Buckle Up! This is the final post in my series on majority-ninority congressional districts and its a long one. The last two presidential elections underscored the importance of appealing to Latine voters, especially in states along the Southern Border. These recent elections also proved the dangers of treating this demographic group as a monolith. Today, we’ll be taking a tour of our nation’s majority-Latine congressional districts and explore the ethnic differences that explain their diverse political attitudes.

Topline Takeaways

• While national media often treats the Hispanic community as a monolith, acknowledging the different ethnic groups within the Latine diaspora is key to understanding how this group of voters interacts with politics.

• Some Latine voters view themselves through the lens of whiteness (Tejanos) while others explicitly lean on their experiences of immigration to shape their identity (Cubans, Mexican Americans).

• Due to the diversity of experiences within their community, majority-Latine districts don’t all align politically.

Tejanos in Texas

The Tejano community in South Texas traces its ancestral roots back to Spanish colonists settling in the Rio Grande Valley. Today, many of these voters do not identify as “people of color” and instead largely see themselves as “White.” (On self identification forms, this group would identify as “Hispanic or Latino of any Race” and would also mark the box for “White.”) While many on the left gambled that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric toward Mexican American immigrants would alienate these voters, many on the ground saw it differently:

“They like this machismo, bravado, lucha libre-style politics — it’s like all-star wrestling, Trump style. It fits perfectly with the South Texas, Tejano person.”

-U.S. Rep Vicente Gonzalez (D, TX-15)

The reality is that this community is deeply patriotic, religious and socially conservative. As the national Democratic party moves left, voters in South Texas are increasingly noticing that they share more in common ideologically with Republican candidates than Democrats. After persistent outreach from Republican operatives, many voters finally made the switch in the 2020 election.

“What bothers me is that people understand that about the white vote. Campaigns don’t have the same discourse in rural Pennsylvania as they do in Philadelphia. It’s a racialized oversimplification, one that holds that, if it’s Latinos, they should all look and act the same… I think they hoped that Latinos would all be, you know, offended by Trump.”

-Sergio Garcia-Rios, professor of government and Latino studies at Cornell University.

There are currently 15 majority-Latine districts in Texas and roughly half of them are currently represented by Republicans. South Texas specifically sits in the political spotlight as it is a historically Democratic region that has been trending toward Republicans in recent elections. Many believe the US House majority will be decided by these voters.

Cubans and Puerto Ricans in South Florida

South Florida’s Latine population is much different than South Texas’s as these voters hold stronger ties to their island homelands of Cuba and/or Puerto Rico. When reviewing both of Donald Trump’s Florida campaigns: many characterize Trump’s approach as a campaign that “never stopped in its efforts” to court Cubans living in and around Miami.

“The weaponization of U.S. policy towards Cuba was the entry point to help cement the idea that the Democratic Party is the party of socialists… The biggest mistake was when it was decided that the accusations about socialism and communism were not going to be rebuked because they were considered absurd.”

- Fernand Amandi, Democratic political strategist

The difference that brought Trump the largest presidential margin in Florida since 2004 was his ability to court several different Latine communities that previously voted for Hillary Clinton by appealing to fears of socialism.

“We ran an innovative grassroots and advertising effort that directly engaged newer Cuban arrivals — who had been largely ignored by both parties — as well as young U.S.-born Cuban Americans in ways that were culturally relevant to them and different than how you’d engage my abuelos’ generation.” -Giancarlo Sopo, a Trump campaign staffer

Despite Trump’s tough-on-immigrants rhetoric, many of these Latin American arrivals resonated with his “America First” approach that mirrors their aspirational patriotism. Cubans who fled dictatorships and/or poverty came to America to evade what they viewed as failed socialist governments and now lean on American nationalism to espouse their preference for capitalism:

“It’s about patriotism. If you love America, you hate socialism. And with Democrats moving toward a socialist agenda, that’s what’s got so many Cubans and other immigrants supporting Trump. They’re not supporting him necessarily. They’re supporting America.”

- Nelson Diaz, former chair of the Miami Dade Republican Party

Republican party leaders leaned in on the negative perception of socialism in ways that hearkened back to each individual community’s history with their home country. Democrats made it even worse with their proposals of packing the Supreme Court: that practice was employed historically by several socialist governments in Latin America to retain power. Some voters saw the parallels:

“The packing of the courts, as you saw in Nicaragua, in Venezuela, as well as Cuba, the stripping of judicial independence for that body impedes democracy… I think that for our community, we view this threat as very real. That can’t be ignored.”

-Helen Aguirre Ferré, former White House communications aide

Trump’s campaign also made successfully targeted pitches to Puerto Ricans. In the 2020 presidential election, Osceola county saw a massive, nearly 10-point swing toward Republicans when compared to 2016. This county has a disproportionately large Puerto Rican community and its residents have higher rates of educational attainment and were much less likely to live in poverty than Florida’s other Latine communities. Trump’s campaign specifically leaned on these markers of middle-class identity and frequently nodded to evangelical Christianity as these voters have embraced evangelicalism at relatively high rates. The contrast between each party’s approach was noticeable to voters on the ground, “We saw these double standards, of how [Democrats] treated faith-based communities and how they treated small businesses.”

Indigenous Latines in New Mexico

Before we can dissect the demographic challenges faced by Indigenous Latine voters in New Mexico we need to review the concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality describes the ways that various identities intersect to create unique social dynamics. (Think the unique struggles faced by queer Black people or trans Asian people.)

Keeping this concept in mind: it is possible to have both indigenous ancestry AND ethnic ties to Latin America. This includes descendants of the Pueblo peoples and the Mayan civilization. To be clear: many would say that it is inaccurate to call these people “Hispanic.” (The term Hispanic refers to people who descend from Spain: y’know… colonialists who captured Latin American countries to service European interests.)

Now that we’ve cleared up our definitions, we can address the fact that Indigenous Latines have been routinely disenfranchised in New Mexico for generations and targeted outreach toward “Hispanics” still ignores this group.

In the most recent redistricting cycle, indigenous voters felt disenfranchised in favor of Hispanic voters. Mapmakers redrew congressional district lines to make NM-2 the state’s only majority Latine district. (The other two districts have majority nonwhite populations but are not majority Latine.) In order to create this majority Latine district, mapmakers had to avoid creating a majority Native district where the state’s Navajo population would hold electoral power. This put indigenous Latines in an awkward bind: their Latine ethnicity was (somewhat?) respected while their indigenous roots were ignored.

Mexican Americans in Arizona and California

The final group of the Latine diaspora that we’ll explore are Americans with ancestral ties to Mexico. In both Arizona and California, Mexican Americans makeup the largest proportion of Latine voters. While many would expect this ethnic group to be in favor of liberal immigration policies, many Mexican Americans share a conservative view on immigration, especially towards “illegal immigrants.”

“Any time an American does something wrong or breaks the law they're going to pay the consequences. Whenever an illegal does something wrong they get a new ID and become a new person. I want the laws same for everybody here, not bent for them."

-Susan Schwartz, Mexican American voter in Arizona

This group is partly responsible for buoying the Republican party in California. Of the state’s 10 House districts currently represented by Republicans, four are districts with a majority-Latine voting base. Several of these areas are also split-ticket districts: places that supported Joe Biden in the 2020 election alongside a Republican House representative. These voters, typically living in the more rural regions of the state, often go forgotten in California politics as they don’t align neatly with the liberal lean seen in and around the state’s larget cities.

Leftover Links

• While recent elections have shown growing Latine support for Republican candidates, that sits at odds with recent public opinion polling.

• Latinx? Hispanic? Latine? A comic artist shares the identifier he prefers and why.