How the Latino Far Right Came to Embrace Trump

In the 1980s, when I was in the sixth grade, my family moved from Brownsville, Texas, to a small town in central Kansas. My father had enrolled in the local Bible college for a year-long sabbatical from his pastoral role at our church. We left our home in the Rio Grande Valley and drove 15 hours north to a place where the schools, streets, and people resembled a scene straight out of a John Hughes film.

During those first few days in Kansas, I had a sense that we had arrived in the “real” America. And I loved it. I admired the manicured lawns of our new middle-class town, and how the homes all smelled like the scent of banana bread baking in the oven. It was so different than Brownsville.

In the 1980s, when I was in the sixth grade, my family moved from Brownsville, Texas, to a small town in central Kansas. My father had enrolled in the local Bible college for a year-long sabbatical from his pastoral role at our church. We left our home in the Rio Grande Valley and drove 15 hours north to a place where the schools, streets, and people resembled a scene straight out of a John Hughes film.

During those first few days in Kansas, I had a sense that we had arrived in the “real” America. And I loved it. I admired the manicured lawns of our new middle-class town, and how the homes all smelled like the scent of banana bread baking in the oven. It was so different than Brownsville.

It was also clear that we stood out. We were poor and lived in the basement unit of our apartment building. The way we spoke suddenly bothered me, too; I had never before noticed my Texas Mexican accent. That year, my embarrassment turned inward. I felt shame for being Mexican and poor, for the way we suddenly seemed to struggle with English. I was only 10 years old, but I distinctly remember feeling mortified by my identity and parents.

That experience, and those feelings, flooded my thoughts as I read Paola Ramos’s powerful new book, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America. Ramos examines how complicated histories of colonialism, displacement, violence, and immigration have shaped experiences of race and racism in the Latino community. Featuring stories from across the country, including from my beloved Rio Grande Valley, Defectors is a carefully crafted investigation into the rising tide of Latino white supremacists, border vigilantes, Christian nationalists, and others whose voting patterns defy comprehension.

How could an Afro-Latino like Enrique Tarrio be the head of a white supremacist organization? How could Mexican Americans become border vigilantes to catch undocumented immigrants? How could Latino Christians, whose own stories are marginalized, take Christian nationalist positions so antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ? How could people living in border communities vote for a presidential candidate whose entire rhetoric preyed on a fear of Mexicans, immigrants, and border culture? None of it makes sense—unless one starts to peel away at how centuries of colonialism and oppression have left a mark on all Latinos.

Proud Boys members Enrique Tarrio (left) and Joe Biggs gather during a protest in Washington on Dec. 12, 2020. Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

In his seminal essay, “Y tú, qué?” the historian George Sanchez argued that there are three histories that most Latinos share: colonialism, immigration, and racial formation. Each of these has sparked their own grassroots movements for justice, civil rights, and housing. For Ramos, these histories are central to not only understanding pan-ethnic solidarity efforts, but also the rise of the Latino far right. It’s a profound take.

Ramos breaks down each of these historical experiences to show how people internalize racism and how it turns into a fear of oneself that breeds shame. Shame is so deep that the only way out is to reject who we are; there is a sense that being or acting white will bring about greater acceptance and recognition. In extreme cases, Ramos documents how internalized racism spawns hate, anti-immigrant sentiment, and white supremacy.

“At what point along their journey,” Ramos asks, “did the victims become the perpetrators?” This question is at the heart of her book, which is at once devastating and hopeful.

Defection has always been a part of the Latino experience, Ramos writes. She is correct. Latinos fought on both sides of the U.S. Civil War (around 2,500 joined the Confederacy) and in Texas’ war of independence from Mexico. In today’s context, Latinos are joining far-right groups in growing numbers.

Ramos meets these “defectors” and interviews them. She sits with them in cars as they patrol borders, gathers with them in churches, and listens to their campaign speeches and promises. She writes about Anthony Aguero, a Mexican American who spends up to nine hours a day in his car, scanning for people moving across the desert to apprehend them and report them to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. Hate, as it turns out, can be lonely.

In bringing these stories to light, Ramos draws from a wealth of scholarship and literature about the racial and genocidal realities of colonialism. For example, she cites historian Cecilia Márquez’s work that found how “some Latinos have used their ties to Spanish colonizers as an entry point to join extremist groups.” That “fantasy heritage,” the scholar Frank Pérez argues, refers to the ways history gets romanticized to erase the violence of colonialism. Pérez’s work explores how Latinos often see themselves through a Eurocentric lens.

Ramos cites this research to prove how we internalize racism and a “proximity to whiteness.” For many of us Latinos, that’s not necessarily a revelation. The fact that the stories Ramos shares come as a shock to non-Latino readers reflects just how ignorant many Americans are about the nuances of Latino history and politics, particularly the racial and colonial baggage we carry with us.

U.S. first lady Melania Trump poses for photographs with U.S. Border Patrol agents and police officers in McAllen, Texas, on June 21, 2018.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Latinos have always had diverse political viewpoints on immigration, politics, and social movements. For example, the League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the oldest Latino civil rights organizations in the United States, excluded noncitizens when it was founded in the late 1920s. Doing so was a tactical choice, a way to claim rights as U.S. citizens, but it did so at the expense of undocumented Mexicans. What’s new about some of today’s Latino movements, however, is their alignment with far-right politics.

In Brownsville, where Mexican and American cultures come together and sometimes clash, race and citizenship are at the forefront of residents’ everyday experiences. I grew up hearing Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants call each other mojado—“wet”—or use other racial nicknames, such as chino, negro, and guero. As ubiquitous as this language was, we didn’t realize just how strong of a hold race and colonialism had on us and our identities. It took my move to Kansas for me to understood that.

This article is featured in the FP Weekend newsletter, a curation of our best book reviews, deep dives, and other reads that take a step back from the drumbeat of the news. Get the lineup directly every Saturday.

Racism is America’s “hidden wound,” according to writer Wendell Berry—a wound that’s never fully healed, and never fully treated or given an opportunity to heal. That wound has carried profound economic and political consequences for nonwhite people in the United States. It has also deeply affected how nonwhite people see themselves and their relationships to their own communities.

I grew up hearing comments from family members about the beauty of light skin and colored eyes, and about the unappealing look of dark skin and brown eyes. I remember when my cousin Irma told me how her lighter skinned sisters begged her to stop drinking coffee because they claimed it was making her skin darker. This form of colorism is not unique to the south Texas borderlands—it is practiced across Latin America and reflected in news reports, school lessons, and telenovelas. Racism is a system built on lies, saying we are less than because we are not white; becoming white, or passing as white, is the only way to escape racism’s grasp.

Ramos speaks with Aguero, the Latino border vigilante, in the opening chapter of Defectors. When asked about how he identifies—whether as Mexican American or Latino—he evades the question, as if his own identity has no bearing on his actions. Ramos’s narrative is an invitation for all Latinos to free our own “haunted minds” from the racist lie that we must “lose ourselves to find belonging.”

Internalized racism convinces us—Latinos—that we are less than. It sees assimilation and participating in white supremacist projects as pathways toward eliminating discrimination. The only remedy is to act white or reject our ethnicity for the powers that whiteness promises. Internalized racism not only redirects hate toward others not like us, but it also distorts our views of ourselves and plays into the notion that structural inequalities like racism and poverty are a result of individual choices. The idea that racism will magically disappear if we behave—if we reject an honest assessment of our nation’s history—is a fantasy with profound consequences. But then again, so is white supremacy.

Defectors is true to its title: For the most part, Ramos writes about political outliers. Toward the end of the book, she makes the case that most Latinos do not hold far-right views and are not associated with far-right movements. But the book’s broader applicability comes from its insights on how race and racism manifest within the Latino community; how colonialism still haunts us today; and how studying this history might provide us a way forward. Defectors, in other words, is a wake-up call for Latinos to take stock of why we believe what we do. Ramos is calling all of us to think more deeply about our work, our identities, and about our collective pasts. 

Defectors is a difficult read. It conjured up memories for me of that one year we lived in central Kansas and brought me back to my own story of shame and internalized racism. But it also inspired me to keep learning—and to keep growing my knowledge about the complicated group of people who all share fragmented roots in Latin America: Latinos.

In Brownsville, people carried a deep sense of pride for their Mexican roots and their American identities. Our loyalties remained tied to the land and to each other. In the end, it is those borderlands of culture that provide us the best hope for a future where, as Ramos argues, Latino political defection can turn into “unprecedented unity.”