Latino MAGA Men

I had to leapfrog over some other things I was planning on writing to strike while the iron is still hot on this issue.  Trump made serious gains with Latino men during the 2024 presidential election and pundits have been trying to figure out how this could happen considering that Latinos are the first people he plans to deport once he takes office.  Are these dudes loco or what? Probably.  But I think, as an outsider living in a Latin American country, I have a pretty broad perspective on why this trend has taken place.  Hear me out. Stop asking Latinos why they do the things they do. Most Latino men can’t give you a straight answer about their voting habits or anything else because their choices are based on their feelings, not some rationale, logic or research.  Something didn’t feel right about neither the decrepit old white man nor that kooky Jamaican chick, so this time around, the Latino men cast their vote for the guy they felt best about.   Latinos don’t want to live around other Latinos either.  When that comedian called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, very few white people cared.   The Mexicans, Salvadoreans and Cubans didn’t give a hoot, either.  In fact, they probably nodded their heads in agreement and laughed, especially since the joke was about Boricuas and not about them.  Cross-border solidarity among Latinos is extremely weak as they are a very nationalistic crop.  Even though most of us can’t tell them apart, there is serious animosity between Mexicans and Salvadoreans, Bolivians and Peruvians, Colombians and Venezuelans and so on.  Putting them all in the same boat only angers them, especially for the national group that considers itself to be superior, like how Mexicans feel about Central Americans.  That nationalism only goes so far because it doesn’t stop many Latinos from feeling pretty negatively about their countrymen who keep their homelands in a perpetual state of corruption, violence and poverty.  Why do you think so many risk their lives to get to the U.S. in the first place? It’s to get away from the riff-raff once and for all, and once in the States, they certainly don’t want to have a terrible déjà vu walking down Santa Monica Boulevard and bumping into the dudes that killed their cousins in Jalisco.  (I know I’d be pissed if after moving to Colombia, I consistently ran into the Arizona assholes and Brooklyn buttwipes I thought I’d left behind.). Biden would not (or could not) keep that from happening. If Trump has a plan to keep those undesirables where they are, then he’s getting their vote.  The quickest way to push a Latino to the right politically is to consistently treat the ones who already “made it” exactly like the ones who just put a wet sneaker onto U.S. soil from the Rio Grande.

For foreign-born Latinos, race is not the issue. Class is. (<-- This proclamation excludes Dominicans, who are completely batshit crazy when it comes to race.).  I don’t know how they did it, but Latinos have been able to, at least idealistically, tease apart race and class in a way that makes sense to them. No matter your skin tone, they believe that migrating to the U.S. offers them an incredible opportunity to move upward from one class to another, an achievement one can only dream of in Latin America.   But once this transition into a higher social class takes place, Latinos move to shut the door on what they left behind.  Yes, many of the people left behind will have darker skin, but if they too are able to make that leap to a better life, they will be accepted by the Latino community there.  But until then, the Latinos up above will not throw a rope down and will have little sympathy for anyone who is not able to leave the working class on their own, and this includes other Latinos from their very own country.  Out there in the real world, the in-group competition is brutal because Latinos are raised in their countries to believe that there isn’t enough to go around for everyone, making it a dog-eat-dog existence, no matter what color you are. The late, great comedian Paul Mooney often said that Latinos want to be white, but that is not the whole story. Of course, there are a few generations of Richie Rich, José-and-Kitty-Menéndez-type Cubans who rule over Miami and think they’re white, but they represent a small number of the U.S. Latino population overall. And it’s not about what they want to be; it’s what they don’t want to be.  Latinos are tired of being associated with being maids, prostitutes and delivery boys, mentally and emotionally fatigued with being equated with those who dwell at the bottom of the social ladder, black, white or otherwise.  If breaking this association means embracing whiteness, so be it. Latinos can be as duplicitous as white people. They be freaks in the sheets and conservative in the streets.  I see this all the time in Colombia where men who consider themselves white consistently vote for right-winged candidates for the same reasons they do it in the U.S.  These men espouse conservative ideologies in public, but that does not mean they aren’t sucking black dick behind a banana tree and jacking off to porn on the Nude Africa website when the wife and kids are at grandma’s.  They can do both at the same time and are fine with that.  Just like their white conservative counterparts in the U.S. Part of the duplicitous nature is that Latinos, as loving and caring as they can be, are at the same time not generally empathetic to the problems of others, especially if they feel they can physically move away from where that suffering is taking place.  If they move into the middle class, they are no longer concerned with what happens in the working class, even if many of them look just like them.

Latinos don’t want to be treated like Blacks, including the Latino Blacks. White liberals might clutch their collective pearls at this one, but creating the catchall term POC was another one of your terrible mistakes.  It’s like opening a zoo and locking all the lions, cheetahs, leopards and common house cats in one cage and hanging the sign Feline Community on it.   White people have always assumed that Blacks and Latinos are as thick as thieves, and this is not true.  When my brother was in high school, and later in prison, he told me about participating in several gang fights between whites, Blacks and Latinos.  When the Mexicans had to make alliances, they jumped on the white side and fought against the Blacks, not with them.  Democrats have never understood that just because Latinos vote largely on their side, it means that they have the same needs as Blacks and liberal-minded whites.  Assuming that all Latinos are interested in the same government assistance programs Blacks and whites have been enjoying for decades and not creating initiatives that address the specific needs of the local Latino community is beginning to drive them into Trump’s arms in ever bigger numbers. And to be honest, what immigrant is going to risk his life crossing a treacherous desert to arrive in a country only to live in the same conditions as the most cursed and mistreated group?  Nadie, that’s who.  In order to move ahead, many Latinos feel they need to stay as far away from Blacks as possible.

Probably most importantly, Latinos are largely Catholic. The Cath-lick Church is the same institution that historically aligned itself with whatever political movement that was winning at the time, whether it be the brutally authoritarian governments in Argentina, Portugal, Chile and Italy or the Nazi party in Germany.  When the Americas were colonized, terrorized, raped, looted, and decimated, the Catholic Church not only gave the monarchies its blessing, but also egged them on knowing that a substantial financial win fall was forthcoming.  (Fuck what you heard.  Not Elon Musk nor any of those Middle Eastern oil barons even come close to the Catholic Church, the world’s richest and most profitable business 500 years running.).  So, Latinos have learned to keep silent while observing what’s going on in the game before quietly positioning themselves among the winning team members in order to enjoy in the spoils.  Here in Colombia, the quickest way to get rich is to either become a politician or make friends with the ones in power.  They will show their undying loyalty to that politician until he falls off, and will then repeat this behavior with whoever takes his place.  In many small towns in Latin America, the head priest (or whatever he’s called) is sometimes more powerful than the mayor so people understand early on whose ass must be kissed to be close enough to catch some of the overflow when the money spigot starts to spurt.  Latinos who attend a Catholic Church in the U.S. jumped on the Trump train because they knew a winner when they saw one, positioning themselves to be first in line to kiss Trump’s ring and then have a hand out and ready when the booty is parcelled out.  (And God knows the Catholic Church knows about booty.).  Also, I understand that Trump’s bizarro Vice President is a Catholic late comer, so that also had to help some.

Conclusion I almost forgot to add one last reason for why Latino men voted for Trump.  The reason is that women are smarter than men.  Women have an innate sense that allows them to anticipate danger on the horizon, while men just do whatever the fuck makes them feel good in the moment, not considering that there will be hell to pay later on.  No one embodies this way of thinking more than Latino men, who are often spoiled rotten by their mothers, their grandmothers and, later, their wives.  Many Latino men, even when they get into their forties and fifties, are really just slightly taller, 8-year-old boys who have never learned how to cook, use a washing machine, change a diaper or put some money aside for a rainy day.  Latino men, especially the straight ones, can be disorganized short-term thinkers, making them the perfect candidates for Trump’s Army of Dipshits.  If it weren’t for women who are tasked with cleaning up after their men make a mess of everything, Latin America would be in much worse conditions than it is now.  My fear is that this time, Latina women in the U.S. won’t be able to fix the huge fuckin’ mess their male counterparts made of their own future.