Latino Defectors
An excerpt from Defectors by Paola Ramos
The release of Paola Ramos’s new book, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for America, could not be more timely. While a majority of Latino voters voted for Kamala Harris for president, this election saw a stark rightward shift in the Latino vote. An exit poll conducted by Edison Research showed that Trump support among Latino voters increased 14 percentage points from 2020. Latinos are certainly not to blame for Trump’s win (cough cough, White men and women), but their shift to the right had, and will continue to have, a major impact on American politics.
To start to win back their trust and their vote, the Democratic Party needs to better understand why so many Latinos have been defecting to vote in favor of conservatives. In Defectors, Paola Ramos does just that. She explores how tribalism, traditionalism, and political trauma have influenced the rise of far-right ideologies among Latinos. A complicated legacy of Latin American politics, colonialism, and internalized racism have all contributed to this shift. For example, Ramos explains how some Latinos believe they must distance themselves immigrant roots and lean “into the whiteness” in order to secure their place in the US, driving them towards white supremacy sentiment.
Ramos ends her book on a note of hope, illustrating a future in which Latinos embrace their complex history and identities in a move toward collective liberation, rather than fear and polarization.
We hope you enjoy the introduction of Defectors below. You can purchase a copy of her book online or at your local book store and you can follow Paola Ramos on Instagram @paoramos to learn more.
xx Tamar and Jill
Introduction: Latino Defectors
“Close your eyes,” said President Joe Biden, imploring Americans to go back to that day. “What do you see?” He was on national TV addressing a divided nation a year after the January 6 insurrection, in which more than two thousand people stormed the U.S. Capitol. When people closed their eyes, they probably saw a sea of violent white Americans clenching their fists and contesting the 2020 election results, fueled by a desire to preserve their diminishing power amid America’s rapidly changing demographics. Or, in Biden’s words: “Rioters rampaging, waving for the first time inside this Capitol a Confederate flag that symbolized the cause to destroy America, to rip us apart.” But in my mind, I zeroed in on the Latinos—inconspicuous among the vast, loud crowd—a significant number of whom were also present that day to make their voices heard.
That curiosity is what prompted me to attend a small press conference in downtown Miami held the same day as President Biden’s address. When I arrived at around 4:00 p.m., a small crowd of Latino MAGA supporters were gathered outside of Miami’s federal courthouse, waiting for the event—meant to commemorate the anniversary of the Capitol riot—to begin. I wanted to make eye contact with the Latino insurrectionists.
They were young, old, brown, light-skinned, former Democrats and lifelong Republicans. Among them were members of Moms for Liberty, the right-wing “parental rights” group; the Proud Boys, an extremist white supremacist organization; the Miami Springs Republican Club; as well as ordinary Latinos hiding behind large sunglasses, black masks, and baseball caps. Some of them had attended the January 6 rally without entering the Capitol building, while others had never even set foot in Washington, D.C., but all found common ground in their support of the insurrection. After a short prayer vigil to honor rioters who had been sentenced to prison, Gabriel Garcia took the podium. All eyes were fixed on him.
Garcia was one of the people who appeared in my mind when I closed my eyes and thought about that day. He was a Cuban American from South Florida who had violently stormed the Capitol, proudly livestreaming his journey through the building on Facebook. Footage from that day shows Garcia basking in glory, perhaps elated to be accepted into the crowd of white supremacists. Yet, that January afternoon in Miami, Garcia, who had a Miami accent and immigrant parents, took a more somber tone as he reflected on and justified his presence at the Capitol. “If we don’t agree with the left, or the media’s bias, we get called ‘white supremacists’ or ‘racists,’” Gabriel told attendees and a few journalists present. He paused before adding, “Let me tell you something, there’s nothing racist about a guy called Gabriel Garcia.” His supporters nodded their heads or raised their American flags to the sky in agreement. That a Latino could be a white supremacist, or a racist was simply unfathomable.
Fourteen months after that press conference, on May 4, 2023, an Afro-Latino man who had as a boy dreamed of becoming a spy was found guilty of seditious conspiracy for his role in the insurrection. Throughout the years, I had followed Enrique Tarrio’s journey as the chairman of the Proud Boys, interviewing him as he became increasingly radicalized and obsessed with the illusion of white power. Even though Enrique would repeatedly deny he was a white supremacist—at times by noting that he was at least 40 percent Afro-descendant—he had turned into one of the far right’s most ardent spokespersons. Enrique wasn’t physically present at the riot, but the jury determined that he had played an even more significant role that day: He was one of the masterminds behind the insurrection.
Merely two days after Enrique’s conviction made national headlines, leaving pundits aghast that a Latino could carry such weight on the far right, thirty-three-year-old Mauricio Garcia made his way to the Allen Premium Outlets, just thirty minutes outside of Dallas. Immediately after stationing his car in the parking lot, Garcia got out and started walking toward people with his AR-15 in hand. From across the parking lot, Beatriz Leon, a Guatemalan woman, and her sister heard Garcia yelling, and then start firing at people, seemingly indiscriminately. Panicked, Beatriz quietly got inside her car, grateful that she had left her three young daughters at home. Garcia murdered eight people and wounded seven before he was eventually shot and killed by a police officer. After the carnage, Beatriz and her sister were safely escorted from the crime scene.
Digging into Garcia’s background in the aftermath of his death, the Texas Department of Public Safety quickly learned that he was a neo-Nazi sympathizer and self-described “full blown white supremacist.” He had left behind a long trail of social media posts and handwritten notes that painted a picture of a young brown man tormented by his identity, attempting to reconcile his Latino background with his white supremacist ideals. According to the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, Garcia had once posted a meme that depicted Latino children at a crossroads faced with the choice to either turn left toward “act Black” or right toward “become white supremacist.” Garcia had always chosen to turn right.
A year after the shooting, Beatriz told me that she still feels traumatized—frightened by loud noises and the darkness of nightfall. She has only been able to go back to the Allen mall once and doubts she’ll ever return. It’s too hard. To this day, Beatriz’s sister refuses to go out to public spaces where large groups of people gather, like malls or movie theaters. Both women are still terrified. And knowing that the shooter was Latino adds a layer of betrayal. “It hurts, knowing that we are the same,” Beatriz said when I asked how she felt after finding out that the shooter was a white supremacist Latino. “How is it possible that you can have so much hate in your heart towards your own people?”
From Gabriel Garcia to Enrique Tarrio to Mauricio Garcia, it’s clear that Latinos, too, can be white supremacists. We can espouse and push principles, systems, and beliefs that uphold racial hierarchies and preserve structural racism. I am convinced that the vast majority of the nearly 64 million Latinos in this country are driven by a desire for social justice and equality. As Latinos, our ancestors’ journeys to the U.S., although individually unique, were all sparked by the promise of greater freedoms. I believe those shared roots are what make us empathetic, open, and compassionate people. Yet, those roots are also what hold us hostage to our past—a past that’s marked by racial baggage, colonial traditions, and political traumas that can evoke a proclivity to white supremacy as we find our place in America. Gabriel, Enrique, and Mauricio are extreme, violent examples of this tendency, but their stories reflect the forces many Latinos are caught between—that of embodying a multiracial America or a white supremacist one; that of being victims or perpetrators; colonized or colonizers. As you’ll see in this book, Latinos, like all Americans, are caught between the pulls of progressive and ultraconservative political beliefs. We, too, dance on this spectrum.
The truth is that we are constantly negotiating the pressures of racial, cultural, and/or political assimilation. The day I got my acceptance letter from Barnard College, the big white envelope also included a welcome package for students of color. I was shocked to receive it. I remember asking my mother if she thought the admissions department had made a mistake: “Who do they think I am?” As a fair-skinned, seventeen-year-old first-generation Latina born in Miami, where being Latino was the norm, most people I grew up with looked and sounded like me: We all spoke English with a slight accent, spoke Spanish at home with our families, and lived unselfconsciously in the world as privileged white people. Unlike darker-skinned Latinos and Afro-Latinos in different parts of the country, many of us were never forced to question our racial and cultural identities. To suddenly feel othered, as Barnard’s welcome package seemed to indicate, just made me want to assimilate even more.
It wasn’t until I stepped onto Barnard’s campus in New York City that I realized that the image I had of myself was different from the way America saw me. As a light-skinned Latina with a Cuban mom and a Mexican dad, I had never really thought about myself in racial terms. In Miami, I lived in a Latino bubble where both class and skin-color privilege insulated me from my differences from mainstream America and distinguished me from other Miami Latinos often marginalized from the community, such as Afro-Cubans. This bubble of privilege burst on the first day of classes. While most of my peers took the mandatory freshman-year English Seminar in different auditoriums, I was told to go down the hall to the English as a Second Language classroom. I remember how ashamed I felt walking down that hall and how much I wanted to turn back toward the sea of white American students. Wasn’t I supposed to be with them? Weren’t they what success in America looked like, the very success I was being sent to an elite Northeastern college to achieve? Yet the moment I opened the door of the small classroom where ESL classes were being held and sat at a table full of first- and second-generation Mexican, Dominican, Salvadoran, Black, and brown students, I felt more at home than I ever had.
That classroom is where I became aware of myself as part of a national Latino community; where I became aware of myself racially and not just ethnically; where I became responsible for the privilege my skin, class, and immigration status carried; and where I started to understand how beautifully complex Latino/Latinx identity is in America. More importantly, it’s where I developed a sense of Latino solidarity and allegiance. Regardless of background, skin color, or class position, we had a bond defined by what you couldn’t see: All of us were building on our families’ legacies in America and bound together by the slippery concept of “Latinidad.” Our ancestors, grandparents, and parents left everything behind in search of freedom and opportunity. Some left because of poverty, others disillusioned by revolutions, and many to flee violence. They left by rafts and boats, by plane or by walking across borders. And they stayed and built lives here, even as the freedom they sought ended up being harder to grasp than they imagined when they bought into the American dream.
So, for the first time in my life, on that Upper West Side campus, not only was I aware of what made me different, I was proud of it. But what if, at that crossroad, I had refused to go down that Barnard hallway with the other Latino students? What if, like Mauricio Garcia’s online meme suggested, I had turned right toward the room that was less racially and ethnically diverse? That choice could have set me off on a different path in life, distinctively shaping my views and future. I would not have been alone. Defection has always been part of the Latino story in this country. That is why we can’t turn a blind eye to it now.
Copyright © 2024 by Paola Ramos. Published by Pantheon, a division of Penguin Random House.
Thanks for this. I just acquired the book!