By Aldo Mena
When I first encountered David Siders’ Politico article entitled ‘There Are a Lot of Mexican People Looking Forward to Trump,” I was expecting to find some form of tangible empirical evidence supporting the rather bold assertion proclaimed in the article’s title.
What I would discover instead was that Siders was relying upon the flimsiest of anecdotal evidence to prop up his primary claim. As it turned out, the sources he had consulted in support of what was essentially his article’s thesis were just some random El Pasoans he happened to encounter during Winterfest one night in downtown El Paso.
One of the people he interviewed, for example, was an “executive chef” named Roy Rosales. According to Mr. Rosales, Trump had ‘started rough. But now that you see it, when Biden came in, he messed everything up.’ Mr. Rosales would conclude his analysis that evening by claiming that ‘There are a lot of Mexican people looking forward to Trump.’
This was apparently enough for Siders, who, without further ado and, more importantly, without any actual substantiation of this vague and somewhat incoherent assertion, chose to misleadingly feature this particular quote as the title of his article.
I would encounter Siders’ article again a few days after its initial publication during a segment on “Jose Diaz-Balart Reports” on MSNBC where the host, without much context or scrutiny, essentially repeated another one of Siders’ unsubstantiated motifs that even in a predominantly Mexican American city like El Paso the “growing appeal of a pro-Trump, hardline immigration mentality” was increasingly evident.
And then, I would encounter fragments of Siders’ article yet again as the right-wing media apparatus picked it up and circulated increasingly distilled portions of it on news sites like the Washington Examiner, State of the Union, and Analyzing America, and then on various Reddit threads. Each of the subsequent references to Siders’ article invariably echoed, in one form or another, the unsubstantiated claim that there were “a lot of Mexicans” looking forward to a second Trump administration.
For the sake of accuracy, I guess I should mention that Siders’ conversations with local Democrats like U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, were more nuanced and developed and certainly much more effective in illustrating the growing concern with Pres. Joe Biden’s vulnerability on the contentious issue of immigration.
But this insight is hardly a newsflash. The Biden Administration’s recognition of the harsh realities of border politics along with the administration’s corresponding policy shift on immigration was evident at least a year ago and has been regularly reported on ever since. More relevantly, however, these conversations with local Democrats hardly serve to establish the “growing appeal of a pro-Trump, hardline immigration mentality” or that there are a “lot of Mexicans” looking forward to another Trump administration.
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Support for Trump in the Mexican American community in El Paso and elsewhere is undoubtedly real and certainly nothing new. Those of us who know the neighborhood a little better, so to speak, have been encountering these “Latinos for Trump” and their infamous warnings of “taco trucks on every corner” since 2015 when Trump launched his first presidential bid by calling Mexicans “rapists” and “criminals.”
And I’ll even concede that during the interval from 2016 through 2020, there has, in fact, been evidence of some erosion of the commanding margins of support that Biden and the Democrats have typically enjoyed among Latino/Hispanic voters. But this doesn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that Republicans are anywhere close to winning any segment of the Latino/Hispanic vote with the obvious exception of Cuban Americans.
The reality is that, at least according to an article by Maria Cardona and Matt Barreto recently featured in the Los Angeles Times, it’s Republicans who continue to struggle with the Latino/Hispanic vote across 19 key policy issues including the economy, healthcare, abortion, and, yes, even immigration. Cardona and Barretto also challenge the larger false narrative being circulated in the media about the Latino/Hispanic vote. As they explain, this narrative posits that “Latinos used to be monolithic base voters for Democrats, but now they are fracturing and increasingly fleeing to Republicans.” The only problem with this version of events, of course, is that, as Cardona and Barreto effectively demonstrate, it simply isn’t true.
Perhaps the most important point to keep in mind about Mexican American support for Trump, of whatever magnitude, is that it is ultimately the product of, and I’m afraid there’s really no delicate way of putting this, ignorance in the most denotative sense of the word. There is, after all, no rational explanation, if you’re a Mexican American, for supporting a political movement informed by an ideology that, under the most generous of interpretations, seeks the marginalization of the Mexican American community in American society. For whatever reason, these Latinos for Trump, or whatever you’d like to call them, have simply not seen the proverbial forest and do not understand the obvious and rather serious implications of a second round of Trumpism for the Mexican American community.
I realize that my observation is likely to be dismissed by some as condescension or arrogance or intellectual elitism or whatever. But, it’s actually intended as a sincere appeal to Mexican American Trump supporters to acknowledge Trump’s incontrovertible connection to white supremacy and to, accordingly, abandon the absurd delusion that Mexican Americans will have any role to play, except perhaps as some form of camouflage or some type of kapo, in the political ecosystem that will undoubtedly be inaugurated by a second Trump presidential administration.
I actually believe Trump when he says that he hasn’t read “Mein Kampf.” It’s likely that he has confused the seminal text of Nazism with a lesser collection of Hitler’s speeches entitled “My New Order” which, incidentally, Trump also claims he hasn’t read either. But, whatever the case, the fact that Trump himself is unfamiliar with the intellectual particulars of white supremacy doesn’t mean that his handlers and that many of his supporters aren’t tuned into this ideology and that they aren’t ready to deploy it against the Mexican American community. As the El Paso Walmart Shooting of 2019 indelibly demonstrated, the possibility of a white supremacist attack of whatever kind on our community is no longer just some remote abstraction.
Perhaps the ultimate value of Siders’ article might be to remind Mexican Americans of the folly of continuing to tolerate this support for Trump from within our very own community. At this point, I think that we can admit that it was a mistake to trivialize this aberration of thought as some sort of innocuous and fleeting anomaly. During the upcoming year, we will undoubtedly continue to see this vulnerable mindset exploited by Republicans to normalize the absurdity of Mexican American support for Trump. And, while it’s not exactly clear how to effectively mitigate the ignorance at the root of this misguided support, what is abundantly clear is that the Mexican American community can no longer afford to simply ignore this problem. As we prepare, once again, to confront Trump, our perennial enemy, in the 2024 presidential election, it is critical for the Mexican American community to also confront the enemy within itself.
About the Author:
The Perimeter is by columnist Aldo Mena. Aldo N. Mena is a local educator, podcaster, freelance writer, and native El Pasoan who enjoys exploring issues of relevance to the Mexican American community. He is a graduate of the University of New Mexico where he received a B.A. in English and Political Science, and an M.A. in Latin American Studies with a research concentration in late colonial/early national period Mexican history.
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