22 Nov Trump Got Elected Again. My Fellow Latinos, We Need to Talk

Latinos show support for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. (Voice of America via Wikimedia Commons / public domain)

Commentary, Joseph De La Cruz

It’s cooked btw lmao, not looking good

Idk I’m losing hope 

I stared at my phone on the evening of Nov. 5, trying hard to keep the hope. We have to be patient, I told myself, trying not to see the writings that were on the wall.

In the span of 20 minutes between that first text from my brother and the one from my best friend, that hope was sucked out of me. It felt like a punch to the gut. I was on the floor, trying to get up, not ready to accept defeat.

>>>Read: Mexican American Young Woman Calls Election ‘a Punch in the Face’<<<

By 10:40 p.m., I told my family to turn off the news. I knew we needed a miracle, for Pennsylvania to go blue. But it didn’t look like a miracle was going to happen.

By the time I decided to go to bed, it was 11 p.m. My phone was on do not disturb mode, and I was only able to find sleep that night because I had taken NyQuil to fight off the cold I had developed two days prior.

I woke up at 2:11 a.m. to texts from friends. It was official: Donald Trump — a convicted felon with various sexual assault allegations, who continues to make threats of mass deportations against the Latino community and to take away the rights of various groups — will once again become president.

In the few hours after the sun rose, and once I had coffee in my system, the atmosphere had taken on what I can only describe as if I were at a funeral. Already, CNN was trying to figure out what had gone wrong — the initial data didn’t take into account what the general public was feeling: Maybe if the Democratic Party had had a primary and Joe Biden never ran for reelection, there wouldn’t have been a candidate who couldn’t distinguish herself from the current president.

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Trump won with 312 electoral votes; Kamala Harris only got 226, a devastating loss. That, in itself, was shocking to me. But perhaps even more shocking to me, as a first-generation gay Latino, is that 46% of Latino voters cast their ballots for Trump, with 54% of those votes from Latino men.

Many Latinos took to X (formerly Twitter) to defend themselves — “Not all Latinos” — or to point fingers (“It was the Texas Latinos,” “No, it was the Florida Latinos”). The reasons why this happened can be argued until the sun goes down and comes up again.

So I want us to talk about it. If we take a hard look at ourselves, we might find some uncomfortable truths are largely to blame.

>>>2020 Election:

Conservative Latinos’ Support for Trump Driven By ‘Family Values,’ Media Distrust<<<

A lot of Trump supporters talked about the economy — whether they were worried about Harris’s tax plan (which would’ve greatly helped the middle and working class), believed there was a healthier economy under Trump, or just wanted more jobs. But I think Latinos should consider three factors that may be hard to hear: We are racists; we are misogynistic; and (probably the one that many of us would deny the most but we need to take time to really reflect on) we want to achieve “whiteness.”

Racism is something many of us either try to hide or we share openly — there is no in-between. I have heard many tias talking about being afraid of Black people solely based on looks or how “loud” they were being.

There is even a divide based on how light our skin is that can be traced back to colonization and natives with darker skin being seen as lesser than. At Trump’s infamous Madison Square Garden rally, when a comedian called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage,” Latinos at the rally cheered, and some later even defended the comment, saying, “That didn’t come from Trump.”

Yeah, but it came from one of his supporters at his own rally, and it’s not like Trump has never said or done anything racist himself. Some dismissed the comment with the attitude, “Well, we talk worse about ourselves.” But in no way, shape or form is that OK. We have allowed our own racism to make excuses for others.

Let’s not forget the racism that our own people face for being Afro-Latino. As we strive towards whiteness, we have joined in the racism that Black people continue to face in this country.

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We are misogynists. But we excuse it as machismo. We are machistas, and because we are machistas, we are misogynists. This is nothing new. This has been entwined in our culture since the dawn of time. As a child, I used to believe that there were levels of machismo that weren’t all bad. However, as I grew to be a gay, Latino man, that view changed.

Machismo culture doesn’t just mean having pride in being a man. It allows the seed of misogyny to grow and makes us view our women — our sisters, our wives, our daughters — as less than. And we use the Bible to justify it. When women ask us why we treat them like they are lower than dirt, we excuse it by saying, “God lets me.”

Because so many of use have these macho and racist attitudes within us, our male pride didn’t want a Black South-Asian woman to run the country.

We excuse those views with so-called remembrance of a better economy during the first Trump presidency. But how could we forget the racism towards our people during his first term and his continued racism during his second and third bids for the presidency — racism that will continue?

We excuse that racism because we want to be white. We look at being white as the answer to all of our problems. That if we were white, all of the problems caused by the color of our skin, by our culture, by our accents, would be solved.

We strive towards whiteness so much that we look down upon those who have taken years to reach citizenship while it has come easier for others. “Well, it was easy for me, and I did it the right way. Why can’t you?” This is one of the factors that I believe causes us to have a sense of nationalism that makes us racists towards our own people. This extreme pride for this country makes us forget our roots.

We strive towards whiteness so much that we give up on ourselves. We don’t speak Spanish as much as we used to; we don’t teach our kids to speak Spanish. “I am American now, so I have to speak English.” We forget everything we have gone through to try to make it in this country. Yet we use our struggles as an excuse why we won’t go back and why we have to change. Before we know it, we have Latinos who are second-gen, third-gen, who don’t see themselves as Latino.

Beneath their dark or light skin, given to them by their ancestors and the struggles that have made them, they see themselves as a false result. They are American. But no matter how much we try to distance ourselves from our culture, our people, our language, we can’t really separate ourselves from them. Who we truly are will never change.

I don’t say any of this to cause further strife. I am a proud son of Mexican immigrants. Crossing the Rio Grande, they took it upon themselves to achieve something bigger for their families, even knowing they had an almost impossible chance of seeing them again.

But I can’t sit back and say I’m not disappointed in my community. We need to have these conversations instead of hiding these issues away and refusing to talk about them.

That 46% of us cast our ballots knowingly for a man who has threatened mass deportations. Who has proudly broken up our families, leaving children in cages with no parents in sight — who claims to have family values yet apparently has no issues tearing families apart. Who sees our people as lower than dirt. Neither any of this nor any of his crimes were enough to keep so many of us from voting for Trump. We proudly elected a convicted felon to the highest office in the land.