UT takes disciplinary action against students after Tower sit-in, The Daily Texan, Nov. 18, 2025

UT-Austin is investigating students for a peaceful sit-in meant to deliver a letter about the Trump Compact and the University’s proposed departmental consolidations—including ethnic and area studies programs, as earlier reporting in The Daily Texan makes clear. 

Branding this action as “disruptive conduct” chills student activism and diverts attention from the real issue: students are seeking transparency and accountability in decisions that will reshape their academic futures. A public university should welcome—not punish—such democratic engagement. It is especially disturbing that the very students most directly affected by these decisions are being denied a meaningful voice in the process.

—Angela Valenzuela

UT takes disciplinary action against students after Tower sit-in

Lizzie Bassett and Diego Hernandez

November 18, 2025

Justin Doud

Kelly Soucy, UT’s Associate Dean of Students, and Aaron Voyles, the Associate Dean of Students, tell computer science second-year Daniel Ramirez and graduate student Áine McGehee Marley that she is unable to schedule a meeting between the students and senior leadership after telling the students to leave the tower alongside UTPD Sergeant Chad Martinka following an SDS sit-in Nov. 7.

The University sent notices of disciplinary action to two students on Monday after they conducted a sit-in at the Tower on Nov. 7, according to documents obtained by The Daily Texan.

The students, Daniel Ramirez, a computer science sophomore and a member of Students for a Democratic Society, and Áine McGehee Marley, a College of Liberal Arts Ph.D. student and organizer for UT Graduate Workers Union, received the letters on Monday afternoon in an email. In the letters, the Student Conduct and Academic Integrity committee said they may have violated University policy by engaging in disruptive conduct and unauthorized entry. They are now under investigation.

During the sit-in on Nov. 7, 14 students, including Ramirez and McGehee Marley, attempted to set up a meeting with the University leadership to deliver a letter with multiple demands, including the University to reject the Trump administration’s compact and stop the possible consolidation of smaller liberal arts departments.

Ramirez said he was not surprised to receive the notice, as other students received similar notices during the April 2024 pro-Palestinian protests, also for disruptive conduct. 

“Given what we’ve seen in the past from UT administration, they have continuously revealed that they will do whatever they can to stop students from using their campus,” McGehee Marley  said. “We are allowed to be on our campus, and to be reprimanded and punished for that is ridiculous.” 

The committee claims the 14 students rushed their way into the University Leadership’s offices in the letters, creating a significant disruption. Ramirez said this is an unfair and inaccurate retelling of the events, claiming the actual sit-in was more civil than described. 

“We did not rush in there, we walked,” Ramirez said. “The picture they’re trying to create is that we were disruptive, and that we didn’t have authorized entry. But this was a public space, so we think both of these charges are pretty ridiculous.” 

The letters initially scheduled the students to meet with the University on Wednesday. McGehee Marley’s meeting was for 1:30 and Ramirez’ was scheduled for 2:30, giving both less than 48 hours of notice. However, the students chose to reschedule their meetings to allow for more time to prepare. 

McGehee said the letters show that the University is afraid of student activism.

“This is … supposed to be Texas’s top state school, and there is a complete lack of transparency on how things are being decided by administrators,” McGehee said. 

Ramirez said presenting the letter was one of the only ways students can make their voices heard.

“We haven’t seen it done any other way, right?” Ramirez said. “There’s basically no institutional support for democratic accountability from the people who actually attend this University.” 

A spokesperson said the University cannot comment on individual student cases due to privacy laws.

What We Refuse to Learn About Standardized Testing: Dr. Gerald Bracey and the 89th Legislature, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

What We Refuse to Learn About Standardized Testing: Dr. Gerald Bracey and the 89th Legislature

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 4, 2025

Learn more about Dr.
Bracey here.

When I revisited Gerald W. Bracey’s 2009 commentary in Educational Leadership, I was struck by how uncannily prophetic it feels in this political moment—especially in light of the sweeping changes enacted by the 89th Texas Legislature in 2025. Best known for his famous "Bracey Reports," his critique of the nation’s “test mania” reads not as a relic of a bygone era but as a warning flare we failed to heed, one whose consequences unfolded vividly during last session’s battles over testing, accountability, and privatization (see Valenzuela, 2025, for discussion).

While public school advocates secured incremental gains—slightly less disruptive testing policies, quicker turnaround on results, the elimination of a handful of assessments, and improved transparency—the underlying system remains largely intact. Schools are still judged primarily by test scores, accountability frameworks remain narrowly defined, and the deeper structural reforms that advocates have long demanded are once again deferred (Valenzuela, 2025). In this vacuum, the push for charterization and privatization only accelerates. 

Even so, there was a brief moment of meaningful political possibility: Texas lawmakers introduced proposals to overhaul or even eliminate the STAAR exam altogether. Raise Your Hand Texas, in particular, deserves a shout-out for leading the charge. For the first time in decades, a major statewide assessment regime came under serious legislative challenge, and the House even passed a bill to move the state away from STAAR. Yet despite the symbolic significance of this breakthrough, the effort stalled—revealing just how entrenched the test-based accountability system remains.

Bracey began with an observation so commonsensical that many policymakers today still stumble past it: no standardized test can ever know a child better than the teacher who sees that child every day. Yet over a fifty-year span, he noted, the United States managed to devolve from viewing tests as occasionally useful tools, to treating them as compulsory, and finally elevating them into the dominant—almost exclusive—measure of educational quality.

Even though tests like NAEP, PISA, TIMSS, or STAAR were never designed to evaluate teaching, curriculum, or the complex, relational work of schooling, policymakers have repeatedly misappropriated them for exactly those purposes. The result, Bracey argued, has been a national preoccupation with numerical indicators that flatten the human reality of learning, obscure the deeper conditions shaping students’ educational lives, and induce undue stress on teachers and the teaching profession.

That critique feels especially urgent in Texas today. This year, the Legislature passed a statewide voucher program that redirects public funds into private schools, one that rests on the long-standing assumption that public schools are failing (Edison, 2025). This assumption gets reinforced year after year through simplistic interpretations of test scores. 

These debates echo Bracey’s core argument: when policy decisions hinge on flawed measures, those decisions inevitably warp the system they intend to improve. Vouchers, sold as a remedy for supposedly failing schools, rely on the very test-based narratives Bracey spent a lifetime challenging. The claim that low standardized test scores reflect poor teaching ignores the deep structural factors shaping learning in Texas—poverty, segregation, underfunding, and what we are by now discovering as the soaring costs (or "price") of privatization. 

Yet these structural realities rarely appear in the public conversation. Instead, test scores are brandished as evidence that public schools are beyond repair, clearing the political path for vouchers, school district takeovers, and the redirection of taxpayer dollars into private hands.

The fight over STAAR reveals a similar contradiction. Legislators across the spectrum have acknowledged that STAAR tells parents little about what their children actually know and does nothing to inform day-to-day instruction. These critiques echo Bracey almost word-for-word. Still, unless Texas reimagines assessment from the ground up—beginning with teaching rather than measurement—any replacement risks replicating the same distortions. Bracey insisted that the best assessments are those built by teachers and anchored in teacher-made curricula, not imposed from above. 

Bracey also challenged the persistent belief that national or international test scores determine economic success. He reminded readers that Japan continued to dominate global assessments even as its economy faltered, and that countries like Iceland maintained high scores while facing economic collapse. 

The notion that bubbling in answers on a fourth- or eighth-grade exam shapes global competitiveness is, to use Bracey’s word, “easily refuted.” Yet Texas, like much of the nation, continues to tie student outcomes to broader narratives about economic health and workforce readiness, despite overwhelming evidence that economic forces are far larger than any test score.

Bracey’s insistence on returning to the human, relational work of teaching feels especially vital. Public schools are not failing; they are absorbing the accumulated burdens of inequality, political interference, and relentless underfunding—burdens that privatization schemes will only intensify. Vouchers will not solve the challenges facing Texas students. Nor will another standardized test, no matter how politically appealing.

Bracey’s enduring message is that education is not a number. It is not a rank, a percentile, or a scaled score. It is the web of relationships, communities, and possibilities that unfold when schools are supported rather than scapegoated. If Texas is serious about creating a stronger and more equitable education system, then we must move beyond the illusions spun by test scores and invest once again in teachers, teacher-made curriculum, and public schools as public goods.

In this critical moment, Bracey’s voice reminds us that the greatest danger is not that our tests show too little—but that we have come to believe they show too much.

Reference

Bracey, G. W. (2009). Multiple measures. Educational Leadership, 67(3), 32–37.

Edison, J. (2025, May 3). Private school vouchers are now law in Texas. Here’s how they will work. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/03/texas-school-vouchers-greg-abbott-signs/

Valenzuela, A. (2025, September 15). Accountability without justice: The continuing agenda to demonize K–12 public schools to set the stage for further privatization. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas, https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2025/09/accountability-without-justice.html 

Paxton’s Attack on Jolt Echoes a Long History of Silencing Latino Political Power, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Paxton’s Attack on Jolt Echoes a Long History of Silencing Latino Political Power

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 1, 2025

While I do not pretend to know the particulars beyond what has been reported by Nguyen and Klibanoff in the Express-News (2025), the effort by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to shut down the Jolt initiative—one of the state’s most effective Latino civic-engagement organizations—most certainly fits into a well-established pattern. It echoes a long Texas history of suppressing Latino political power through intimidation, manufactured crises, and the selective use of state authority.

To truly understand this moment, we must see it in its historical and decolonial context. For well over a century, Texas has deployed legal, political, and bureaucratic tools to police and shrink the political power of Latino communities. From poll taxes, white primaries, English-only ballots to literacy tests, voter purges, and now “election integrity” scare tactics, the state has continuously reengineered the political landscape to maintain racial hierarchy.

Today’s version of that old project further includes gerrymandering—most notably the failed attempt, under pressure from Donald Trump, to draw five new congressional districts designed to dilute rising Latino voting power and secure permanent Republican control. That map was ultimately too extreme even for Texas courts, but the message was unmistakable: Latino political participation is to be contained, not cultivated (Guo, 2025).

Paxton’s attack on Jolt follows the same logic. It stems from a thoroughly debunked 2024 social-media rumor alleging that migrants were being registered to vote at driver’s license offices in North Texas—a claim that local officials, including Republican leaders, dismissed outright. Yet Paxton seized on this fiction to launch an intrusive investigation into groups working primarily with Latino voters.

When his initial efforts faltered in court, Paxton simply pivoted, filing a new lawsuit accusing Jolt of orchestrating an “unlawful voter registration scheme,” despite providing no evidence of noncitizen voting. Instead, he targets the organization for conducting voter registration drives at DMV locations—community hubs where working-class Latinos naturally gather. In a telling distortion of Texas election law, he now frames a volunteer’s explanation of the parent-agent provision as evidence of wrongdoing.

The point is intimidation, not truth.

Taken together, these actions reveal a disturbing theory of democracy: Latino civic participation is inherently suspect, and any infrastructure that supports it must be dismantled. Whether through extreme gerrymanders designed to nullify Latino voting strength, or legal assaults on organizations registering Latino youth, the goal is the same—maintain political power by shrinking the electorate.

A decolonial lens makes this continuity visible. Latino civic organizations like Jolt are not just registering voters; they are challenging a longstanding colonial logic that extracts labor while denying civic belonging. When young Latinos organize, vote, and assert political agency, they interrupt the racial order Texas has spent generations protecting. That is the disruption Paxton is attempting to crush.

And this is not new. Texas officials have repeatedly equated Latino civic engagement with disorder or fraud, from the surveillance of Chicano activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Contreras, 2025) to the recent attempt to shut down El Paso’s Annunciation House (see Paxton v. Annunciation House, Inc. 2025). Each episode follows the same pattern: when Latinos build power, the state responds by declaring that power illegitimate.

see Contreras (2025)

Jolt is simply the latest target.

That said, it surely concerns the political establishment that approximately 200,000 Latina and Latino youth in Texas turn 18 every year (as Jolt notes on its webpage). This rising generation of Gen Z voters represents a profound demographic shift—one that makes efforts to suppress Latino civic engagement not only predictable, but deeply revealing of the racialized anxieties driving state power.

The lawsuit against Jolt is not about voter fraud—it is about fear. It is about a political establishment that recognizes the demographic reality of Texas and is scrambling to freeze the electorate in place. It is about denying young Latinos the tools they need to participate in public life. It is, at its core, an attempt to preserve a political order that can no longer command the consent of a changing population.

Texas cannot claim to be a democracy while treating the political participation of its largest communities of color as a threat to be neutralized. Jolt’s resistance is not only a legal fight—it is an act of collective self-determination. It affirms what generations of activists, elders, and organizers before us have insisted: we belong here, our voices matter, and our political engagement strengthens, rather than threatens, the fabric of this state. We need and deserve organizations like Jolt that do the essential work of cultivating young leaders, expanding civic participation, and ensuring that Latino communities can exercise the full rights of citizenship. To defend Jolt is to defend democracy itself.

The struggle for Latino political power in Texas is far from over, but the outcome of this case will say much about who this state believes democracy is for.

Reference

Contreras, R. (2025, January 6). Scoop: CIA releases docs on Latino civil-rights-era surveillance, Axios. https://www.axios.com/2025/01/06/cia-releases-docs-latino-civil-rights-era-surveillance?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Guo, K. (2025, July 10). As Texas Republicans prepare for mid-decade redistricting, cautionary tales loom from the past, Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/10/texas-redistricting-congressional-districts-past-mistakes-overreach/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Nguyen, A., & Klibanoff, E. (2025, November 11). Texas Latino civic group sues to block AG Ken Paxton from shutting it down. San Antonio Express-News. https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/texas-latino-civic-group-sues-to-block-ag-ken-21163598.php

Paxton v. Annunciation House, Inc., No. 24-0573 (Tex. Sup. Ct. May 30, 2025). https://law.justia.com/cases/texas/supreme-court/2025/24-0573.html

Texas Latino civic group sues to block AG Ken Paxton from shutting it down

By ALEX NGUYEN and ELEANOR KLIBANOFF/The Texas Tribune,Nov 11, 2025

Jolt Initiative, a nonprofit that aims to increase civic participation among Latinos, is suing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block his efforts to shut them down. Paxton announced Monday that he was seeking to revoke the nonprofit’s charter, alleging that the group had orchestrated “a systematic, unlawful voter registration scheme.”
This is not the first legal back-and-forth between Jolt and Paxton’s office. Last year, the organization successfully sued to stop the state’s investigation into their voter registration efforts. In the new suit, Jolt’s lawyers argue Paxton’s efforts to shut them down are retaliation. The attorney general’s office has also in recent years targeted other organizations aiding Latinos and migrants, such as the effort to investigate and shut down El Paso-based Annunciation House.

“Jolt is simply the latest target of his unlawful campaign to undermine and silence civil rights groups in Texas,” said Mimi Marziani, a lawyer representing the nonprofit.

The background

In August 2024, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo said on X that a friend had seen organizations registering migrants to vote outside state drivers license facilities in Fort Worth and Weatherford. But local officials, including the Parker County Republican chair, said there was no evidence backing the post.

Bartiromo’s debunked claims still prompted an attorney general investigation into organizations including Jolt.

Jolt then sued for a temporary restraining order, saying that Paxton’s probe would harm the organization as well as put its workers and volunteers at risk. In October 2024, both sides agreed to pause their legal fight and Jolt was allowed to continue its work, while the courts addressed a different lawsuit involving the tool used by Paxton to investigate the group. The attorney general’s office now said in its recent court filing that it has agreed to not issue another subpoena, instead opting to launch a new lawsuit.

In addition, Paxton announced earlier this year that his office is investigating cases of “potential noncitizens” casting more than 200 ballots in 2020 and 2022, which would be around one-thousandth of 1% of the votes cast during these periods.

Meanwhile, Texas counties are looking into more than 2,700 registered voters who were flagged as “potential noncitizens.” At least six of them have been confirmed to be U.S. citizens.

Voters also recently approved a constitutional amendment adding language to the state’s constitution saying that a person who is not a U.S. citizen cannot vote in Texas. Noncitizen voting was already illegal prior to this update.

Why Texas sued

Following Bartiromo’s claims, the attorney general’s office sent an undercover agent to a DMV location near San Antonio to investigate by attempting to register a fake daughter — who wasn’t physically with him — to vote, according to Paxton’s Oct. 23 court filing. It said a Jolt volunteer deputy registrar still instructed the agent on how to register his daughter, despite her absence.

Although when the agent asked for a form to take his daughter, the Jolt volunteer said he could not let the agent have one. The agent said the volunteer then inferred that he could register his daughter to vote, which is illegal, according to the filing.

“I stated in a question format that I couldn’t have one, and (the VDR) replied that since I have her information, I could register her to vote, alluding to being a parent and that I had that right,” the agent wrote. “This was inferring that I could sign her voter registration card, and while (the VDR) made this statement he overtly looked away. This is not only incorrect but illegal per election code.”

Jolt disputed this claim about legality in its court filing.

Paxton’s filing didn’t provide evidence of Jolt registering noncitizens to vote. Instead, it said the group’s decision to hold voter registration drives near DMV locations “illuminates its unlawful motive.”

“This is because U.S. citizens can already register to vote at any DMV with proof of citizenship,” the court document said. “Thus, there is no need for a VDR at such locations.”

Paxton brought the lawsuit in Tarrant County, saying that a “substantial part of the events” underlying its claims took place there.

“JOLT is a radical, partisan operation that has, and continues to, knowingly attempt to corrupt our voter rolls and weaken the voice of lawful Texas voters,” he said in a news release. “I will make sure they face the full force of the law.”

What Jolt says

The nonprofit filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday, asking a judge to stop Paxton’s state lawsuit because it infringes on their rights under the First Amendment and the Voting Rights Act.

In particular, Jolt said in a court filing that its volunteer didn’t do anything wrong because Texas’ election code does allow for a person to appoint their parent as “an agent” to “complete and sign a registration application” for them. The parent must also be a qualified voter or must have submitted a registration application and be eligible to vote, according to the code.

“Here, the State provides very few particularized factual allegations in its Petition to support its Motion for Leave, instead relying upon sweeping but unsupported claims about Jolt’s motives, beliefs and activities,” the group said in its initial response to Paxton’s lawsuit.

Jolt also said it will fight to defend its mission, adding that Paxton is “abusing his authority” in order to stop its voter registration drives.

“This is a systematic effort to dismantle the infrastructure of Latino civic engagement in Texas,” ⁨Jackie Bastard⁩, Jolt’s executive director, said in a news release.

This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

Silence Is Not Neutral: UT, the Compact, and the Fight for Fair Admissions in Texas Higher Education by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 Silence Is Not Neutral: UT, the Compact, and the Fight for Fair Admissions in Texas Higher Education

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

November 25, 2025

The University of Texas at Austin’s apparent refusal—or strategic silence—regarding the federal “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” marks an interesting, if not troubling, moment for public higher education in Texas. To be sure, UT has been navigating mounting political pressure from students, alumni, faculty, and community members. Even the editors of the Austin American-Statesman recently weighed in.

Faculty groups across the country have condemned the Compact as an effort to reshape universities into instruments of political ideology rather than centers of inquiry (Spitalniak, 2025). While universities across the country have rejected the Compact outright, UT has neither affirmed it nor denounced it, and that silence suggests more than institutional deliberation. It suggests political constraint indicating a modicum of success by opponents, but silence nevertheless.

Consider the KXAN segment below which questions why UT should be compelled to openly reject the Compact if it is already moving toward Compact-like outcomes as a result of recent state-imposed policy changes?

The Compact, proposed by the federal administration, would condition access to federal research funding on compliance with a slate of politically charged requirements: restrictions on faculty governance, limits on hiring autonomy, reinterpretations of free-speech policy, constraints on international student enrollment, and a prohibition on what it calls “proxies” for race or sex in admissions. 

All told, this moment exposes a parallel misunderstanding that urgently needs correction: the widespread claim that Texas’ Top Ten Percent Plan is a “race-based” or affirmative-action-style policy (e.g., Mukherjee, 2023). This mischaracterization has resurfaced because the Compact prohibits admissions criteria that correlate with race; some commentators have leapt to the false conclusion that the Top Ten Percent Plan is therefore racially motivated. But historically and legally, the policy is race-neutral.

The Top Ten Percent law, created under House Bill 588 in 1997, guarantees automatic admission to Texas public universities for students who graduate in the top ten percent of their high school class (Flores & Horn, 2020). It does not ask for racial identification, does not classify students by race, and does not treat students differently based on race. Its origin lies in Hopwood v. Texas, which barred the use of race in admissions in the mid-1990s. Legislators—seeking to broaden opportunity without violating the ruling—created a system that relied on class rank, not racial preference, to expand access across the state (Flores & Horn, 2020).

A key detail is that UT–Austin operates under a unique statutory modification to this law. In 2009, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 175, which allows UT–Austin to cap automatic admissions at 75 percent of its entering Texas freshman class beginning in 2011. This adjustment was made at UT’s request, as the flagship campus argued that full application of the Top Ten Percent rule would consume the entire entering class. Even with this cap, however, the Top Ten Percent Plan remains the policy mechanism through which the majority of UT’s freshman seats are filled—and it remains fully race-neutral.

While the Top Ten Percent Plan does increase racial and socioeconomic diversity, that outcome reflects the deeply segregated landscape of Texas high schools rather than any use of race within the statute itself. Legal scholars are unequivocal on this point: the percentage plan “is race-neutral…and its operation ensures broad diversity in every dimension” without invoking racial classification (Dorf, 2024, p. 112). 

At the same time, as Flores and Horn (2016) demonstrate, the plan’s current iteration—though it expands opportunity—still falls short of eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in access to Texas’ most selective universities. Miscasting the law as race-based is therefore not only factually incorrect but politically perilous, particularly at a moment when genuinely race-neutral mechanisms remain among the few available tools to advance equitable access in higher education.

The confusion is especially harmful now, as UT contemplates whether the Compact’s ban on “proxies” could be interpreted to target class-rank admissions. Class rank measures academic performance within schools; it is not a racial proxy under federal law (Dorf, 2024). Yet if political actors succeed in recasting it as race-based, they could undermine a foundational element of Texas admissions policy—one that is already modified at UT–Austin through SB 175 and thus particularly vulnerable to political reinterpretation.

If UT ultimately rejects the Compact—as it appears to have done—we as a public must nevertheless remain vigilant in defending the truth about the Top Ten Percent Plan as a race-neutral. Misrepresenting it only deepens confusion and fuels the political manipulation already surrounding higher education.

At a time when academic freedom, democracy, and access to higher education are under assault, clarity is essential.

References

Flores, S. M., & Horn, C. L. (2016). The Texas Top Ten Percent Plan: How it works, what we know, and what we should learn from it. UCLA, E-Scholarship.org. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4hm2n74b

Dorf, M. C. (2024). Race-neutrality, baselines, and ideological jujitsu After Students for Fair Admissions. Texas Law Review, 103, 269.

Mukherjee, R. (2023). 'Percent plans' undermine meritocracy in higher education: They function as a form of indirect affirmative action. City Journal.

Priest, J. (2025, November 17). UT-Austin still silent on Trump compact after deadline to sign passes: Most other invited universities have rejected the administration’s offer tying priority federal funding to campus policy changes. The Texas Tribune.

Spitalniak, L. (2025, October 8). Trump’s higher-ed compact draws condemnation from faculty and college unions. Higher Ed Dive.

The Rise of the Latino Far Right is Less about a Political Shift and More About an Emotional Realignment: An Analysis of the Emotional Architecture of Latino Conservatism

The Rise of the Latino Far Right is Less about a Political Shift and More About an Emotional Realignment: An Analysis of the Emotional Architecture of Latino Conservatism

I invite you to view and listen to this on my Youtube Vlog: 

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

November 19, 2025

Paola Ramos’ (2024a) insightful analysis in her award-winning book, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, could not be more urgent for Texas and the nation. She argues that contemporary politics—especially around race, immigration, and education—is driven less by policy debates than by emotion. This emotional terrain helps explain a phenomenon many political observers once considered unthinkable: the rapid rightward shift among segments of the Latino electorate.

Democrats have long assumed that Latino voters would remain a reliable bloc, but recent elections have shattered that assumption. Donald Trump, despite his virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric and punitive border policies, won a higher percentage of the Latino vote in 2020 than he did in 2016 (Ramos, 2024). 

Ramos travels across the country to understand how and why this is happening, revealing a complex emotional and psychological landscape that has been largely ignored by both parties. What she finds is deeply relevant to Texas and other states, where political actors continue to weaponize fear, disgust, resentment, and grievance to inform immigration policy along the U.S.-Mexico border, reshape public education, and redefine belonging.

Across states and regions—including the Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida—Ramos meets Latino underdog GOP candidates, January 6th insurrectionists, Evangelical pastors, border vigilantes, and culture-war crusaders. Figures like Monica de la Cruz, who ran on a platform to “finish what Donald Trump started,” or David Ortiz, who identifies as a Spaniard and fought to preserve a statue of a conquistador in New Mexico, exemplify how narratives of cultural anxiety and racial hierarchy are being reactivated within communities of color.

Ramos interviews Pastor Luis Cabrera, whose calls to “Make America Godly Again” fuse Evangelical traditionalism with nationalist grievance, and Anthony Aguero, a Mexican American independent journalist turned border vigilante, who uses fear and conspiracy to radicalize his audience (Ramos, 2024b). Through these stories, Ramos shows how tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma within the Latino community have become powerful emotional levers. 

Many Latinos, like their white counterparts, fear losing their place in American society, and political actors have seized upon those fears to draw them toward movements that seem at odds with their own interests. The emotional void left by institutions—schools, local governments, political parties—has been filled by rhetoric that promises comfort, order, and belonging, even when those promises undermine the very communities they target.

This emotional landscape becomes even more dangerous when understood through Bryn Nelson’s (2024) framework of stochastic terrorism, a term law enforcement officials use to describe strategies in which public figures weaponize disgust and dehumanization to provoke unpredictable acts of hostility or violence (also see Hancock, 2000; Deigh, 2006). Importantly, the

emotional lexicon Ramos draws upon—fear, loss, resentment, nostalgia, belonging, abandonment, betrayal, pride, identity crisis, trauma, and tribalism—aligns closely with what scholars identify as the politics of emotion. 

These are not incidental feelings; they form the emotional architecture of political behavior. Ramos demonstrates that people defect not because they have been persuaded by new policy ideas, but because they are searching for emotional clarity, emotional safety, and emotional purpose.

Nelson explains that disgust is one of the most potent triggers humans possess, a biological response evolved to protect us from contamination. When politicians and pundits attach disgust to entire communities—immigrants, bilingual children, LGBTQ+ youth, educators, university researchers—they construct emotional conditions in which harassment, censorship, and even violence feel justified. The resulting harm is often diffuse, uncoordinated, unpredictable, and deniable by those who helped incite it.

These dynamics reveal why Texas’ education crisis cannot be understood apart from this emotional infrastructure. The attacks on Ethnic Studies, queer and trans students, DEI programs, university researchers, teacher autonomy, and historical truth are not policy disagreements. 

They are emotional strategies rooted in fear and disgust, strategies that now resonate with portions of the Latino electorate that have been recruited into grievance-based movements (Ramos, 2024). Figures like de la Cruz do not emerge in a vacuum; they reflect a broader realignment fueled by narratives of loss, nostalgia, and racial anxiety.

This is why after-school programs, community-based educational initiatives, and investment in public education matter so profoundly. Programs like our Saturday school, Academia Cuauhtli in Austin, Texas, are not just pedagogical interventions; they are emotional counterforces. 

They create spaces where children and families experience dignity, recognition, cultural pride, belonging, and joy—what some grotesquely deride as “identity politics,” but which are, in truth, the emotional foundations of human development and democratic belonging. 

These are the very emotions that protect against the vacuum where the manipulations described by Ramos and Nelson find fertile ground. These programs remind young people that their languages are assets, that their ancestors were scientists, mathematicians, engineers, activists, and philosophers, and that they have a rightful place in this society—truths that the current political climate works aggressively to suppress.

Ramos’s work makes clear that Latino political shifts are not driven solely by ideology but by unmet emotional needs—needs for safety, coherence, identity, and belonging. Nelson warns that when disgust is mobilized against communities, violence becomes ambient and unpredictable. 

Together, they illuminate what is happening in Texas schools: an emotional crisis disguised as a policy debate. And they underscore why our third spaces rooted in ceremony, storytelling, danza, bilingualism, and ancestral knowledge are not merely educational alternatives—they are frontline defenses against the weaponization of fear and disgust.

People do not defect from harmful ideologies unless they have somewhere better to belong. Our responsibility, especially in Texas' current political storm, is to continue building those places—spaces of corazón where community, culture, and emotional truth serve as the antidote to disinformation, division, and dehumanization.

References

Deigh, J. (2006). The politics of disgust and shame. Journal of Ethics, 10(4), 383–418.

Hancock, A. M. (2000). The public identity of the “welfare queen” and the politics of disgust. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Nelson, B. (2024). How Stochastic Terrorism Uses Disgust to Incite Violence: Pundits are weaponizing disgust to fuel violence, and it’s affecting our humanity. Scientific American.

Ramos, P. (2024a). Defectors: The rise of the Latino far right and what it means for America. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Ramos, P. (2024b, September 23). The immigrants who oppose immigration: A desire to prove their Americanness has driven more and more Latinos to turn against newcomers, The Atlantic.