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 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.”

Excellent political theory and analysis of why conservative Latinos support Trump by Dr. Alfonso Gonzales Toribio, professor of Ethnic Studies and director of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Riverside. To this, I would add their own lack of understanding of history that Trump exploits as follows:

"The point of the MAGA slogan is to bury history with its deep class and racial disparities and to conceal the crises of our time: savage inequality, climate change, pandemics and racial conflict."

His approach is seductive to those that have internalized racism—meaning that they have adopted the dominant, pejorative image of their group—and that, as a consequence, need someone to blame. 

-Angela Valenzuela

#vote2020

#EthnicStudiesNow

#SayNoToFascism #Fascism

Op-Ed: Trump’s ‘historic bloc,’ like fascist movements, unifies groups with opposing interests

By ALFONSO GONZALES TORIBIO

SEP. 29, 2020

4 AM

How is it that working-class whites and a significant number of Latinos could support Donald Trump, a self-aggrandizing billionaire with nothing in common with them and little understanding of their lives?

The Italian political theorist and leader Antonio Gramsci asked a similar question about the appeal of fascism among the working class. Why was it that fascism, a project that favored the capitalist class, could have so much support among working-class people, who by the conventional wisdom of the time were expected to side with the left? This was the fundamental question that Gramsci contemplated in his famed prison notebooks, written from his cell after his arrest by the Italian fascist government in 1926.

To describe this dynamic, Gramsci put forward the idea of the “historic bloc,” among other concepts, to explain the unification of a constellation of groups with opposing interests into an apparently seamless front. Such a bloc, he argued, blurs the lines between the state and society and functions to repress dissent in moments of crisis and intense labor and social-movement militancy, like the one we are living in now.

These blocs congeal by demonizing their enemies foreign and domestic, declare states of emergency and criminalize legitimate social protest in the name of national unity. They can unleash a viciousness among the state security forces and among armed citizens. Such blocs don’t have to be based on truth, facts or coherent arguments.

Never rational, such authoritarian movements are based on pure emotion and a sort of identity politics of the right, using common-sense ideas about how the world works among the working class to draw them from the left. The bloc depends on an intense identification with a strong-man leader, the romanticizing of violence for resolving conflicts and a selective reading of history and national culture that appeals to groups that find protection by joining the bloc even if in a subordinate position.

Although the base of the Trumpian bloc is overwhelmingly white and male, 26% of Latinos support Trump over Biden. Many conservative Latinos identify with macho political posturing, pro-2nd Amendment rhetoric, simple law-and-order solutions to complex problems, demonization of the left and disdain for the Black Lives Matter movement.

This bloc, under the “Make America Great Again” banner, requires its supporters — particularly subordinate groups — to accept a degree of cognitive dissonance in submitting to the emotional appeal to a mythical moment of American greatness. For many of the white working class, that moment is before the rise of the civil rights movement, Latino immigration and multiculturalism, the idea that diverse people should have representation and rights in pluralist society.

For right-wing Latinos, this means ignoring both the historical and the contemporary injustices inflicted on their community, such as the lynching of Mexicans by the Texas Rangers in the 1920s, the deportation of at least 1 million Mexicans in the 1950s, the separation of children from their parents at the border or the alleged coerced hysterectomies of Latina migrant women in immigration detention centers now.

The point of the MAGA slogan is to bury history with its deep class and racial disparities and to conceal the crises of our time: savage inequality, climate change, pandemics and racial conflict.

Racism and xenophobia have historically provided the ideological glue that has kept the white working class supporting the most rabid sectors of the capitalist class and from seeing their fate linked with racial others and immigrants. Even during the current economic disaster, it is easier for many working-class whites to identify with the Trumpian bloc, led by a billionaire rooted in the transnational capital class, than to have a sense of solidarity with Latinos or Black people.

Historic blocs of the right emerge precisely at that moment when the left is strong and when the right decides to stop playing by the rules of liberal democracy, the system for resolving conflicts through representative government and respect for individual rights.

These are dangerous times that compel us to recall the fascist bloc that emerged in Italy as a reaction to the Biennio Rosso, the great workers movement of 1919 and 1920, when workers took over factories and continued production in defiance of the owners.

It emerged in Germany on the heels of the Weimar Republic, a liberal government, in the context of intense labor struggles and one of the strongest communist parties in Western Europe at the time. And in the 1930s, authoritarian blocs in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic led to dictatorships and brutal repression that lasted for much of the 20^th century.

In the name of redeeming a victimized nation, fascist leaders like Mussolini and Hitler created historic blocs that destroyed liberal democratic institutions, outlawed dissent and even murdered their opposition, and channeled the anger of the working class into an ultra-nationalist project at the service of capital. Fascism eventually led to the collapse of democracies in Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal and the death of 85 million people by the end of World War II.

These are unprecedented times, with a pandemic raging, millions unemployed, rising hunger and poverty, racial tensions and clashes between police and protesters. The stability of the imperfect American democratic experiment is being threatened by a historic bloc that empowers the president to undermine democratic institutions and promote the use of violence against protesters and dissenters in the name of law and order.

Trump maybe created new symbols, like his red MAGA hat, and slogans to try to differentiate himself from the fascisms of the 20^th century. But Robert O. Paxton, a leading historian of fascism, has noted in his classic book “The Anatomy of Fascism” that “a fascism of the future — perhaps an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis — need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols” to be any less dangerous.

Alfonso Gonzales Toribio is a political theorist and associate professor of ethnic studies and director of the Latin American Studies Program at UC Riverside. He is the author of “Reform Without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State.”

Smiling Brown: Erika’s story and a Cinco de Mayo Reflection

Here is a deep, soulful reflection on skin color by Erika González, a Tejana teacher, poet, and book illustrator  living in Oakland, California, posted to a blog worth following titled, Xica Nation. 

This story reminded me of my father who also gave me the nickname, "Prieta Linda," a term of endearment that was intended for me to feel pride in my skin color, too.  (I smile as I write this.  Do read Erika's story about this below).  My mother, who passed away in 2005, was fair- skinned and quite intentional in always telling her children how she intentionally married the darkest, handsome man that she could find.  This is not completely true, of course, but she would say this to make a point.  She would also always speak admiringly to her children of their skin color, convincing them of their beauty and power. Thanks, Mom!

What our parents have to do for us as children to love ourselves and be whole human beings is incredible.  They affirm in their children that which is societally disparaged.  

In my Mom's case, she gave us the tools we needed to survive "apartheid West Texas" and the vestiges of Jim Crow.  As parents of two daughters, Emilio and I have done this, as well, to the best of our abilities.  Yet we have learned that we could not and cannot protect them fully from all of the indignities to which they have been subjected as Chicanas in a patriarchal, sexist, and racist society.

Our children need to read these stories and reflections if they are to recognize themselves and all others as beautiful children of the Creator, just as they are.  They also need to read history on the Mexican American experience which is what the push for Mexican American Studies is about.  There they would learn about an entire movement together with circulating discourses in the late 1960s and early 1970s called the Chicana and Chicano Movement that was precisely about community and, as a consequence, personal empowerment. We cannot have one without the other.

Stated differently, our parents and youth must decolonize themselves and their thinking to see beauty and power in how they look and who they are.  And Erika González' work, alongside that of many others, helps to get us there.  

While focused on Mexican Americans, these words map on to the experiences of all minoritized communities, and thusly, to all children of color, as well.  Thanks to another great leader whose recent blog you may have read, Dr. Cesar A. Cruz Teolol, with #HomiesEmpowerment for sharing.

Happy Cinco de Mayo, everybody!

-Angela Valenzuela

#ApproveMAS  #CincodeMayo

MAY 3, 2018 BY ADMIN

Smiling Brown: Erika’s story

I grew up on the Border of Texas and Mexico and was surrounded by brown Xicanitas just like me. I still remember my thoughts as a young child and for this I am grateful, because I feel that it is children who are closest to the Creator, who have the most innocent and creative minds, and fearless instincts based on love.  As a young child, I remember sitting down in the spots on the rug in my family’s trailer house where sunlight shone. I stayed in these sunlit spots in a meditative state for long periods of time. It was quiet, peaceful and I felt closest to what as an adult, I try to channel today. I remember looking down at my skin and loving the way it reflected the sunlight back at me.  The bronze, red, yellows and brown tones made me feel like I had a connection to the sunrays.

I now ask myself, what happens to children when they grow up and lose their connection to the Source of Light?  As I got older, I stopped seeing the sunrays and moonlight’s reflection on my own skin and started playing with Barbie Dolls with blonde hair, blue eyes, and white skin.  I forgot all about my own bronze skin because everywhere I turned, I was fed the idea that white skin was beautiful from the dolls I played with, to the commercials and cartoons I watched each Saturday morning.  I vividly remember getting mad at my mom for getting me a Cabbage Patch Doll with brown hair and brown eyes while my sister got one with blonde hair and blue eyes. At this point in my childhood, I had already associated brown as not beautiful.  

My Grandfather Pipa nicknamed me Prieta Linda, after a famous Tejano song by Little Joe y la Familia.  I remember being embarrassed by the nickname not really understanding why anything Prieta (brown girl) would be linda (pretty).  I never took it as a compliment as a child and was embarrassed each time my grandfather and my father would stop to sing me parts of the song. As an adult, I have now reclaimed that nickname and am proud to be a bronze woman.  Last year, I danced to the song Prieta Linda with my father on my wedding day during the Father Daughter dance and I sobbed the whole time, as my dad and I embraced each other in a moment that only he and I knew so well.

The road to loving my own skin was not an easy one.  Nobody sat me down and told me how important it was or even showed me the path to love myself and my brown skin.  It happened organically through meeting elders in the Xicano and Environmental Justice movement in Austin, TX who made it a part of their life struggle to defend their communities of mostly people of color experiencing injustices.  A demand of justice for communities of color experiencing racism led me to work alongside them for many years which led to my own realizations of self love and love of community.

Fast forward twenty years, and I am now a mother of two children who are mixed with beautiful black and brown skin.  I am also a Kindergarten teacher at Roses in Concrete Community School in East Oakland. As an elementary teacher, I remember when I first came across skin color crayons.  They were sent to my classroom in a package and each box said multicultural crayons in big bold letters. I opened a box and saw a variety of brown and black shades. I couldn’t wait to let my students use them.  Each child had their own box and was given the task to look through the box to find their closest shade of skin color. This particular year, I had all brown students and I was surprised at how many students chose lighter shades of brown when their skin was actually darker.  I had to bring in mirrors the next day so that my students could see their beautiful brown skin and create self portraits that truly embodied their skin tone and features.

These past three years at Roses in Concrete have been the most interesting for me because all of my students have been students of color.  Because I get to design my own curriculum, I have the freedom to teach Ethnic Studies through a unique lens without limitations. Over the years, students have created their own shades of brown skin color and named them names such as Redwood Tree, Café con Leche, Brown Buffalo, chocolate amber donut, or black as night.  We go deeper into the study of their own ancestral histories by interviewing family members and creating altars for ancestors that have passed away. Our classroom culture is based on the Mayan concept of the Inlakech: You are my other me. If I love and respect you, I love and respect myself. If I do harm to you, I do harm to myself.  

Our school’s music and art program balances out what is learned in the classroom.  Students get to learn breakdancing and mindful mediation, sing soulful and revolutionary songs, learn basic vocabulary in the Nahuatl language, concepts and dances from the Danza Azteca tradition, and create sculptures and paintings relevant to their own lives and culture.  This year, Maestro Danny taught my students about the Aztec calendar and gave each child their Aztec birth sign. During Writing, students incorporated their Aztec birth sign as well as their skin color name onto a poem about themselves.

I find this type of cultural work in creating Ethnic Studies curriculum for children as young as Kindergarten age, a crucial necessity when the dominant society is bombarding them with self hate propaganda.  We see the lack of diverse characters in children’s books and as a teacher, it becomes even more glaring because when designing my own lessons, I have to search for hours just to find books that my children can identify with and sometimes end up creating my own stories due to the lack of books made for children on topics such as the origins of corn based people, the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and all Social Justice Movements.  I’m getting to a point where I am starting to really grasp the idea of writing my own children’s books so that future generations of teachers won’t have to go through what I am going through.

I have to give credit to children’s book authors and illustrators such as Maya Gonzalez, who has authored and illustrated numerous children’s books with characters of color and who has now published the last book in a 3 book anthology in response to the lack of relevant representation of “the people” in traditional children’s books.  I am blessed and proud to share that I am one of the 18 Artist Authors whose writing and illustration is included in her latest Anthology, “Unfulring: A Voice is a Revolution.”

This is a huge accomplishment for me considering that as a child, my parents had to drive for two hours in order to buy my sister and I children’s books because our border town had no bookstores and all the ones they brought back to us contained blonde girls with blue eyes.  I grew up during a time when the only brown girl representation on television was La Chilindrina, a whiny and goofy Mexican girl who would cry hysterically after being teased by other neighborhood children.

Unlearning what was taught to me, as a form of de-colonization is what I have been doing for most of my adult life.  The hope I have is that I am saving my own children and my students years of having to unlearn self-hate and relearn what has been denied.  Maybe one day the message of brown is beautiful will be read about in every public school in the nation, or better yet, be spoken about and truly honored. I have moved beyond the sunlit spots to venture out in the world and let the sun guide me and fill me with love.   The grand mystery of love reveals to us that it is not how much we can be loved for our own beautiful black and browness but in how much we can love others with shades of brown without limitations. It is similar to the love given to us by our Mother Earth. Mother Earth’s unconditional love for us teaches us how to love others and ourselves.  

Erika González is a Xicana educator and former environmental justice organizer with fifteen years of experience working with children and families in K-12. Erika infuses art, social justice and culture in curriculum. She is the former Co-Director of PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources) based in East Austin, Tx and is currently a founding teacher at Roses in Concrete Community School, a social justice school in East Oakland where she teaches Kindergarten. Erika’s poetry has been published in three books: Cantos al Sexto Sol: An Anthology of Aztlanahuac Writings edited by Patrisia Gonzales, Roberto Rodriguez and Cecilio Garcia-Camarillo, Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and the Austin Project edited by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth, and the most recent in an anthology by children’s book author and illustrator, Maya Gonzalez titled Unfurling: Voice is a Revolution. Erika is originally from Eagle Pass, Tx a border town next to Piedras Negras Coahuila, Mx and is a mother of two beautiful mixed black and brown children.