to reclassify their documented race and attain perceived status and wealth. That culture of racial reclassification became pervasive in Puerto Rico. During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars found that there was a collective social push to redefine “whiteness” and expand the definition of who got to be white. University of Wisconsin researchers found that nearly 100,000 Puerto Ricans who were perceived as Black in 1910 were suddenly classified as white in Puerto Rico’s 1920 census.

In 1996, about 65 percent of Americans identified as Christian and white, and by 2020 that number dropped to 44 percent. Recruiting exclusively white evangelicals, therefore, is simply not a sustainable strategy. Because Christian nationalism is as much a theological ideology as it is a political strategy, extremist Republicans can’t deny the country’s demographic shifts and are reluctantly advancing an alternate version of God’s plan by reaching out to Latinos in order to achieve their desired political outcome. To survive, the movement needs Latinos and pastors like Luis Cabrera who can effectively reach them. After all, the statistics they are noticing are shockingly encouraging: Approximately 55 percent of Latino Protestants support the Christian nationalist ideology. Black Protestants aren’t nearly so interested.

While other congregations struggle to attract young followers, at least 35 percent of the average Latino Protestant churchgoer is under the age of thirty.

• Latinos are already familiar with Christian nationalism because of colonization (Spainish conquistadors & American missionaries) and many have bought into it.

• A big draw for converting from Catholicism to Evangelicalism is the emphasis on the Holy Spirit and how it can apparently cure illnesses or past sins

• Stephen Miller has a record of hating Latinos but is now courting their vote; anti-trans fear-mongering has proven effective due to religiosity & the fact that the trans population is really small and most people don't know a trans person

• Some Latinos have even led white-supremacist organizations, such as Enrique Tarrio and the proud boys (he's even Afro-Cuban). Basically a project in asserting their masculinity When the cameras were off and no one was around us, Enrique seemed curious about my perspective and willing to see eye to eye with me on certain things. He listened. He asked questions. He seemed calm. But outside those private interactions, Enrique had a role to play. He had to exert control.

Additionally, the Proud Boys are paying close attention to the way Trump’s “macho allure” (a phrase coined by my colleague Jennifer Medina from The New York Times) seems to be driving many Latino men to part ways with progressives. In the 2020 presidential election, there was a significant nationwide gender gap among Latino voters, with Joe Biden winning women by 24 points and men by just 17 points. In Nevada, Biden won Latino men by just 6 points, and in North Carolina, Trump overwhelmingly won Latino men by 20 points.

The woman who had Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s ear and led the Miami-Dade Moms for Liberty chapter was Eulalia Jimenez, a Cuban American mother of six.

...

There were about six moms present, all of them Latinas from places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and El Salvador. Several of them were former Obama Democrats who had turned Republican for Trump. When I got there, they were all informally sitting on the floor in a circle with their legs crossed as they chatted through their agenda items.

I interrupted: “When you think of ‘Hispanic, Latina moms,’ is there something about that…that you believe aligns with Moms for Liberty?” I asked. I wanted to get a sense of the cultural parallels they drew between their own Latino backgrounds and the values espoused by their group.

“Yeah. That fire you have. That warrior drive for our kids. We all have that,” one of them responded.

“The women are nurturers, the males, you know, bring the protection,” another one said. The moms went on to discuss their top item: the LGBTQ+ community. They talked about the danger of having transgender children use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity. They implied that the LGBTQ+ community was actively sexualizing children out of “revenge” for having been discriminated against for so many years. They reinforced their opposition to having teachers openly share their own sexual orientation with their students. As the conversation evolved, Crystal Alonso, one of the members, went as far as to say that queer kids should be confined to “separate classrooms”:

“Like for example, children with autism, Down syndrome, they have to have special IEP [individualized education plan] meetings with a counselor,” Crystal said to the group.

“They have to be put into separate classrooms.”

No one said anything. Crystal kept going. “I think that for children that identify differently, there should also be like a specialized something for them.”

I interrupted again, this time to ask Crystal to say more about why gay students should be educated separately. What did she mean by a “specialized something”?

“I think for the same reason why teachers wouldn’t just bring a child with autism in front of the classroom. He’s got autism. It’s an embarrassment,” Crystal responded.

“But what is, in your eyes, embarrassing about being gay?” I asked.

“It’s not that it’s something to be embarrassed about. But, I mean, I’m sure that you understand a lot of kids that are young and feel gay are shamed,” she responded.

• this is reminding me about that person who came to book club once and talked about how someone in her mobile game community used to be staunchly pro-Trump because he was afraid of Black people taking revenge on white people.

...the architect of the Gays Against Groomers grassroots movement is actually a gay, Indigenous Latino man who goes by the name Mario Presents. He was one of the original directors of a Gays Against Groomers chapter and takes credit for singlehandedly growing the organization from an online group to a national organization. He is, in many ways, his own worst enemy.

...

As I was talking to Mario, it felt like I was talking to someone who could never fully love themselves. Who better to design the campaign for Gays Against Groomers than someone who is somewhat alienated from himself? He talked in a way that made his own oppression at the hands of homophobic forces seem justified. He told me he completely understood why the Catholic Church opposes same-sex marriage. He spoke of gay men as unhinged sexual beings who only cared about “partying, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” He reproached sexuality, slut-shaming those who enjoyed sex. And he vehemently opposed letting children know that LGBTQ+ people exist in their full humanity. It sounded to me like the voice of a son justifying all the reasons why his mother had abandoned him and, on the other hand, trying to prevent future children from suffering the same loss.

Microbiologist and science writer Bryn Nelson argues that attacks like the Club Q massacre and other abuses suffered by the LGBTQ+ community amount to stochastic terrorism, which is uniquely driven by messaging and propaganda that dehumanizes and vilifies a person or a group. Put simply, stochastic terrorism is different from other forms of terrorism in that it is provoked by a gut, visceral feeling and not necessarily by a calculated effort. “At its core,” Nelson wrote, “stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.” Nelson has spent years studying disgust, even writing a book about poop to better understand the emotion and psychology of disgust. He argues that disgust is “even more powerful than fear.” I found this fascinating.

...

According to researchers from the University at Albany, State University of New York, a large body of scholarly work suggests that disgust—rather than emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness—is actually the primary driver of dehumanization. The researchers note that the act of dehumanizing often involves drawing metaphorical links between entities we associate with humanness and entities that we associate with disgust, such as animals, diseases, or people we “other.”

• conquistadors and treating indigenous peoples with disgust for cultural differences such as in third genders

The fact is that Latin America has some of the highest rates of gender-based violence and femicides in the world, according to the Wilson Center. The Wilson Center has noted that one woman is killed due to her gender every two hours in Latin America. Additionally, Latin America is currently the deadliest region on the globe for transgender communities, according to available statistics. The deadliest country is Brazil, followed by Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela. And the average life expectancy for transgender women in Latin America is thirty-five years old, which is lower than any other social group in the world. I’ve interviewed far too many Latin American transgender women who have been victims of horrific attacks and hate crimes. The legacy of colonialism is always hovering in the background.

"“Do you know what gender is the most policed in Latin America and Latino culture today?” Mikel asked.

“Which one?”

“It’s not femininity. It’s masculinity,” he said."

• immigration and “Perennial mourning”

Experts confirm that Latinos in the U.S. are more likely to consume, spread, and receive fake news and misinformation online compared to the average population. What exactly makes Latinos so vulnerable? The simple answer is threefold: We are glued to our screens; we are thus overexposed to dangerous mis- and disinformation in a tech environment that barely has the mechanisms to monitor Spanish language falsehoods; and we are facing both domestic and foreign bad actors. The more complicated answer is: Our vulnerability may be rooted in our perennial mourning.

Latinos also over-index on news consumption on social media, especially on Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp. For instance, 47 percent of Latinos in the U.S. use YouTube as a news source weekly.

During that time, Pew Research found that Latinos’ use of digital platforms and social media increased at higher rates than that of the average population. Latinos were 57 percent more likely to use social media as a primary source of information about COVID-19 than other demographics, according to Nielsen.

• never thought about how the Internet in different languages has different levels of misinformation protection and that Spanish would be worse at this. now I'm wondering what language has the political will to combat misinformation the most

As Braga stated, tech companies have not developed a symmetrical and consistent system to take down misinformation in other languages the same way they have attempted to do for English language content, leaving false narratives to spread unchecked, even when they violate a platform’s terms of service. According to the nonprofit Avaaz, Facebook flags just 30 percent of misinformation in Spanish, compared to 70 percent in English. A 2022 Washington Post analysis found that 40 percent of Latinos who relied on Spanish language social media for their news believed that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, compared to 31 percent of Latinos who relied on English social media channels.

• I'm honestly not sure if i buy this perennial mourning and history of storytelling in face of colonial extinction explanation for why Latinos engage more with disinformation. Seems like a cultural explanation for a structural problem. What about general education etc.

Many of us assume that people desire accuracy and are driven to find what’s true. But that’s not how humans digest information, says Dr. Nathan Walter, founder and codirector of the Center of Media Psychology and Social Influence (COM-PSI) at Northwestern University. Instead, people want answers that are consistent with the stories they’ve already come to know and accept. “The only way that we can understand reality is to have some kind of a story about it, a mental model of how reality works,” Walter told me. These models are primarily influenced by lived experiences, tribal attachments, and deeply rooted ideologies. They are formed in childhood and constantly reinforced throughout our lifetime. Walter’s research shows that it’s virtually impossible to change humans’ mental models. Rational arguments are no match for the values that humans cling to as evidence of their identities.

Narratives surrounding alternative treatments were “among the most influential in Spanish-language online spaces,” according to research conducted by First Draft, a nonprofit that provided guidance on how to verify content sourced online. References to “alternative medical treatments” for COVID-19—such as supplements like hydroxychloroquine and zinc—were present in Latino communities before they were endorsed by prominent U.S. antivaxxers. Latinos were particularly likely to come across sites that suggested herbal teas and ginger-based drinks to combat the coronavirus. Even chlorine dioxide solution (CDS), a toxic bleaching agent, became a popular antidote in Latin American countries and was lauded to Latinos living in the U.S. (The Food and Drug Administration has warned consumers about these types of products, stating that “it is not aware of any scientific evidence supporting their safety or effectiveness and they pose significant risks to patient health.”) Our religiosity played a role, too. First Draft found that religious figures, like that Salvadoran evangelical pastor who offered up the purple drink recipe Rosario found on YouTube, were playing a pivotal role in spreading alternative treatments and false claims about the vaccine. That devotion they were able to capture inside churches merely transferred to online spaces.

• curanderismo (old traditional medicine)

Millions of Americans were watching Dr. Anthony Fauci broadcast in their living rooms every single day, and Time magazine was touting him as one of the year’s most influential people. But millions of others, including Rosario, had never even seen or heard of him. Rosario’s case also highlighted the underlying structural failures of the American media landscape. The problems with English language media are many and well documented. Stories about Latinos typically constitute less than 1 percent of news media coverage, according to a 2014 study by Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Similarly, Media Matters for America found that Latinos made up less than 5 percent of guest appearances on the Sunday news shows in 2015. Those Sunday show guest appearances have always been important windows for pundits to spread important messages to large audiences. But while there’s no doubt media rooms have since attempted to diversify their staff, on-air talent, and guests, the efforts don’t address the scale of the problem, given that Latinos comprise almost 20 percent of the U.S. population. Among the plethora of available channels, it’s still hard for Latinos like Rosario to find trusted and familiar messengers there. On the other hand, in the Spanish language media landscape, there is a void of information since only two major Spanish language news stations operate in mainstream media, Univision and Telemundo.

YouTube influencers and social media are displacing radio and TV as the main sources of information about Cuba among Cuban Americans living in Miami, according to a 2022 Florida International University poll. In their survey, 37 percent of respondents said they got their Cuba-related news from social media, surpassing every other medium. The poll also noted that the influencer most Cuban Americans were tuning in to was a controversial YouTuber called Alex Otaola.

In 2020, I met Otaola in his studio, where he sat surrounded by life-size cardboard cutouts of Trump. I realized over the course of our conversation that his controversial sound bites are much less powerful than his ability to transport his listeners back to Cuba. Otaola’s segments are full of insults, yelling, and wild gesticulation. But every so often he gets soft and still. It’s then that he weaves in nostalgic stories about his memories of Cuba and the island’s resilient people that resonate with his thousands of viewers. It’s then that the perennial mourning really kicks in. As he told me in his studio, “We are people that have lost hope, and from here I want my people to recover it.” I can see why he is a persuasive messenger.

• Nayib Bukele — president of El Salvador with no party affiliation and a 90% approval rating; populist president with repressive policies, much like Trump. Young and made bitcoin an official currency alongside the dollar. "Two years after his election, Bukele changed his X profile bio to say, “World’s Coolest Dictator” (he’s since changed it). That sarcastic bio description captured his character: Bukele was constantly trolling democracy."

Since taking office, Bukele worked to consolidate his power and exploit it as much as possible. He used his legislative supermajority to pack El Salvador’s highest court with his loyalists, employed intimidation tactics to pass favored bills, and defied the constitution by announcing his run for reelection in 2024 despite the constitution’s ban on consecutive terms. Eventually, by November 2023, El Salvador’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal had approved Bukele’s bid for reelection. Bukele also developed a hostile environment for the press, driving El Faro, an esteemed newspaper once based in the nation’s capital, to relocate their headquarters to Costa Rica due to the harassment and defamation they were receiving from the state. Bukele rarely held interviews with his own country’s news outlets, but he loved to sit down with Tucker Carlson when Carlson was at Fox News, fostering a Republican fan base that was mesmerized by Bukele’s tight grip on El Salvador. Yet perhaps Bukele’s most repressive and undemocratic policies are precisely why he is popular with his constituents and maintains stellar approval ratings. Through his hardline crackdown on gangs, Bukele managed to achieve security in El Salvador. But he did so at the expense of civil and human rights.

Not too long ago, El Salvador was often referred to as the murder capital of the world by mainstream media due, in large part, to brutal gang violence plaguing the country. For decades, groups like MS-13 and their rival Barrio 18 terrorized neighborhoods, killing countless citizens, and forcing thousands of people to flee the Central American country. On March 26, 2022, just a couple of years into Bukele’s presidency, over sixty people were killed in the country of 6.3 million, making it the deadliest day on record since the end of El Salvador’s civil war in 1992. The following day, Bukele declared a state of emergency and unleashed a set of policies that raised serious concerns in the international community. Bukele extended his special powers, deployed the military to the streets, arbitrarily rounded up and arrested thousands of men (having a tattoo or being related to a gang member was good enough reason for targeting), and detained them in inhumane conditions in overcrowded jails.

Shortly after Bukele began his massive crackdown, approximately 100,000 people were incarcerated—up to 2 percent of El Salvador’s entire population. By December 2022, Human Rights Watch found widespread human rights violations had taken place during Bukele’s mass arrests, including arbitrary detentions, torture of detainees, deaths in custody, and lack of due process. And, by 2023, Bukele was tweeting videos of thousands of barefoot, tattooed men in white boxers and shackles as they were being transferred to his newly constructed mega-prison. He was proudly and unapologetically showing off his captives to the world. The footage reminded me of the gruesome images of detainees being held in Abu Ghraib, images that would end up becoming proof of the U.S. government’s human rights abuses.

• Ramos draws a comparison between Bukele and a “caudillo,” a “Spanish or Latin-American military dictator,” referring to the type of leaders that emerged from Latin America’s wars of independence against Spanish colonizers in the early nineteenth century, and specifically to Simón Bolívar, who liberated Venezuela, as well as Colombia, Panama, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, while also concentrating authority in the hand of a small, lettered, and largely Creole elite under what a political scientist has called "Republican Imperialism." This type of hero/dictator has been true for many Latino countries.

Throughout the twentieth century, Latin America saw another wave of autocratic figures. By the 1970s, seventeen out of twenty countries in Latin America were under some form of dictatorship. This included right-wing military rules in Chile under General Augusto Pinochet, in Brazil under Emílio Garrastazu Médici, and in Paraguay under General Alfredo Stroessner, as well as communist rule in Cuba under Fidel Castro and a leftist regime in Peru under Juan Velasco Alvarado.

• Basically, people are chasing the idea of safety. This is also the appeal of Trump to a lot of them; many people don't care about democracy and just want to believe that there will be a strongman who will do away with all the scary figures & don't want to think too hard about the collateral damage. It's not hard to understand if the only kind of violence you're focused on is gang violence & not violence by the police and state; some of these people have had relatives die from gang violence, so it's easy to see how they rate that as more of a concern than thinking about the unfortunate innocent person that gets tortured for no reason by the state in the crackdowns.

I was taken aback when I heard Evelyn’s comments about Trump. They were unexpected. Evelyn was a queer, longtime Democratic voter whose parents had once been undocumented, and I naively assumed nothing could veer her toward Trump. Even Evelyn was surprised by her own comments. But she had made a seamless and seemingly unconscious connection between Nayib Bukele and Donald Trump. In my view, the tie between Bukele and Trump wasn’t necessarily based on ideology, politics, or policy preferences, but rather on the image both men evoked in Evelyn’s mind: that of a strongman and enforcer. Of someone “in charge.” Of a Latin American caudillo.

Some scholars have even pointed to the effects of colonization and Catholicism in Latin America, characterized by its long history of violence and forced assimilation, as another underlying reason why some citizens may naturally submit to authority. All of this tracks with some of the most recent polling coming from Latin America. For example, approximately 40 percent of Latin Americans would tolerate a military coup under certain conditions, such as high corruption, according to a 2021 AmericasBarometer public opinion survey conducted by Vanderbilt University. A similar survey produced by Latinobarómetro, another annual public opinion survey that involves over nineteen thousand interviews across eighteen Latin American countries, found that less than 50 percent of Latin Americans agree with the notion that “democracy is preferable to other forms of government.” In El Salvador specifically, just 28 percent of the population fully supports the idea of democracy.

In 1815, Bolívar, who has long been compared with George Washington, wrote:

The American States need the care of paternalistic governments which can cure the ulcers and wounds of despotism and war. Bolívar was implying that strongmen were the solution for a people who had been controlled and damaged by other strongmen. One man could take out the other man, or replace other forms of governance. But what stuck with me most was his use of the word “wounds.” Those wounds, it seemed to me, were the real source of the strongman’s power. Those wounds alluded to the depth of the pain political trauma can inflict on humans—loss of land, unpredictable change, violence, death—driving many to embrace strongmen out of emotion and not logic. As Bolívar foresaw, those wounds could become the strongman’s justification for the abuse of power.

In the U.S., there are millions of Latinos walking around with open wounds, like Ivan, Evelyn, and their families. These are people who have escaped brutal violence and fled communism or other endless sociopolitical instabilities. Those Latinos don’t leave their trauma behind; they carry it with them and can thus become susceptible to the appeal of strongman rule in the U.S. For years, I’ve analyzed Latino voters as either Republicans or Democrats, when perhaps the more accurate way would have been to treat them as victims of trauma. That’s why I reached out to Dr. Jessica Cerdeña, a medical anthropologist and family physician who studies health justice, to help me understand the way immigrants’ political wounds manifest in American politics. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines trauma as an emotional response to a terrible event.

Dr. Cerdeña carries this definition into her work by viewing political trauma as a disruptive incident that can change the way humans perceive their environment and their attitude toward the future. As she explained, this type of trauma can be caused by many things, including natural disasters, gang violence, corruption, repressive regimes. When the negative experiences accumulate to the point that a person decides to leave their home country, it’s clear that the buildup of trauma propelled them to try to escape those conditions. “When it [negative moment] arrives on your doorstep,” Dr. Cerdeña told me, “that’s when it becomes deeply personal.” More than 75 percent of migrants from Latin America to the U.S. report histories of trauma, which can be passed down through generations, according to research Cerdeña compiled in her report, Intergenerational Trauma in Latinxs: A Scoping Review. From a clinical framework, she explained that the symptoms of political trauma can manifest in hyper-vigilance of one’s surroundings, intrusive memories, and nightmares. It’s a form of PTSD.

• At this point, Ramos doubles back to one of the previous examples, Eulalia from Miami-Dade Moms for Liberty, and realizes that her primary motivation comes from her dad, who fled Castro's Cuba and kept talking about communism takeovers. She was apolitical until the COVID-19 restrictions, at which point her generational trauma flared up, and she became convinced communism was taking over. She compared all Democratic policies (such as the Green New Deal) and cultural hot-button topics (like teaching about slavery or gender) to communism. This led her to support DeSantis.

It’s easy to become frustrated with people like Eulalia, who support leaders and policies that go against the very democratic values she claims to protect. Her actions are contradictory. However, can we really blame Eulalia? American history tells us that its governments haven’t just rewarded anticommunist behavior but also normalized violence against communists and “the left.” In fact, the U.S. has historically treated anticommunism as the paramount political goal, leveraging that trauma suffered at the hands of communist regimes to win support for controversial interventions in Latin America that have supported right-wing strongman rule. Ignited by the Cold War and the fear of communism spreading through the West, the U.S. government was covertly and overtly involved in a series of military operations against left-leaning governments in Latin America from the 1950s through the 1980s. Anticommunism hasn’t just been an ideological platitude; it’s always been the ultimate representation of American patriotism. It’s an identity.

• Salvador Allende and Pinochet's coup (supported by the U.S.)
• Reagan's positioning of the U.S. as in a war against communism/the USSR, interference in Nicaragua — Iran-contra
• Interviewed Felix Rodriguez from the CIA, who assisted in trying to assassinate Castro, Guevara's assassination, El Salvador's civil war 1979-1992.
• Trump calling Democrats socialists & communists has earned him Latino votes; red-baiting still works for them.

A postmortem 2020 election report produced by Equis Labs revealed how effective these types of attacks were. The report found that approximately four in ten Latino voters were concerned about the Democratic Party embracing socialism and leftist policies. Most importantly, Latino voters were more worried about Democrats moving to the left than about Republicans espousing fascism and nondemocratic policies.

Exploiting people’s pain is, after all, an incredibly cruel and effective strategy. In 1984, during a White House address, Ronald Reagan famously said, “Latinos are Republican. They just don’t know it yet.” That phrase alluded to the fact that Reagan fundamentally believed that Latinos were conservative people in their hearts, moved by traditional values, faith, patriotism, and, of course, anticommunism. But looking back, I now see a different meaning behind Reagan’s words. As Reagan gave those remarks, the U.S. was backing Pinochet in Chile, involved in El Salvador’s civil war, and on the verge of funding the contras in Nicaragua. I wonder if Reagan foresaw, back then, that generations of Latinos could be conditioned to rely on strongmen as their rulers. Is that what he was implying? For decades, many Latinos have been led to believe that the fundamental solution to their problems and defeat of their enemies was the strongman. Throughout American history, different administrations used the guise of fighting communism and instability to justify foreign policy interventions, legitimize violence, and, ultimately, support dictators. Generations of Latin Americans were forced into thinking that the strongman was the cure to all political woes and wounds, as Simón Bolívar predicted. This may have had some immediate short-term effects, but in the long run, America’s foreign policy created fertile grounds for the steady rise of authoritarianism, not just in Latin America, but in our own backyard.

In 2020, Enrique was seen at several protests wearing military body armor along with a cryptic patch that read “RWDS,” which is short for “Right Wing Death Squad.” At that point, it became increasingly common to see Proud Boys wearing “RWDS” patches, which were often described as “neo-Nazi symbols” by the media. But they were more than that. The specific reference to being part of a “death squad” was part of Enrique’s and the Proud Boys’ unique fascination with Pinochet and other far-right Latin American strongmen. During his dictatorship, Pinochet ordered “death flights” to rid the nation of leftists and communists. The regime’s actions included tossing hundreds of bodies out of helicopters into Chile’s oceans, lakes, and rivers. Other South and Central American governments and paramilitary units carried out similar actions in the 1970s and ’80s to forcibly “disappear” political opponents; thus the term “RWDS” was used to label those who carried out these assassinations. “RWDS” mentions reemerged among extremist groups in the U.S. in the mid-2010s and took hold once the Proud Boys took off after Trump’s 2016 win. As Dr. Heidi Beirich, cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said to me about the Proud Boys: “They really turned Pinochet almost into a fetish.”

Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, did one of the most extensive analyses of the demographic makeup of the January 6 insurrectionists. He found, contrary to popular belief, that the majority of the insurrectionists weren’t unemployed, poor, or residents of conservative, rural states. Rather, many of them were middle-class white professionals hailing from blue states and counties with declining white populations. What united these people? Pape’s national survey found that the top motivating factor among the insurrectionists was the Great Replacement theory: the delusion that they were losing power in the face of a growing minority population. By January 2021, Latinos had become the largest minority group, Black and brown people were fundamentally changing the nation’s politics, and immigrants were continuing to integrate into the very same neighborhoods the insurrectionists inhabited. Generations of Anglo Americans felt endangered by that prospect.

• Gabriel Garcia, livestreaming while storming the Capitol. Goes into his family's history and how his parents were from the Pedro Pan operation from Cuba and had a deep resentment towards Castro.

The image America has of us doesn’t necessarily translate into the image many Latinos have of themselves. Americans may see us as minorities, but many feel like the majority. They may see us as immigrants, but many feel like border vigilantes on the inside. They may see us as Black, but many feel white. They may see us as Indigenous, but many feel like Spaniards. They may see us as liberal on paper, but many feel conservative in their hearts. They may see us as people who value democratic ideals, but many yearn for the authoritarian strongman. The path toward finding ourselves in this country has never been linear. In our quest to find belonging in America, many Latinos are quietly oscillating between identities, spaces, and stories that are often disconnected and at odds with each other.

• Two vignettes of people who changed their minds and deradicalized: Raul Rodriguez (discovered he was undocumented after working as a Border Patrol agent for two decades because his family lied to him and forged his birth certificate); Christopher Monzon (ex-member of League of the South white supremacist group who started rethinking it after he was being taken to jail and a Black man asked him, “And this is where it got you?” and being told by a few members at a conference that he didn't belong)

The Border Patrol carries the legacy of Texas’s original police force, the Texas Rangers, which set a national model for law and order and border enforcement. Founded in 1835, the Rangers hunted for enslaved Black people and murdered Native Americans. During the early twentieth century, they fueled mass violence against immigrants and Mexican residents along the southern border, lynching and executing Latino Texans and Mexicans, as well as raiding and looting their homes. The historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has noted that the Rangers’ past influenced Border Patrol’s tactics when the federal agency was established in 1924.

In that moment, Chris gained something he yearned for during his entire childhood: belonging. Even though part of him knew he was different from the rest of the members, Chris was able to rationalize his association with the League of the South by simply pointing to history. Before the Civil War broke out, the South had advocated for the annexation of Cuba into the U.S. During that period, Cuba was becoming the colony with the largest number of enslaved people in Latin America, and Southerners wanted to expand their slave states. During the Civil War era, the South continued to believe that the preservation of slavery in Cuba was key to the Confederacy’s own mission, and they even shipped their own enslaved people to the island. Yet what Chris was most proud of was the fact that a significant number of Cubans had fought with the Confederacy during the war. Among them was Ambrosio José Gonzales, who first fought to liberate Cuba from Spanish rule and then fought as a Confederate Army officer in the U.S.

...

Chris even realized that his own heroes, those Cubans who fought with the Confederacy, never made it to the highest ranks of white power after all. His main hero, Confederate Colonel Ambrosio José Gonzales, who was the highest-ranking Cuban officer, was repeatedly denied promotion to brigadier general despite having a stellar record. It turns out the story of the “Cuban Confederate” was always better in fiction than reality.

It turns out that Raul’s family is originally from Coahuila, a northern Mexican state that became a place of refuge for many enslaved people from the American South. After years of slavery under colonial Spanish power, Mexico fully abolished slavery in 1837, nearly thirty years before the U.S. outlawed it with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Historians like Alice Baumgartner, author of South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War, estimate that anywhere between three thousand and five thousand enslaved Black Americans escaped to northern Mexico. This included people from Texas, but also from states like Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas.