SEEKING A HOMELAND: WHY LATINES VOTED FOR TRUMP
Speak English in this car!
I was shocked to hear those words come from my father’s mouth. This was the man who, while I was growing up, taught me about Brown Pride and Chicano Power, who reminisced about marching in Denver with Russell Means, who taught me that the teachers’ strange preference for the blond haired, blue-eyed children in my elementary school over people who looked like us was racism. My dad doesn’t know Spanish, and my facility with it is laughable, but a few years ago, I decided it was important to be able to speak with my grandparents in their native tongue. While questions about colonizer languages remain, not being able to speak Spanish felt like a barrier between me and my ancestral roots. I was taking the opportunity to speak to my abuelita in my mangled Spanish as we drove from Wyoming to Colorado. All five of us in that car were Chicano (U.S. citizens of Mexican descent). All five of us were proud of our heritage but, in that moment, my father embodied whiteness in a way I had not experienced from him before.
Though hearing my father demand this was shocking, in a way it made sense. I don’t know what his voting habits were when I was a child, but he has been drifting right for a while. By the time I left my home in 2008, he was an unashamed George W. Bush supporter. This rightward drift is not unique to my father. In 2016, Donald Trump only received 28% of the Latine vote, but in 2024, he won an unprecedented 43%. Why would Latine immigrants and their children vote for a person over against their own community's well-being? Again, this may feel shocking, but it’s not surprising, at least not from within the Latine community. (1)
Donald Trump embodies a kind of machismo that resonates well with Latines. Like everything else in the quasi-mythical “Latine culture,” machismo is a debated term but, by and large, it speaks to the ideal Latino man. On the positive side, a man with machismo embodies “courage, presence of mind, generosity, stoicism, heroism, [and] bravery,” while on the negative side, it is characterized by the domination over family, arrogance, narcissism, misogyny, and a “supermanliness that conceals an inferiority complex.” (2) Both the so-called positive and negative sides of machismo are rooted in Spanish patriarchalism, which places a high value on European (White) male superiority. (3) There’s an old inside joke that Latin Americans love a good dictator, a man who can be patriarch for the whole nation, and Donald Trump fits that bill.
Deeper than the appeal of machismo, I believe, is the desire for a sense and place of belonging. Latines living in the United States often wrestle with their sense of identity and belonging. Liminality is an ever-present and undeniable part of Latine existence in the United States. Though I am four generations away from Mexico on both sides of my family, I have ancestral roots in New Mexico long before it was part of the United States. So, what am I? By birth, I’m a citizen of the US, but what about by culture? I’ve wrestled to answer this question over the years. I’ve answered Mexican, Mexican-American, and Chicano, all the while understanding that the Mexican culture I’m most familiar with is distinctly New Mexican. Existing in this liminality can be beautiful, but navigating it can often be painful and exhausting. Ever since Spaniards have been raping and sleeping with Indigenous and Black women on this continent, there has existed a racial stratification that is easier to give in to than resist.
Shortly after the conquests took root, the Spaniards implemented a highly-stratified racial organization system called the Casta. Providing paintings for visual reference, they created a racial hierarchy with “pure blood” Spaniards at the top, followed closely by criollos, those of “pure” Spanish blood but born in the New World. After that were many layers of mixed blood and ancestry. Those with a closer approximation to Europe were quite literally thought to be better than those with la sangre de los indios, the blood of Indians. Even worse were the mulattos, those with African blood. Though the system would be legally dismantled through the various independence movements, the Casta remains present in Latine self-perception from the southern tip of Chile all the way into the United States. This is exacerbated in the US because of the country’s obsession with racial stratification, not on many levels, but two: Black and White.
In the US, we’re not tempted to approximate “Spanishness,” but whiteness. This is not about skin color, but a way of being that is ritualized through colonial lifeways. It is a way of being that seeks to dominate and homogenize, erasing any culture or people that stands in the way of a hegemony craving ever more wealth and power. Decolonial theologian, Willie Jennings, characterizes this tendency as the “image of the white self-sufficient man…defined by possession, mastery, and control.” (4) Whiteness stands at the border of Latine liminality and beckons to us like Lady Folly from the book of Proverbs. Embracing whiteness is appealing to us because it promises a way out of liminality into a (perceived) place of stability and belonging. Whiteness says, “I know you don’t feel like you belong anywhere, but you can belong here, with us.” Yet, in order to do so, we must embrace whiteness as a way of being.
It was whiteness that manifested in my father’s words that day in the car. It is this whiteness that causes immigrants of many nationalities and cultures to identify their kin as “illegals” and “criminals.” By embracing whiteness, we (Latines) prove to the United States that we too belong here. Studies suggest that anti-immigrant sentiment is rooted in nativism and cultural identity more than anything else, and Latines in the US strongly embrace this nativism because we seek belonging. (5) The dominant culture of whiteness has made it clear we don’t belong while simultaneously offering this way in. We can finally cross the border out of our liminality into the homogenizing embrace of whiteness.
This is not the only story told by the Latine community, though As long as Spanish, Indigenous, and Black blood have been mixing, there have been resistance movements from within our borders. Even though Christianity came to the continents via colonization, God has shown his faithfulness to the Latine people by meeting us, if not because of colonization, in spite of it. We have learned the way of Jesus from the Holy Spirit herself, and liberation and resistance movements have grown from that good soil. This is true even from within the colonizers themselves. Among the first Christian resistance leaders was the monk Bartolomé de las Casas, a slaveholder in the Caribbean. While preparing for a sermon, he was struck by the fact that he, a priest, had gained so much wealth and power through the subjugation and murder of Native people. He experienced an awakening, and for the next fifty years he advocated for fairer treatment of Native peoples and the abolition of their enslavement, even getting the Spanish Crown to abolish the encomienda system in 1542. (6)
There are other stories too, like that of Garcilaso de la Vega the Incan, who embraced his status as a mestizo (mixed-blood) proudly and chronicled his people’s history in order to save their memory and legacy. Or more recently, those of Delores Huerta and César Chávez, who founded the United Farm Workers Association in the 1960s, the longest-enduring and largest farmworkers union in the US. We should also remember Archbishop Oscar Romero, who stood against government violence and oppression of the poor. His work was built on the teachings of Jesus, and he declared this publicly and proudly. For three years, while priests, nuns, and other religious workers under his care were martyred, Romero advocated for the poor and prophetically criticized the powers that be with very little support from the Vatican. Bishop Romero was martyred while celebrated Mass on March 24, 1980. (7)
Over against the story of Manifest Destiny and colonialism, the Gospel stands as a story of radical inclusion and belonging. The promise of Acts 2 is that the community that gathers around Jesus would be made of people from all over the world who speak different languages, that their unity would be found in the sharing of Jesus’ broken body and spilled blood. Christian resistance against the imperial mood of Trump and his administration looks like a people who embrace the Sermon on the Mount, who advocate for the poor and marginalized, who welcome the stranger instead of turning her away. Christian resistance in a Latine mode means embracing our liminality and loving our neighbor as ourselves, undocumented or otherwise. Once upon a time, we loved ourselves enough to do the hard work of making a place for ourselves in this land, and Christian charity demands we do the same for those who sojourn here as well.
I must say here that talking about “Latines” is rife with problems and difficulties. We come from many different cultures, countries, and regions, with more or less proximity to indigeneity, whiteness, or blackness. We are liberals, conservatives, capitalists, socialists. We practice Christianity, traditional spiritualities, or any number of religions, and some of us are even atheists. Anything I say about Latine people as a group is said with humility and reverence for the many experiences and histories that have led us here.
Paredes, Américo. “The United States, Mexico, and ‘Machismo.’” Journal of the Folklore Institute 8, no. 1 (1971): 17–37. https://doi.org/10.2307/3814061.
Quiñones Mayo, Y., & Resnick, R. P. (1996). The Impact of Machismo on Hispanic Women. Affilia, 11(3), 257-277. https://doi.org/10.1177/088610999601100301
Jennings, Willie James. After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Chicago: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020. Accessed February 28, 2025. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Ramos, Paola. Defectors: The rise of the Latino far right and what it means for America. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2024. 23.
Romero, Robert Chao. Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity. Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2020. Accessed February 28, 2025. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Romero, Robert Chao. Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity. Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2020. Accessed February 28, 2025. ProQuest Ebook Central.
