The Tragedy of Internalized White Supremacy: A Response to the Rise of White Nationalist Hispanics by Russell Contreras & Astrid Galvan
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
July 2025
A March 2022 Axios report, “The Rise of White Nationalist Hispanics,” authored by Russell Contreras and Astrid Galvan, paints a disturbing picture of what happens when systemic racism, cultural erasure, and historical amnesia collide. Of course, this is what Republicans want to engineer even more profoundly in the American psyche with their censorious campaigns against books, CRT, DEI, tenure, academic freedom, and the like.
That a small but vocal number of Latinos—many of them with deep ties to the very communities under attack—are now aligning themselves with white nationalist rhetoric should alarm all of us. This is not new, but it is newly visible, more organized, and more dangerous.
It is no accident that figures like Nick Fuentes and Enrique Tarrio carry Latin American heritage yet advocate for the same ideologies that have historically dehumanized, excluded, and punished his and our own people. What we are witnessing is the violent logic of internalized oppression, passed down across generations and intensified in a political climate of fear, disinformation, and performative nationalism.
Internalized oppression happens when an individual from a minoritized group adopts the same stereotypes and pejorative views that the dominant group holds toward their own.
I’ve spent my career in education fighting for equity, truth-telling, and the inclusion of our histories in school curricula. And this is why Ethnic Studies matters. This is why we must teach our children where we come from—not just geographically, but socially, politically, and spiritually. We must dislodge the myths of racial innocence that shield Latino communities from confronting our own complicity in anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and yes, anti-Mexican-ness and anti-Latino-ness as a whole.
To be clear: these individuals do not represent the majority of Latinas/os. The overwhelming majority of our community believes in justice, in equality, and in solidarity with other marginalized people. But we must also confront how a lack of historical education, coupled with conservative media echo chambers and political manipulation, has left too many vulnerable to ideologies that are rooted in prejudice, violence, and exclusion.
This is not just about individual choices—it is about a system that rewards proximity to whiteness and punishes solidarity with the oppressed. It's about a multibillion-dollar misinformation machine that targets Latino voters with lies and fear-mongering. It’s about a country that has too often failed to fully recognize Latinos as part of its racial conversation—until we show up in the wrong places, saying the wrong things. The "black-white" binary erases Latinos from public discourse.
The antidote is education. The antidote is collective memory. The antidote is love for our people that doesn’t depend on assimilation, erasure, or the politics of rejection that engenders self-hatred. We must teach our youth that their worth is not measured by how close they can get to whiteness, but by how rooted they are in justice, culture, and truth.
White nationalist Hispanics are a contradiction. They are also a warning. If we do not confront the deep scars of colonialism—within our families, our communities, and our institutions—then the cycle continues. But we have a choice. We can choose historical memory over triumphalist myth-making, solidarity over supremacy, and love and healing over hate.
We can do better. Much better. The time to choose is now.
-Angela Valenzuela
The rise of white nationalist Hispanics
Nick Fuentes, identified as a "white supremacist" in Justice Department filings, made headlines last week for hosting a white nationalist conference in Florida. His father is also half Mexican American.
The big picture: Fuentes is part of a small but increasingly visible number of far-right provocateurs with Hispanic backgrounds who spread racist, antisemitic messages.
Driving the news: Cuban American Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, a group the Anti-Defamation League calls an extremist group with a violent agenda, was arrested Tuesday and charged with conspiracy in connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
What they're saying: Experts tell Axios far-right extremism within the Latino community stems from three sources: Hispanic Americans who identify as white; the spread of online misinformation; and lingering anti-Black, antisemitic views among U.S. Latinos that are rarely openly discussed.
- Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State University, said in an interview that the trend is "part of the mutation that takes place as the racist fringe tries to become more mainstream."
- Racism is deeply rooted in Latin American and Caribbean nations, where slavery was common, Tanya K. Hernández, a Fordham University law professor and author of the upcoming book, "Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias," told Axios. "In Latin America, white supremacy is alive and well.”
- Even families who have been in the U.S. for generations can often bring those biases with them.
Between the lines: The U.S. trend, fueled over the course of Donald Trump's presidency and the pandemic, extends beyond movement leaders to a broader network of participants, some of whom have faced hate crimes charges.
- Last month, Jose Gomez III, 21, of Midland, Texas, pleaded guilty in federal court to three counts of committing a hate crime for attacking an Asian American family, including two children, he believed to be responsible for the pandemic.
- In 2018, Alex Michael Ramos, a Puerto Rican resident of Georgia, was sentenced by a Virginia District Court to six years in prison for his role in a beating of a Black man in Charlottesville, Virginia, following the "Unite the Right" rally.
- Christopher Rey Monzon, a Cuban American man and member of the neo-Confederate group League of the South, was arrested in 2017 for attempting to assault anti-racist protesters in Hollywood, Fla. He later resigned from the group and said he regretted using slurs for Black and Jewish people.
Context: At the conference in Orlando, which made headlines because U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) accepted an invitation to speak, Fuentes drew attention for comments of his own:
- "And now they’re going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler — they say that’s not a good thing..." He then laughed and said, "I shouldn't have said that."
- Fuentes has questioned the Holocaust, criticized interracial marriage and defended Jim Crow-era segregation. The ADL describes him as "a white supremacist leader and podcaster who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP."
- Tarrio, 38, has previously faced charges: He was sentenced to five months in jail for setting fire to a Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a historic Black church in Washington, D.C.
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