Since it was announced that Donald Trump would once again become president of the United States, liberal political commentators of all races and creeds have gone out of their way to make sure blame is assigned to Latinxs, 37 percent of whom, according to UnidosUS, voted for the ex-president. With a 14-point increase from 2020, Trump made history as the Republican presidential candidate who has received the largest number of Latinx votes in the nation’s history. Political analysis of the “Latino vote” quickly turned into a referendum on Latinidad writ large. White political commentators like Rachel Bitecofer turned to good old colonial paternalism to explain the growth of Trump’s support among the Latinx electorate by implying Latinx are simply too dumb to understand the consequences of their votes.

Meanwhile, Black political commentators from Joy Reid to Elie Mystal and actors Jenifer Lewis and Whoopi Goldberg, among others, rushed to condemn Latinx for breaking the Black and brown alliance.

The feelings of betrayal in Mystal’s posts quickly merged with a long history of nativist mistrust of ethnic minorities who fall outside the U.S. Black-white binary: Asian Americans, Latinx, Arab Americans, Americans of African immigrant descent, and even Native Americans. Many Black and white liberals expressed a wish for mass deportations in retaliation, with Tweets and TikTok videos saying, “I hope he mass deports you and your entire family.” For African Americans in particular, a collective feeling of betrayal and disappointment colored their reactions: We were there for you before, and we won’t forget this betrayal.

But who are these Latinx that have inspired such disappointment and rage? The idea of a singular “Latino vote” presupposes that people who identify with the multiple versions of the term — Latino, Latinx, Hispanic — constitute a single voting bloc and share concerns over a single issue, immigration, to the same degree. This reductive view ignores the fact that Latinx are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse people who have different relationships to the U.S. government and, by extension, to U.S. political processes.

Media caricatures erase the diversity of opinion informing Latinx responses to the election. In reality, there is no such thing as a singular “Latino vote.” Instead there is the potential to unite a highly diverse group of people around a set of issues, historical legacies, and desires for their communities. If listened to and engaged, many Latinx voters across the political spectrum are up for grabs.

Nativist mistrust is at the heart of the invention of Latinx as a racialized U.S. category of difference and by extension of the so-called Latinx vote as decisive. The category, originally called Hispanic, was officially introduced in the 1980 U.S. census following decades of activism by Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Afro Caribbean communities. United by their experiences of discrimination and exclusion, a common history of European colonialism and U.S. imperialism, shared ancestral languages and cultural affinities, and, for some, similar migration experiences, Latinx of different racial and ethnic backgrounds have often come together to demand rights and representation for workers, farmers, students, and immigrants.

Since the 1960s, when communities began using the term “Latino” to describe themselves, the population it encompasses in the United States has continued to diversify. Cubans, Brazilians, Haitians, and Central and South Americans of multiple races have moved north, fleeing the economic conditions often caused by U.S.-backed dictatorships and coups and from the capitalist exploitation and environmental disasters wrought by U.S. and European corporations extracting wealth from their home countries. “Latino” functions both as: (1) a U.S. political term coined by activists of shared Latin American ancestry who sought representation and access to civil and human rights for their communities; and (2) a co-optation by the state and the market, something to sell for political or economic gains.

Through a process the brilliant philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls “elite capture,” Latinx have become both hypervisible and invisible, via a commodification of cultural and linguistic traits (the Spanish language, Mexican cuisine, Caribbean music, etc.) as universal symbols of Latinidad that collapses Spain and the Latin American countries it colonized into a single category while erasing the diversity of the people and their political affiliations and aspirations. Latinx is sold as an exotic commodity in ways that dilute the majority-Black and Indigenous Latin American population. One of the earliest examples of this co-optation by the media is the 1950s TV show “I Love Lucy,” in which Desi Arnaz, who played Lucy’s husband, appeared as a taco-eating (Mexican), bullfighting (Spain), heavily accented Cuban immigrant.

Latinx can be Black, white, Asian, Native, or mixed race. They can speak one (or more) of the roughly 560 languages indigenous to Latin America, the half dozen imposed colonial languages, or a patois, a mix of a colonial and an African language. They can be Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, or they can practice multiple forms of syncretic religions, including the Afro-descended Santería. Some Latinx, like me, both dance and eat salsa. What unites Latinx peoples as a political category is precisely the fact that in the United States we are clustered together, regardless of race, ethnicity, or culture, into a single category for the purpose of being othered as foreign. This amalgamation in turn renders us as a homogenous group that is supposed to share the same racial identity and that is supposed to want the same things and vote for the same candidate. Our othering via homogenization and erasure is what makes it possible for so many official forms to designate “white (not Hispanic)” and “Black (not Hispanic)” as realistic racial definitions.

The U.S. Census Bureau, which has been led by a Latino man, Robert Santos, since 2022, is unclear on what “Latino” means. It acknowledges that Latino is an ethnicity and even states that Latinx can be of any race. From 2010 to 2020 about 40 percent of Latinx checked the “Other” box for race, a fact that likely reflects ideologies of mestizaje that erase Blackness and indigeneity from the racial imaginary and have been cemented in Latin America since the early 19th century. In response, the bureau revised the categories in 2024 by collapsing race (white, Black, Asian, et al.) and ethnicity (Latinx) into one ethno-racial category that virtually makes Latinx a race: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Middle Eastern or North African, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and White. This confusion over whether Latinx is a race or an ethnicity traverses all aspects of our government, institutions, and the public sphere, and it shapes electoral politics in unhelpful and confusing ways.

Latinx is not a race. Yet grouping all people who trace their ancestry to Latin America into one racialized category has made it easier for them to be made scapegoats by politicians at economically vulnerable moments. The trope of “blaming the immigrant” satisfies the need to assign culpability and reinforces the erroneous belief that all Latinx are immigrants or come from immigrant families. For many of us who identify ethnically or culturally as Latina, Latino, Latinx, or Hispanic and are Black or brown, this new wave of anti-Latinx hate is both chilling and triggering. We know how quickly comments on television or social media can turn into actual threats to our bodies, livelihoods, and property. In the 1930s, this “us versus them” logic led to the deportations of nearly two million people to Mexico, about 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens. During the Zoot Suit Riots of the 1940s, Mexican Americans, especially youths, were targeted by police and civilians alike. In 2010 states began introducing legislation requiring that everyone who looked “undocumented” — meaning a certain version of Latinx brownness — be stopped and asked for their papers. More recently, during the 2020 George Floyd protests, intense clashes between Afro Latinx business owners and so-called looters in New York and Chicago laid bare the sentiment that not all Black lives matter.

As a new wave of anti-Latinx hate grows, Latinx scholars, journalists, and commentators are preparing for worse to come while being bombarded with requests to explain the election results to the non-Latinx public. While some responses have been basic and, frankly, a bit insulting to the Latinx community, such as the argument that the increase in the Republican vote was caused by the use of the term “Latinx” by Harris and others, most responses have been thoughtful, with Geraldo Cadava, Tanya Katerí Hernández, and other scholars taking the lead by explaining the nuances behind the numbers. By far the most illuminating commentary has come from Afro Latinx scholars and journalists, including Hernández, Natasha Alford, and Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, who have reminded us that Black Latinx have been erased from generalized analyses of the “Latinx vote” and by extension from conversations about the “Black vote.” Considering that about six million Latinx identify as Black, their erasure is significant. Journalists Paola Ramos and Maria Hinojosa have examined how colonialism in Latin America and the desire for whiteness shape the Latinx turn to the right in their own critiques of Black erasure. For them, Latinx anti-Blackness and a colonial desire for whiteness, paired with what Ramos calls “traditionalism” — the Catholic values that oppose abortion and LGBTQ rights and lead many Latinx people to vote Republican — shaped how Latinx voted in 2024.

Colonial legacies are central to how many Latinx people, particularly those who are descendants of immigrants, think about politics. U.S. military and political interventions in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America impacted how nations defined themselves racially, how they border their countries, who governed them, who they traded with, and even if they were allowed to be sovereign. The impact of the relationships between U.S. and Latin American governments continues to shape immigration patterns, but rarely gets acknowledged in mainstream debates.

There is a direct correlation between what the U.S. did to our parents’ countries of origin and why we are here. That colonial wound is experienced in a variety of ways and continues to shape our votes. There are people who identify as Latinx whose ancestors never migrated to this country; they lived in places that became known as California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming prior to U.S. expansion into and annexation of parts of Mexico in 1848. Some Latinx trace their roots to U.S. colonial possessions, as is the case with Puerto Ricans. Others are descendants of Latin American immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Arturo Schomburg, the Black Puerto Rican collector responsible for the gift to Black histories that is the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. And there are Latinx like my family, a mix of immigrants, new Americans, and second-generation Americans whose presence in the mainland is relatively new (arriving within the past 50 years) and whose ties to our countries of origin remain strong. To this diversity add race, religion, class, gender, education, political environment in countries of origin, and the issues they care about as Americans, and the unified group known as Latinx becomes quite fractured.

As Cadava reminds us, thinking that more than 65 million people of such diverse backgrounds have only one concern — immigration — is reductive. It is also based on xenophobic racism, harmful nativist narratives, imperialist and colonialist legacies, and anti-Blackness. The mistake Democrats continue to make is to assume Latinx are a mass of brown immigrants whose only concern is how to stay in this country and not get deported rather than a constituency of voters who are citizens of this nation and who experience and think about electoral politics through a lens that is shaped by their particular relations to race, class, gender, and religion as well as by the issues most affecting their families, communities, and countries of origin: the economy, health care, reproductive justice, climate crisis, trade relations, and policies toward countries of origin (particularly relevant to Cubans, Haitians, and Venezuelans).

While immigration is among those issues for many Latinx voters, particularly those who are part of recent waves of migration, it is not the main concern of all Latinx voters, who, like most voters, tended to cite economic issues as a top priority. In fact, as recent polls have shown, some Latinx are as concerned about immigration as other groups. When I interviewed a small group of Latinx Trump supporters in the Bronx for a book project, Afro Latinx Americans of different ages, to my surprise, said a recent case in which an undocumented immigrant was accused of sexually assaulting a young girl in a Queens park had swung their vote to the right. In Brooklyn, during a similar interview, a group of New American Latinx, mainly of Colombian descent, cited concerns about a housing shortage if new waves of immigrants and refugees were allowed entry in driving them toward Trump.

Exit polls, as well as continued analysis by Latinx organizations, are a good starting point for understanding where to begin organizing if the left wants to harness Latinx voting power in elections to come. We learned, for example, that while Trump did better with Latinx voters in general, he made more headway with Latino men than women. Some have argued that this gender gap reflects not only a certain form of masculinity and machismo that is prevalent in Latinx communities but also the same traditional cultural values Ramos described. For more traditional Latinx families, the economic burden falls on the man, who is often expected to support his household (or multiple households). If men are railing from a lagging economy, still underemployed due to the aftermath of Covid, it’s not a huge surprise that many found Trump’s promises of prosperity, wrapped in a masculine narrative of strength and rapid success, to be appealing. The economy was a huge driver for Latinx Republican votes across the country.

Another key element for those seeking Latinx votes is familiarity with the constituency’s specific communities, which vary by region; relationship to immigration, race, and class; and familiarity with the U.S. electoral process. The success of Latinx politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Adriano Espaillat, Ruben Gallego, and Raúl Grijalva in their congressional bids, including in red or purple districts, was in great part due to their familiarity with the communities they serve.

Take New Jersey, for example, a state with a Latinx electorate of 15 percent that has traditionally voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Gains among the Latinx population in particular have now turned New Jersey, for the first time ever, into a potential purple state with a 25-point swing to the Republican Party. In an interview with the New Jersey Monitor’s Sophie Nieto-Muñoz, Patricia Campos-Medina, president of Latina Civic Action, explained that Latinx in New Jersey voted Republican because “there’s a disconnect — they’re not getting any messaging from Democrats that appeal to them. They don’t get opportunities to run. They don’t get their candidates. They don’t get attention. Therefore, once they hear a message of economic opportunity and investments and business growth, they appeal to that.”

Nearly one in four people in New Jersey identifies as an immigrant, which makes it likely that a large number of Latinx in the state are immigrants or come from immigrant families. Many come from countries where socialist governments have left many people in poverty and unable to access basic opportunities, as is the case with the growing population of Venezuelans and the more established Cuban population in Union City. They might be averse to voting for candidates associated with the left, defaulting automatically to the Republican Party, simply because it seems like the safest option. Others, like my family, come from countries with legacies of dictatorship and find Trump’s rhetoric eerily familiar. Both factions of Latinx immigrants — those running away from socialism and those running from the right — mistrust politics, which Nieto-Muñoz reports manifests as either minimal participation in electoral processes or voting for the candidate who seems to acknowledge the bare fact of their existence (by appearing on Univision, for example). The lack of understanding of what Latinx are politically leads to a lack of representation. And when so few Latinx run for positions in New Jersey’s state government, it is difficult for Latinx who are new Americans to understand who would have their backs.

If the Democratic Party wants to convince Latinx people to join it and if the left wants to organize with and among Latinx, the first thing that they must do is to understand what Latinidad is, who identifies with the various terms used to name Latinidad, what issues affect particular Latinx communities across the United States beyond immigration, and what broken promises need to be addressed. For many Latinx immigrants in mixed-status families, there is still a feeling of betrayal that lingers from the failure of the DREAM Act, which Obama promised and could not deliver. An undocumented community organizer in Trenton, N.J., where I am from, reminded me recently that “our community carries this mistrust because Obama … looked so many of us in the eye with the promise of a DREAM Act, then once elected turned into the border czar himself.” That Democrats since Obama have continued to detain and deport immigrants en masse, intruding even into sanctuary cities like Trenton, does not help. To move forward, Democrats need to make amends by pairing with community leaders, people who can educate them to better understand our differences, needs, and desires. More importantly, politicians and organizers should work with Latinx communities now, every day, and through the years to come, not only during the few months that precede presidential elections.