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.

The Tragedy of Internalized White Supremacy: A Response to the Rise of White Nationalist Hispanics by Russell Contreras & Astrid Galvan

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

• Russell Contreras,
• Astrid Galván

Nick Fuentes, the leader of a Christian-based extremist white nationalist group, speaks to his followers in Washington 

D.C. Photo: Zach D. Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Image

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."

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio wears a shirt supporting Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of killing George Floyd. Photo: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

• 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.

• 
  

• • "I'm pretty brown, I'm Cuban. There's nothing white supremacist about me," Tarrio told Insider in 2020.
  • But Tarrio was suspended from Twitter in 2019 for posting anti-immigrant threats, has denigrated transgender people and has used racist language to describe a Black actor.

  But, but, but: There are limits to how accepted some far-right Latino activists can become in white supremacist and neo-Nazi circles, Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the ADL's Center on Extremism, told Axios.

  • Some extremists on 4chan and 8chan say Fuentes' Latino heritage disqualifies him from speaking on white supremacy, Pitcavage said. Meanwhile, some white supremacist elements of the Proud Boys dismiss Tarrio as a leader but so far he has withstood the criticism, said Pitcavage, who monitors the chats.

  Tarrio's lawyer, Lucas Dansie, did not respond to emails seeking comment. Fuentes' American First Foundation also did not respond to requests for comment.

  What we're watching: U.S. Latinos identifying as multiracial soared during the last decade, while those identifying as solely white dropped significantly, according to the latest census.”

  Subscribe to Axios Latino and get more news that matters about Latinos and Latin America, delivered right to your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  Editor's note: This story first published on March 10.

"The Rise of Latino White Supremacy," At a time of increased racial violence, Latinos are potential perpetrators and potential victims," by Geraldo Cadava

Here goes again. Another piece on Latino White Supremacy that maps on well to my earlier post titled,The allure of fascism: why do minorities join the far right? by Edwin Rios, May 22, 2023, but authored this time by Geraldo Cadava with the New Yorker. One thing for sure, our community is highly armed. I wonder how many of these violent perpetrators themselves have a background in the military? How many of them have a vexed relationship to schools and education? To what extent are they getting targeted by right-wing organizations? There are more questions to ask.

The analysis points to assimilation into a white supremacist vision of the world. Nature hates a vacuum. If these individuals aren't learning about their own heritage and how their ancestors sought the path of family, hard work, sacrifice, and education, the outcome would be different. Sadly, these people have taken the path of hate and are woefully lost and dangerous. 

As Arnold Schwarzenegger eloquently says, these folks are "losers" for taking the path of hate, Do listen to Schwarzenegger's "Powerful Message for Those Who Have Gone Down a Path of Hate [Youtube Video]."

Every concerned white and Latina/o parent or guardian should share this with their boys and young men. Young women, too.

-Angela Valenzuela

The Rise of Latino White Supremacy

At a time of increased racial violence, Latinos are potential perpetrators and potential victims.

By Geraldo Cadava | The New Yorker | May 30, 2023

Two people stand at a makeshift memorial for the eight people who were fatally shot at a mall in Allen, Texas, in early May.Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty 

May 6th, a thirty-three-year-old Mexican American man named Mauricio Garcia shot and killed eight people at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas. Then he was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer. Because of the white-supremacist views the shooter expressed in a diary and online, many were shocked that he was Latino. In fact, Latino white supremacy isn’t an oxymoron, and carrying out a premeditated mass shooting in the United States is one of the more American things a Latino could do. We’re only five months into 2023, and in that time seventeen thousand people have been killed by guns in this country. Meanwhile, there are more than sixty million Latinos in the United States, and, motivated by extremism or a sense of fear, they’ve bought a lot of guns in the past few years.

In his 2004 book, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity,” the late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington fretted over how Mexican immigration was changing the “Anglo-Protestant mainstream culture” of the United States. He worried that Mexican immigrants weren’t assimilating as earlier European immigrants had done. “The criteria that can be used to gauge assimilation of an individual, a group, or a generation include language, education, occupation and income, citizenship, intermarriage and identity,” he wrote. Huntington believed that the descendants of Mexican immigrants weren’t hitting these markers, but he was wrong. They assimilated like others did. They learned English, intermarried, became loyal Americans, and adopted American politics, including its most extreme and violent forms.

We don’t know a lot about Garcia, but the diary he kept in the years leading up to the shooting made clear his growing persuasion by white-power ideology. He wrote about the superiority of non-Latino white people and claimed they would lose their edge if they continued to let nonwhite immigrants into the country. Reports on Garcia’s self-presentation have focussed on his misogyny, Nazi tattoos, racist statements against pretty much every group, and the patch on his vest that read “RWDS.” The patch, which stands for Right-Wing Death Squad and refers to anti-Communist and anti-Indigenous paramilitary groups in Central and South America during the nineteen-seventies and eighties, has become popular among right-wing groups in the United States today, particularly the ultranationalist Proud Boys.

But Garcia continued to see himself as Latino, which he never equated with whiteness, and at moments he manifested pride in his nonwhite Latino identity. It is a confusing set of ideas that nevertheless has a long history among Latinos, in part because the category “Latino” itself has been fiercely contested—with some arguing, for example, that it should be classified as a race rather than an ethnicity. A New York Times Op-Ed by the historian Cecilia Márquez focussed on the lineage of Latino white supremacists before Mauricio Garcia, including Pete Garcia, a Mexican American segregationist in Dallas in the nineteen-fifties; George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin, in Florida, in 2012; Alex Michael Ramos, who beat a Black protester at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville; Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader recently convicted of seditious conspiracy; and Nick Fuentes, a white-nationalist live streamer. Most of these Latinos said they were nonwhite, even though the protests they joined, the groups they belonged to, and the violence they committed defended whiteness and white-power ideology.

Scholars and journalists have described these Latino white supremacists in different ways. Some Latinos, they’ve argued, are also afflicted by “aspirational whiteness,” or the desire to be white in order to fit into the racial and capitalist order of the United States, to avoid the discrimination that Black Americans experience, or to justify the pursuit of individual wealth and belonging. They ascribe to “multiracial whiteness,” which the political scientist Cristina Beltrán defines as an identity that people from all racial backgrounds can participate in. It is rooted, she writes, “in a discriminatory world view in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.” Such concepts help to explain how, in a country with rising racial violence, Latinos can be both potential perpetrators and potential victims.

Many Latinos, like other Americans, have responded to their sense of victimhood by buying weapons. Latinos armed themselves after the August, 2019, massacre by a white-power shooter at a Walmart in El Paso, which left twenty-three people dead, almost all of them Latino. As the coronavirus pandemic spread across the country, Latinos reported fears of violent crimes; this was again followed by a spike in gun purchases by Latinos. A survey conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the firearms industry, found that Latinos purchased guns at a forty-nine-per-cent higher rate in 2020 than in 2019. It also found that forty per cent of gun retailers reported an increase in sales to Latinos in 2021. Last year, another Latino shooter used an AR-15 he bought himself for his eighteenth birthday to kill twenty-one people and injure seventeen others at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas.

According to Harel Shapira, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of a forthcoming book on American gun culture which focusses on Texas, the fact that gun ownership in the United States has become increasingly diverse is “something that people love to talk about, especially conservative groups like the N.R.A. and gun organizations. No one throws out the flag of diversity more than them.” Shapira thinks that, when the N.R.A. says it cares about diversity, “they are being at once cynical and genuine. They are being cynical when they express concern only in the context of supporting gun rights, but not, for example, affirmative action or other policies that benefit nonwhite Americans. They are being genuine in so far as they truly believe that the best way for minority populations to obtain equality is by being armed.”

In Texas alone, there have been twenty-one mass shootings so far this year. They’ve left thirty-four people dead and another eighty-two injured. (I had to update these numbers three times while writing this essay.) In at least four of them, the shooters were Latino. We live in a country where everyone from university deans to corporate executives extolls the virtues of assimilation and diversity, but the growing diversity of gun owners who inflict mass death should cause us to rethink inclusion’s underlying assumptions. So, too, should Latino white-supremacist thinking—another marker of Latino assimilation at a time when white-power ideology is spreading rapidly at home and abroad. Expressing surprise or disbelief at the fact that Latino white-supremacist shooters exist marks them as outsiders, as many Latinos before them have been marked. But it should be the shootings that we see as un-American, not the shooters themselves. ?

The allure of fascism: why do minorities join the far right? by Edwin Rios, May 22, 2023

This entire piece is worth reading considering that it focuses on Latinos who are drawn to the far right with a growing list of names like Afro-Cuban Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, who was recently found guilty for "sedition conspiracy" for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.  

In particular, read Dr. Cristina Beltran's analysis below of how this has evolved over time, pointing to  a dynamic that she terms, “multiracial whiteness” that helps capture much of what is playing out currently with far-right men of color. While provocative, we shouldn't at all be surprised about this since we've always had language for this, including "internalized oppression" and "internalized racism." Simply expressed, multiracial white people adopt the dominant group's pejorative perspective of their own group.

Clearly, Latinos and other communities are on the receiving end of a continuous "complex and contradictory cocktail of misinformation." This is exactly what helps create space for these far-right identities. 

Relatedly, what is not at all addressed is the vacuum in identity that is engineered by a white chauvinist K-12, and to a great extent, higher education, curriculum that systematically excludes the knowledges, histories, stories, identities, languages, as well as prior and ongoing contributions made by our nation's Black and Brown, minoritized communities.  

I've always said and it's worth mentioning anew: The antidote to extremism is an Ethnic Studies curriculum—in both K-12 and higher education institutions—that provides the conceptual tools and frameworks needed to understand self in relation to family, community and society. Plus, rather than victimization or victimology, Ethnic Studies—along with gender and ability studies—empowers our youth, beginning with an enhanced sense of self that is pro-social, pro-community, pro-democratic, and an important avenue through which to perfect the union.

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

The allure of fascism: why do minorities join the far right?

by Edwin Rios | The Guardian | May 22, 2023

A white supremacist ideology would appear to be antithetical to people of color, but there’s a perverse logic at play when they join extremist groups

While investigators search for a motive behind a Texas man’s mass killing of eight people at an outlet mall near Dallas earlier this month, they and groups such as the Anti-Defamation League believe they have uncovered social media posts in which he spewed white supremacist, misogynist and antisemitic rhetoric.

Experts say Mauricio Garcia’s apparent expression of hate-filled rhetoric fits into a modest but increasingly alarming pattern of largely men of color drawn to far-right communities. Since the election of Donald Trump, they say, more men of color have taken on leadership roles in far-right and militia groups and participated, and in some cases led, violent protests, most notably during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

For people of Latino descent like Garcia, who self-identified as Hispanic, the allure of rightwing proto-fascist politics comes from a complex and contradictory cocktail of misinformation within Latino communities, the presence of authoritarian influences from their countries of origin, and a proximity to whiteness in the US that relies more on dominance over people than one’s skin color. In this world, violence is an apt political response to threats to such dominance.

“Part of what we’re seeing – not just in the militia groups, but all across, including a clear upsurge of people of color voting Republican party – is that there’s not a necessary connection between racial identity and your beliefs,” Daniel HoSang, professor of ethnicity, race and migration and American studies at Yale University, says.

He added: “It is complicated. It means disentangling your presumptions around race and political identity. We had an entire civil rights movement that was grounded on combating laws that were racially segregative. Now, we’re at a moment where it’s a bit more muddy and requires more nuance.”

Garcia, who was killed by police, wore a patch on his chest that read “RWDS”, which stands for “Right Wing Death Squad”, a nod to glorifying violence and an allusion popular among far-right and extremist groups to violence by Central and South American paramilitary groups against communists and what they saw enemies on the political left from as far back as the 1970s, the Associated Press reported.

The Anti-Defamation League found posts on Russian social media of Garcia with neo-Nazi tattoos and misogynist language, including those used by “incels”, a subculture of men who blame women and society for their inability to form romantic connections, a phenomenon that federal law enforcement sees as a rising threat that could escalate to violence, often against women.

“White supremacy itself is not just about membership, about who is and isn’t white,” says HoSang, co-author of the 2019 book Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. “It comes with a politics and ideology of division … It’s also their beliefs about the nation and of the role of violence in enforcing that hierarchy.”

Unlike the white supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville in 2017, men of color attracted to white supremacist ideologies believe less in a white ethnostate and more that the state has failed them in the past and it will take violence to suppress threats and restore their perceived sense of order, HoSang says. Scholars have described their connection to these extremists as the “multiracial far right”

Cecilia Márquez, a history professor at Duke University, was less surprised than others when it was revealed the Texas mass shooter was Latino and had peddled white supremacist views. She has tracked the involvement of Latino people on the white nationalist website Stormfront, particularly since the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, whose mother was Peruvian.

Márquez had seen a small but rising number of Latino men, and men of color broadly, being drawn into white nationalist forums and becoming radicalized. Márquez, whose research has found Latino participation in white supremacist groups as far back as the 1980s, described how Latinos on the website would identify as the heirs to the Spanish conquest in similar ways to how white supremacists would relate to Norse or Viking mythology.

She added that the internet “made it possible for white supremacists throughout the Americas to be able to talk to each other” in ways that were not possible before, noting that that communication through messaging apps like WhatsApp had “accelerated” not just the spread of misinformation but also of “information designed to radicalize people”.

“It felt really, really scary,” Márquez said. The Texas shooter, she added, was “not a single actor. He’s not by himself. He’s part of a growing community of people who are engaged in this kind of thinking, and increasingly this kind of violence.”

She emphasized, however, that Garcia’s views represented a fraction of this small population and fixating on him missed the larger story of how Latinos in the US have largely consolidated around Democratic political views. Still, experts say, Garcia represents a paradox of squaring away one’s racial identity with one’s political identity.

Like others, Cristina Beltrán, an associate professor who studies race and the right at New York University, emphasized that the experiences and views of Latino communities in the US are not monolithic, and being Latino is one part of a person’s identity.

“We know that experience alone doesn’t produce an identity. That is how you interpret your experiences,” Beltrán says.

What could also draw young men of color to the far right extends beyond perceived views of racial superiority. Beltrán argued that they could also be drawn to the practice of “domination” that is tied to American history and the subjugation of other groups such as women, noting that it was part of a “history of being able to feel free because some groups are below you”.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Beltrán, author of Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy, also wrote that the rise of Donald Trump offered this form of what she called “multiracial whiteness” to far-right men of color like Enrique Tarrio, an Afro-Cuban former leader of the Proud Boys who was recently found guilty of seditious conspiracy in relation to the January 6 insurrection. Márquez and Beltrán both questioned whether those views opened pathways for men of color into more extremist ideology.

What’s more, Beltrán argues that the expansion of jobs within the US security and carceral apparatus in the past few decades have both inspired movements to dismantle those systems and reinforced the perception of a nation under threat, as people from communities of color both fill those jobs and are disproportionately affected by the prison system .

She added that those communities have certain views on how to resolve problems and are skewed to conservatism.

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, wearing a shirt proclaiming support for Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd. Photograph: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images

“In Texas, you have a lot of migrants who are being brutalized by our really terrible immigration and border policy. But you also have over half of the border patrol being Latino,” Beltrán says. “They’re employed and being socialized into a brutal regime that is very dehumanizing to migrants.”

Within the histories of their countries of origin are moments of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous sentiment, as well as reactionary politics that led to the violent suppression of progressive views by dictators.

Beltrán says that within Texas, where the shooting took place, Latinos, particularly people of Mexican descent, have a complicated history as both having a proximity to whiteness and being subjected to lynching and brutalization by the Texas rangers.

“Latinos have always existed as a population that’s both been under assault, and also been brought into practices of racial domination,” Beltrán says.

In Garcia, Márquez saw a difficult tension: Garcia’s hate-filled views rest on the extreme end of a spectrum of conservatism that separates one’s connection to their racial and ethnic identity and one’s political views. She added that his hateful views, shared by an increasingly visible minority of people, were not representative but also should not be discounted.

Experts have pointed to Latino Republicans who have touted their own identities on the campaign trails while they supported former president Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies.

“Maybe not everyone has a swastika on their body. But many of us have aunts and uncles who say inappropriate things at the table, or have someone who voted for Trump or doesn’t want to live in communities with other people,” Márquez says.

“Seeing [Garcia] as part of this spectrum is important. Yes, he is aberrant in so many ways – in so many ways. But to look away from him and eschew him from our community gets us off the hook because there is a lot of racism within the community and anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous sentiment that we have to reckon with.”