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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?
Ahead of Tuesday night’s debate, Vogue spoke to Ramos about her reporting, the long shadow of Latin American political history, and the most surprising part of writing her new book.
Vogue: Finding Latin-X: In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity looked at various communities across the massive Latino population in the US. How did you decide to focus this second book on the rise of the Latino far right, and why do you think this is a critical group to better understand?
Paola Ramos: Finding Latin-X was so much about highlighting the diversity within the community. It was based on this idea that we had more in common than not—and then fast forward to 2020, and that’s when I get this lightbulb [moment]. I see that in 2020 Donald Trump—a figure who, for many Latinos, carries this anti-immigrant symbolism—does between 8 and 10 points better with Latinos than in 2016.
Then, throughout my reporting following the 2020 election, I start to see the rise in this anti-immigrant sentiment, this evangelical movement, and the culture wars. So that’s what prompted me to dig into what the numbers meant and, more than anything, question my original thesis four years ago. Can we claim to be a unified voting block? Can we claim to be a unified community? Regardless of the answer, today is forcing us to at least question those built-in stereotypes we’ve had for decades.
One of this book’s main takeaways is that the defector phenomenon isn’t new within the Latino population. Can you talk about that a little bit?
I try to explain that this alleged rightward shift goes beyond Trumpism. It goes beyond politics. And it has more to do with our history and culture and the psychological forces that overshadow the Latino community. If we understand that Latinos are part of these complex voting blocs, it has to do less with politics and more with this racial baggage that we carry from Latin America—which manifests in a very complicated way in American politics. What I’m talking about is the anti-immigrant sentiment that comes from our history of colorism and the caste system in Latin America. The rise in Christian nationalism among some Latino evangelicals comes from the doctrine of discovery and the brutal history we’ve had with colonization. And the appeal of Trump, particularly when it comes to strongmanship and authoritarianism, resonates with some people because, during the 20th century, we also had a very complicated relationship with strongmen figures throughout the continent. When you look at it through that lens, you start to understand that part of the politics we’re seeing now has actually more to do with our history and goes beyond the MAGA movement.
You often interviewed and spent time with people who subscribe to dangerous and violent ideologies. How did you ensure your personal safety, particularly as a queer woman, during these reporting trips?
I made a conscious decision that the only way to truly understand this wave was to attempt to humanize many people who fundamentally disapprove of my being. And that’s a hard exercise. Most situations were uncomfortable in the sense that I wasn’t just talking to people who obviously reject queerness or have pretty alarming things to say about Black people or believe in Christian nationalism, but even just walking into those spaces as a queer woman, you feel the weight of the stares and the tension. But there’s an element of being transactional in this work now, so I needed to get many of my characters to build enough trust to talk to me.
It’s very hard to sit down with a lot of these right-wing figures. Through all the conversations, I tried to explain the danger in their thinking and ideology and what this means to the country. But I also tried hard to understand them as people—like, where does the trauma come from? How do I explain why these Latinos have so much hatred toward queer people? And the harder part is getting to the root cause of that versus just dismissing it as hatred. But it’s uncomfortable.
What surprised you most while working on Defectors?
I started my career in politics, where I was driven by this idea that the heart of this multiethnic, multiracial coalition was going to be Latino voters, right? The thesis of both the Obama and Clinton campaigns was that in the future Latinos would drive the Democratic Party to success. And so it has been surprising to question that theory and those presumed loyalties to voting patterns and even who we are as a community.
In terms of what surprised me most in this research, one is the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment. And now that I understand the subject more, it is shocking to talk to brown Latinos, who perhaps even recently arrived from Latin America, who have warmed up to the idea of mass deportations. And you never get used to that. Having those conversations with people is always alarming, particularly because so much of what I grew up around was this idea that as Latinos the one thing we had in common was that shared immigrant experience.
The second thing is understanding how forceful and divisive the moral panic around transgender folks has been in the community. We as Latinos can humanize abortion, perhaps humanize immigrants, but when it comes to queerness, I’ve seen how it has really torn us apart. And that has been hard to swallow.
You seem to have a penchant for releasing books right before a presidential election. The 2016 election emphasized the Latino vote and how it would ensure Hillary Clinton’s win, and obviously that didn’t happen. Have conversations and perceptions around the Latino vote shifted since then?
For sure. The most basic thing that has finally been ingrained in the mainstream media and the public is this very simple idea that Latinos are not a monolith, which is something that we wouldn’t talk about publicly in 2016. That’s sort of the thesis now. And now the evolution from 2020 to 2024 is not only that Latinos are not a monolith, but there seems to be this small but growing rightward shift that can no longer be neglected. And that raises these bigger fundamental cultural questions about us.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
