On a visit to Mexico, my older sister brought along her six-month-old so my grandma could meet her. When my grandma held my niece for the first time, the first thing she said was, “I thought she was going to be darker, but she is a good olive tone.” My siblings and I started laughing: We knew we weren’t going to talk the colorism out of a 90-year-old, light-skinned Mexican. No, we didn’t attempt to beat it out either.
Latinos are increasingly leaning toward the Republican Party in the era of Donald Trump. Democrats are shocked that, despite Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiments, a significant proportion of Latinos voted for him, with the share growing between each of the 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential elections. It’s hard to pin this on any single reason; however, one of the many culprits is racialization. Racialization is the process by which race is constructed, particularly as groups become defined by their “otherness” to the dominant strata of a population. As Latinos continue assimilating into the American racial system, the concurrent rise in anti-Latino and anti-immigrant sentiments has led some to defend their self-identified place in the racialized and colorist hierarchy by means of voting conservative.
The Latino right is not a new phenomenon. Many analysts predicted that Trump would inspire limited Latino support due to his anti-Latino and anti-immigrant rhetoric, yet that wasn’t the case. Trump received around 28 percent of the Latino vote in 2016, 32 percent in 2020, and around 39 percent in 2024.
It’s not just about Trump; a meaningful proportion of Latinos have historically supported the Republican Party. Since the 1970s, Republicans have received roughly one-third of the Latino vote in presidential elections, which is significantly more than other racial minorities such as African Americans. The origins of Latino conservatism are deeply rooted in the American history of Latino racialization and their reaction to discrimination.
In 1848, following Mexico’s defeat in the Mexican-American War and the cession of Texas in 1845, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo led to the Mexican Cession, adding all of California, Nevada and Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico to the Union. Under the treaty, all Mexican residents who stood to be integrated into the United States territory would be offered a choice between emigration or full citizenship and a legal status of whiteness. Many chose to stay.
The Mexicans who remained in the Southwest after the Treaty were already subjected to racial hierarchies under Spanish colonial occupation. Latin American societies are characterized by deep socioeconomic inequalities stemming from the colonial caste system, in which Spaniards occupied the top of the social hierarchy, mixed-race mestizos the middle and Indigenous and Black people the bottom. These disparities have persisted, continuing to harm Indigenous and Black Latin Americans. At the same time, the mestizo majority internalized white supremacy, resulting in the prevalence of deep-seated colorism in this diverse population.
In 1929, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) was founded in Corpus Christi, Texas. LULAC was mostly composed of middle-class, American-born Latinos of Mexican descent. In its early years, LULAC distanced itself from the civil rights efforts of Mexican immigrants and African Americans because its members believed that association would degrade their American identity and their “whiteness.” To fight for Latino civil rights, LULAC’s principal strategy consisted of using Mexicans’ legal status as “white” under U.S. law. Yet Latinos, while legally “white,” did not enjoy the same benefits that this status conferred for others.
South Texas, where LULAC was founded, is predominantly Latino, specifically Mexican. Starr County, on the Mexican border, is 97.68 percent Latino, and all counties along the southern tip of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley are around 90 percent Latino or more. From the very beginning, Latinidad was characterized by competing racial narratives. A large proportion of Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley have historically self-identified as white in the U.S. Census, while at the same time identifying with other labels in all other contexts.
However, as anti-Latino sentiments, especially in these near-border regions, are on the rise, Latinos may deny or minimize their experiences with discrimination in an effort to conceal their “otherness.” It is primarily when interacting with government institutions that they choose to identify as white. This identification stems from a “colorblind” ideology regarding race, meaning they reject the idea that race plays a significant role in shaping their lives.
Colorblind ideology, or denial of racism, has been strongly linked to an increased likelihood of voting for Trump among Latinos. It has been suggested that some Latinos vote for Trump as a defensive strategy against discrimination. At a time of heightened anti-Latino and anti-immigrant sentiment among white Americans, many Latinos have concluded that the best way to secure their social status is to align with white populations and vote Republican in an effort to be accepted and thus avoid discrimination.
In Julie Dowling’s “Mexican Americans and the Question of Race,” she interviews various South Texas Latinos who hold this colorblind ideology. One interviewee, a man in his mid-twenties whom she calls Ruben Perez (a pseudonym), was born in the United States and believes that racism is a thing of the past and doesn’t need to be addressed. Perez describes how he is often mistaken for an immigrant at the many Homeland Security checkpoints throughout South Texas and is questioned about his legal status more frequently than many members of his own family. However, when asked whether he has experienced discrimination, he insists he has not.
It should not be surprising that many Latinos in the United States have adapted to American culture by implicitly accepting its racist attitudes. As American culture under Trump increasingly villainizes Latinos, it is increasingly common and understandable that they seek escape from these labels, adopting colorblind and right-wing ideology to avoid this vitriol. To this effect, amid Trump’s increasing rhetoric against Latino communities, South Texas experienced one of the largest swings toward the Republican Party in the 2024 presidential election. Starr County had not voted for a Republican since 1892, but it did so in 2024, when Trump won it with 57.74 percent of the vote, compared to losing it with 47.06 percent in 2020.
As Latinos struggled for dignity in the decades that followed adoption into the American caste system, they hung onto the only tool at their disposal: Legal whiteness. In the eyes of many liberals and even many left-leaning Latinos, Latinos for Trump is an oxymoron. But Latino conservatives are not dumb; their voting behavior can be reasoned to stem from a need to defend their self-perceived social status. The legacies of racism will continue to shape American politics and will do so for the foreseeable future. Likewise, Latino conservatism will remain significant and shape American politics as Latinos become an even larger minority, wielding substantial political power.
Rafael Hernandez Guerrero, PZ ’29 is from El Refugio, San Luis Potosí, México and immigrated to Boulder, Colorado as a child. He doesn’t really know what’s going on and hopes you do.
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