On a sunny Chicago day last month, journalist and author Paola Ramos posted a TikTok she’d recorded with her father, Mexican American news anchor Jorge Ramos, at the Democratic National Convention. She asked Jorge, who had reported from many similar conventions over the decades: “What is the main difference you’re noticing at this convention?”
His response was that the rhetoric around immigration seemed to be changing: While la reforma migratoria, or immigration reform, was once a Democratic buzzword, the tides are now turning toward a conversation around border control. This language shift might indicate a new strategy for the Harris campaign: out-Trumping Trump. But how would such a narrative be received by the Latino electorate?
With only a few months left until the 2024 presidential election—and with a woman as the Democratic candidate for the second time—the younger Ramos is thinking a lot about elections of the recent past. She began her career in politics, working on the Clinton campaign and under the Obama administration, and has often considered the so-called Latino vote—especially when it was emphasized as a tool to secure Hillary Clinton’s victory.
However, when less than 50% of eligible Latino voters showed up to the polls in 2016, the loyalties and motivations of the population were called into question. Ramos wrote her first book, Finding Latin-X: In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity, in the wake of that result, embarking on the project of unpacking a vast and rapidly growing demographic. To do so, she traveled around the country, talking to and connecting with pockets and subcultures within the Latino community.
Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, Ramos’s latest book (out September 28), casts aside the misguided notion that Latinos are a monolith and looks at the small but expanding part of the population moving steadily right. Through reporting trips and conversations with experts and psychologists alike, Ramos interrogates the idea that the Latino electorate is aligned with progressive values, writing about an Afro-Latino former Proud Boy leader, a Latino border vigilante, and Latino insurrectionists who participated in the January 6 US Capitol attack. As she persuasively proves, not all white supremacists are white.
In studying and spending time with these conservative extremists, Ramos attempts to situate their beliefs and affinity to Trumpism and far-right movements within Latin America’s long history of colonialism—a sort of political trauma. She delves into the history of caudillos, the Latin American military dictators who came out of the wars of independence from Spanish colonial rule, and writes that it “seems to be a recurring story in Latin American history and politics: strongmen achieving ‘democracy’ by way of authoritarianism.” Sounds familiar, right?