This thoughtful piece by Xochitl Gonzalez writing in this week's Atlantic, helps illustrate how race and ethnicity are social constructions. That is, these are historically produced in the context of, and in response to, social, political, economic, and cultural forces, resulting in a high level of complexity in relation to identity that Gonzalez identifies as problematic in the context of South Texas' conservative, far-right Republican Mayra Flores' recent election to Congress.
Gonzalez raises the question of whether a "Latinx" or "Latino" electorate actually exists—even to the point of suggesting that there may be no "Latino vote," much less a "Latinx vote" in light of not only our diversity as a Latino community writ large, but also by a potentially false centering of it in places like South Texas where the electoral dynamics don't align.
My short answer to this question of whether a "Latino electorate" exists is that it does and it doesn't.
It does to the extent that being "Latino," "Hispanic," "Latina," or "Latinx" correlates to such things as consumer and political behavior, as well as to language and cultural practices. A shared experience of subordination also promotes a sense of "we-ness."
It doesn't in the sense that ethnicity is also "situational," meaning that how one describes oneself varies by context. In spaces like a college campus or highly diverse urban contexts, it's easy to adopt pan-ethnic labels like "Latino," "Hispanic," "Latina," or "Latinx." It's further encouraged when one is in an ethnically mixed group of "Latinas" or "Latinos," consisting of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans, Salvadoreans, and so on. However fraught (e.g., "Latinx"), pan-ethnic labels are inclusive terms that can easily straddle political party identification and views.
To be sure, pan-ethnic labels and identities can be different from how one regularly identifies or how one experiences or "feels" one's identity, including in instances like South Texas where race and ethnicity may be less salient than say, class, gender, sexual orientation, or generational status (immigrant or non-immigrant)—that can themselves also function intersectionally, or in tandem, while shifting in salience—at different times depending on context.
Many are quick to decry overarching labels and even question their validity, but for those situationally choosing such labels, this can facilitate navigating across diverse contexts and promote inter-ethnic solidarity. Without a doubt, these constructions are so powerful that they do have implications for how our multiple identities get formed and evolve over time.
But what about contexts like South Texas that are more homogeneous—in this case, "Mexican" or "Mexican American?" Clearly, ethnicity is experienced differently. The "other," isn't a white person, but rather an immigrant, foreigner, or outsider who may be viewed either in a competitive manner or with disdain, as Congresswoman Flores' winning rhetoric displays (e.g., read this New York Times piece titled, "The G.O.P.’s ‘Wildest Dream.")
Moreover, when everybody around you in South Texas is "Mexican," including all the candidates running for office, Gonzalez is correct to conclude that given the uniqueness of this context, a "blanket Latinx Outreach Strategy isn’t going to win over the Hispanic voter." Instead, an approach that is more situated in the lived experiences of the community holds much greater promise.
I don't think most South Texans are anti-immigrant, but many can be manipulated to be so with schools that don't teach that we didn't cross the border, but that the border crossed us instead. It's perhaps more probable that it's mostly not taught. Errors of omission in curriculum and pedagogy leave wide, gaping holes in knowledge and interpretation. And this is exactly what we're seeing—a filling in of that conceptual gap with a pernicious and harmful ideology.
For those with ill will, it's so convenient. The anti-immigrant, white supremacist trope of the "invading immigrant" who is "taking our jobs" maps onto fears about the economy, giving folks in South Texas and beyond a false sense of entitlement that translates into the scapegoating of so-called "immigrants" whose ancestors inhabited this continent before there ever was a border or a place called "Texas" or the "United States."
This leaves the question of how to address Congresswoman Myra Flores' conservative views toward immigrants and immigration—especially considering that she herself is a Mexican immigrant? Clearly, she was either not educated or miseducated about the history of the border and her own people in San Benito High School that she attended upon migrating across the border to the U.S. What happened—or what didn't happen—when she thereafter went to South Texas College? Probably the exact same thing since our higher education institutions are also assimilationist and Eurocentric.
It's amazing that any of us hold on to our languages and cultural integrity. And yet many of us do. In defense of our own humanity, we resist in the service of social justice.
This is not at all an insult but rather a statement of the status quo of our assimilationist education system that does not want us as Mexicans or Latinos to hold onto our identities. However, if we do manage to do so, the "next best thing" is for us to think negatively about them, where we unknowingly internalize and accept as truth the dominant views held toward minority (or minoritized) people, ourselves included.
All told, it's positive to have an expansive, open view of race and ethnicity precisely because this fosters an awareness of, and appreciation for, difference that welcomes curiosity, acceptance, and peaceful relationships. How can we be open to others if we are not first open to our own identities and selves?
Yes, Democrats absolutely do have a "Latinx Blind Spot." The first step in fixing this is to acknowledge how they, too, have been complicit in the creation of a system—especially an educational system—that engineered this from the get-go. This is exactly why we struggle for Ethnic Studies, including Mexican American Studies, alongside culturally relevant and sustaining curriculum and pedagogy in our schools.
We have a human right to our ethnicity. All people do.
Without such grounding, vacuums in identity exist that can and do get exploited—in this case, by the Republican party that's winning big on an ongoing political project of invisiblizing and eviscerating Latino culture and identity. Not that this project is ever fully realized, but rather that we are always positioned in vexed relation to the dominant culture that's pushing this. In short, this is actually not a "minority people's problem," but rather, a "white people's problem."
This project has definitely been a force in our history as Latina/o/x peoples, making many in our community vulnerable to rhetoric and ideologies that betray their origins and resonate with their fears—when there really is nothing to fear at all except fear itself, as John F. Kennedy once said.
Let's support the teaching of Ethnic Studies in our schools. Let's also continue challenging the attack on Critical Race Theory and our teaching of the truths of history. Let's widen the circle of citizenship so that all can benefit from the wealth and riches of our communities and country.
Let's also vote this extremist Republican leadership out of power—and get reconciled to one another and the planet so that our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren not only heal from the historic trauma of assimilation, but most importantly, love themselves. This will help them to also love the socially constructed "other," nurturing ways of knowing and being in the world where no one is scapegoated, "othered," or treated as "less than."
Love is the answer. It always has been and will always be. It begins with us loving ourselves so that instead of hostility and division, we can engineer peace and prosperity.
SĂ se puede! Yes we can!
-Angela Valenzuela
#EthnicStudiesNow
Democrats Still Have a Latinx Blind Spot
The victory of the ultraconservative congresswoman Mayra Flores in South Texas shows what Democratic campaigns are doing wrong.
By Xochitl Gonzalez | July 12, 2022 | The Atlantic
Congresswoman Mayra Flores of Texas, with her family, after being sworn into Congress. (Brandon Bell / Getty)
Several years ago, shortly before the 2016 elections, I was having a drink with an acquaintance of mine, another Latino Brown alumni, who we’ll call Mando Gonzalez. Other than our last names and our Brown degrees, Mando and I don’t have much in common, but we hit it off at an alumni function and went on to get the occasional drink or coffee when we find ourselves in the same city. When the conversation turned to the election and how much Hillary Clinton needed the Latino vote, Mando said something that I found nearly blasphemous at the time, but that I’ve pondered since. I paraphrase, but he said: “There is no Latino vote; Latino identity is an invention of academia.”
His point, as he further explained, was that Latino-ness is something your kids “catch” when they go to college, like feminism. And not just any kind of college, but a predominantly white institution. Had Mando, the son of Mexican immigrants who was reared in a Spanish-speaking Los Angeles household, gone to, say, UCLA—a school with a 21 percent Hispanic population (about 6,600 students), and whose Chicano-studies program is nearly 20 years old—he would have likely emerged with a different worldview. Surrounded by so many other Hispanics of similar backgrounds, he argued, he likely would have just considered himself Mexican American. Mando felt that having the rarified experience of being part of a pan-ethnic Hispanic minority at a predominantly white institution is what gave the term Latino emotional and intellectual resonance. (To help paint a picture, Brown—by no means an outlier among the Ivies—boasts a 10 percent Latino enrollment rate, which is about 1,000 students. This number includes students from every Latino ethnic and geographic background that the U.S. has to offer.)
I found myself thinking of Mando this weekend while reading the recent New York Times coverage of Mayra Flores, the newly elected, ultraconservative congresswoman in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. I was wringing my hands the whole time, yet I was also utterly unsurprised. I wasn’t surprised that Flores and other conservative Latinas’ success in running for office has largely been fueled by the power of Latina political organizing—something the Hillary Clinton campaign tried to tap into as well. I also wasn’t surprised that Flores’s simple slogan, “God, Family, Country,” was persuasive; it clearly reflects the values of a certain slice of her predominantly Mexican American, pro-law-enforcement region of South Texas.
But here’s what had me wringing my hands: I could very easily see that slogan having appeal in pockets of Florida, Arizona, Central California, and even parts of New York. As we watch this Hispanic drift toward the GOP, I wonder: What, exactly, are Democrats offering “Latinx” voters? (Indeed, that very language is somewhat polarizing, as just 3 percent of the Hispanic population uses the term, but that’s a newsletter for another day.) What, beyond the blanket and possibly patronizing presumption that Latino voters all see themselves as people of color and therefore are voting against their own interests by voting Republican, is being offered up? Or, to return to Mando’s take, how do you make a compelling case for voting around Latinx identity politics when only a micro-segment of the population feels an emotional tether to that identity? In a community like Flores’s, which is overwhelmingly not just Hispanic, but Mexican American, what aspect of a pan-ethnic identity do voters there connect with? Do they connect with such an identity at all?
Personally, getting to college and finding a Latino community was a salve for me. I am of mixed Puerto Rican and Mexican American heritage; I spent my school years in Brooklyn and the summers in Northern California with my paternal grandmother. No single identity felt fully correct, and at that time it didn’t matter, because in the streets of Brooklyn, you were just “Spanish.” When I got to college, the term Latino, which spoke to my own pan-ethnic identity, felt like a comfortable identity to embrace. (I preferred it to Hispanic, which, in my opinion, put the colonizer in the center of our experience.) Away from my family and home and with such a small group of us on this largely white campus, the Latino community became my family. I learned how to cumbia from my Colombian friends, perfected my bachata with my Dominican ones, and developed a familiarity and affection for the cultures of many other ethnicities and experiences that comprise what we think of as Latinx in the United States. (While I tend to use the terms interchangeably, I personally prefer Latin, Latine, or Latinx, in a sign of respect for my gender-nonbinary brothers and sisters out there, although I also understand the resistance.)
My experience is rare. Going away to college is what gave me access to Latine diversity, yet only about 16 percent of Latinos have college degrees. (Again, a gap that merits its own post.) Within that group, students are overwhelmingly attending local community colleges, state schools, and regional private, often religious, institutions, with majority minority or Latinx populations. Couple that with the sheer fact that nearly 72 percent of Americans live near where they were born and raised; that number includes Hispanic Americans, who traditionally have gravitated to certain regions and areas based on ethnicity. What we can extrapolate is that most Hispanic Americans are living a highly specific, regional experience of their identity. Even among college-educated Hispanics, the pan-ethnic experience that made Latino identity into more than just a demographic term for me is not a universal one.
Maybe Mando was right. Yes, part of the Democrats’ problem with the Latino vote is their laziness in failing to look at the regional cultures and concerns of the Hispanic electorate and tailoring their messages to that (or their refusal to even use the terminology most Hispanics prefer). But I believe it’s also, as David Shor has pointed out, a blind spot that Democratic campaigns have developed, in which they over-index the worldview and experiences of the college graduate. As Shor’s theory was paraphrased in Politico:
Although young people as a whole turn out to vote at a lower rate than the general population, the aforementioned type of young person is actually overrepresented within the core of the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. According to Shor, the problem with this permanent class of young staffers is that they tend to hold views that are both more liberal and more ideologically motivated than the views of the coveted median voter, and yet they yield a significant amount of influence over the party’s messaging and policy decisions. As a result, Democrats end up spending a lot of time talking about issues that matter to college-educated liberals but not to the multiracial bloc of moderate voters that the party needs to win over to secure governing majorities in Washington.
In my experience volunteering in politics, this holds true for the young Latinx movers and shakers seeking to make a mark in politics as well. A quick search of “emerging leaders” celebrated by the Biden administration last Hispanic Heritage Month reveals a talented bunch of young staffers, all of whom, as expected, have four-year degrees, many from elite, predominantly white institutions, where I would imagine they, like me, found some comfort in their pan-ethnic Latino communities. But their reality is not reflective of the reality of Mayra Flores’s constituents, many of whose families have lived in the Rio Grande Valley since before it was Texas, and the majority of whom are Mexican American.
When every candidate on the ballot is Mexican American, what matters to voters is not an allegiance based on identity, but which candidates’ values (God, family, country) are aligned with their own. I don’t know what the midterms will hold, and I can’t even wrap my head around the 2024 presidential race, but what I can tell you is that any candidate who comes out with a blanket Latinx Outreach Strategy isn’t going to win over the Hispanic voter.
