In a Nutshell: Why Are So Many Latinos Voting For Trump In 2020?

I should start off by saying that Latinos/Latinas/Latines/Latin@s/Latinxs…we’re not a monolith. In the United States, Latino/x is a very broad term that does not identify the race of a person, and is instead used as a heavily flawed classification to define where a person originates from, geographically speaking. The US Census defines a Latino as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.” Latino/x is therefore considered to be an ethnicity, and this means that there are Black Latinos, Brown Latinos, Beige Latinos, White Latinos, and everything in between. So in the US, this hugely diverse Latin demographic includes about 60 million people representing over 30 different countries, each with their own respective cultures, traditions, and languages. Now, I can’t answer this question without going over a little history.

Latin America and the Caribbean went through colonization before the US, and the European colonizers first began their conquest by exterminating entire indigenous empires, resulting in millions of deaths all across the reigon. Left with virtually no one to provide free labor for them, conquistadors from Spain and later British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and American colonizers forcibly transported millions of African slaves to countries in the “New World” starting after Christopher Columbus’ first expedition to the Dominican Republic in 1492. These Africans and their descendents were used as free labor to work on coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, and cotton plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, the construction industry, cutting timber for ships, in skilled labor, and as domestic servants. These European nations continued to drain the resources of Latin America and the Caribbean for hundreds of years, accumulating trillions of dollars in economic value.

It’s estimated that during the Transatlantic slave trade, less than 10% of African slaves were taken to the US. The rest were taken to Central + South America, the Caribbean and West Indies. The Spanish colonizers were the first to establish a European settlement in the United States in the year 1526 called San Miguel de Gualdape, located in present-day Georgia. The enslaved Africans brought by the Spanish settlers became the first documented instance of black slavery in mainland North America and carried out the first slave rebellion there.

So, things have been real messed up in these countries because of colonization, slavery, the genocide of indigenous civilizations and the erasure of their customs, histories, and languages, just like here in the US. The White supremacy that drove Spanish + European conquistadors to rape, kill, loot, and pillage our ancestors, was then passed down by their descendants to carry on the torch. With the help of the United States government and other foreign interests, this new Latin elite continued injustices towards Black and indigenous folks for years to come, up to this day unfortunately. It’s simply the same White supremacist system that has existed in the United States since the 1600s, just in a different language. White supremacy is as much a part of mainstream Latin culture + media as it is in American culture, due to our ugly colonized histories and the survival and evolution of diseases like colorism and racism.

To answer the question: there are racist Latinos who are most likely White-skinned and/or “White-passing” folks that openly and aggressively support Trump and want to uphold the White supremacist + patriarchal status quo that exists in Latinidad and all throughout The Americas (North/Central/South) and the Caribbean. There are other Latinos who are terribly misinformed by rogue news platforms, social media sites like Facebook, and WhatsApp, conspiracy theories like QAnon, who have been brainwashed into buying Trump’s hard-fist approach to terrorism, social + racial violence, and immigration. We also must keep in mind the huge role that Christianity plays within Latin culture, and point out that Trump has effectively branded himself as a “pro-life” president and by doing so, won over many conservative Christian Latino voters who place abortion and homophobia high on their list of political ideological priorities. There are also Latinos who’ve been traumatized by civil war, communist + socialist revolutions, fascist movements and military coups, as well as state-sponsored violence and corruption by the governments in their home countries. Some of these are people who have grown very distrustful of leftist politics over the past few decades and are more likely to be fear-mongered into believing the Republican-spun lie that if Trump loses this election, the US will turn into a socialist nation. Trump has also pandered to Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan voter bases by promising more sanctions and punitive actions against the socialist governments that rule their nations back home, going as far to claim that he will become “the first US President to liberate Latin America from all communist and socialist dictatorships.”

Latinos in general have not forgotten that the Democratic nominee is Joe Biden, former vice-president to Obama, who deported more Latinos than any other President in US history. To add insult to injury, there are a lot of disenfranchised Latinos who have felt that in the past, the Democratic party promised the world to them during political campaigns only to pull out the rug from under them once they’re in office, and there is truth to this claim. There are those who feel that Biden and the Democrats didn’t do a good enough job this time around at courting the votes of our unique communities and including our progressive interests within his agenda, and a case can be made for that as well. By keeping all this in mind, it’s definitely not a sure thing to expect the largest minority group in America to vote exclusively for the man who opened his 2020 Hispanic Heritage Month speech by playing Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” from his phone.