Following Donald Trump’s electoral victory, and the inevitable blame game among blue voters, it was Latinos, more than any other group, that emerged as the face of the turncoats who had thrown the Democratic Party under the bus. “Democrats should spend exactly zero political capital stopping any Trump deportation efforts,” Jonathan V. Last, editor of the Bulwark, a conservative Never Trump website, wrote on Bluesky earlier this month. “It is madness to spend capital trying to help people who are no longer a major part of your electoral coalition.”
After Joe Biden won in 2020 with less Latino support than Clinton, I warned liberals that the Democratic Party was losing blue-collar Latino men. Few listened.
Last’s sentiment summarizes well the conventional wisdom that’s dominated political thought on both sides of the aisle for some time now: Latinos care deeply about immigration, and will support whichever party touts the more liberal policies on the border. It also conveys the palpable indignance that many of Trump’s detractors have felt toward Latinos since November. The vibe is very much, “we tried to help you, now get lost.” But these reactions are all rooted in a sense of entitlement over Latino voters that itself is based on a host of assumptions in dire need of reevaluation if Democrats hope to regain their footing in the community.
The most prominent of these assumptions is that Latinos see themselves as immigrants, or, more specifically, that they recognize a shared ethnic plight in immigrants without proper documentation. The reality is, according to Pew Research, Latino immigrants constitute a shrinking number of Latinos in the U.S. Within those immigrants, 77% are documented. And even within the percentage of immigrants without proper documentation, there are resentments between groups, as illustrated in a recent ProPublica piece, where Mexican-born immigrants without proper documentation divulged contempt for Nicaraguan-born immigrants without proper documentation whom they saw as getting special treatment.
Here are some facts: Last year, President-elect Donald Trump claimed that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” he has proposed the largest deportation effort in the history of the United States, and he garnered more votes in 2024 from Latinos than any Republican presidential candidate before him. Together, these realities call for a reframing on how Democrats approach Latino identity. More specifically, they ought to bring an end to the notion that “Latino” is interchangeable with “undocumented immigrant.”
This all cuts against the crystallized belief that Latinos are immigrants, or that even immigrants without proper documentation have innate solidarity with one another. If schadenfreude is what some Democrats are after during the next Trump administration, they should be prepared to reckon with the fact that there will be a significant number of Latinos in the U.S. who would look at ramped-up deportation efforts and say, “good,” and some of those people will be recent immigrants themselves.
What should be gleaned here is not that Latinos are realigning with the right because they are conservative about the border, but that they have shifted to the right because, like most Americans, they feel insecure about their future. It’s not a matter of identity, but of material reality, and no amount of lecturing or shaming or even outright threatening will get Latinos to return to their previously more robust support of Democrats. The narrative has to shift.
What should that narrative look like? It’s almost certainly one that highlights class. As Mike Madrid said in a recent interview, “I believe the through line is the working class. That is going to be the bond that crosses the diasporas and the variations within our own generational differences as Mexicanos and Latinos.”
One example of this in action is the victory of Democrat Ruben Gallego, who defeated Republican Kari Lake in the recent Arizona Senate race by emphasizing class and support for working families. “What’s most important is for you as a candidate to be able to connect with everyday voters and make sure they understand you and see in you that you are gonna fight for them,” Gallego told the Associated Press after his win. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be the same story as me, but somehow you need to be able to connect and to be able to do it in an authentic way.”
In short, the future looks populist, and channeling that energy toward progressive policies can work, if Democrats are willing to buck their consultants and embrace the strategy. The frustration and befuddlement regarding how Latinos voted in 2024 is emblematic of the old way of thinking about Latinos. Latinos, as a group, are increasingly young and English-speaking, yet continue to be addressed as outsiders in their own country. Mass deportation won’t “punish” the vast majority of Latinos who voted for Trump. It will punish people without proper documentation, not all of whom are from Latin America. Calling Latinos traitors won’t sway any of them back toward Democrats. It’s time to let such preconceptions die and allow a class-based approach to supplant an ethnic one.
Donald Trump won the 2024 election with a historic share of the Latino vote. It’s time for Democrats to rethink essentialism.
While of course it’s easy to point out the Democratic Party’s shortcomings in how it approaches Latinos, the dirty little secret is that not even Latinos have a single concrete identity. Latinos are multiracial, multiethnic, come from a stunning array of backgrounds and experiences. Part of the reason that Democrats haven’t figured out Latinos isn’t that Latinos haven’t figured out Latinos, as evidenced by the fact that the words used to describe the community have even in recent decades changed. “Hispanic” was once the favored term. This is all the more reason for Democrats to hone in on the realities of class and abandon the outdated map they’ve been using that emphasizes immigrant identity, something that younger Latinos especially are connecting with less and less.
It could very well be the case in the future, in fact, that the entire ethnic project of Latinidad as we know it will face enough challenges that it crumples altogether. One of those challenges could be Trump’s mass deportation effort. It’s unclear if such an effort will actually materialize, or, if it does, if it will be carried out with the promised efficacy. But if anything close to it is actually acted upon, it will reveal preexisting cracks in the notion that any of these disparate cultures, experiences and immigration statuses share a common identity beyond the Spanish language.
All that remains to be seen. But what’s clear is that, today, the majority of Latinos in the U.S. do not see themselves as immigrants, without proper documentation or otherwise. Most, it seems, don’t feel seen in the first place.
JP Brammer is a columnist, author, illustrator and content creator based in Brooklyn, N.Y. He is the author of ”Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons” based on his advice column. He has written for outlets including the Guardian, NBC News and the Washington Post. He writes regularly for De Los.
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