GC: A hundred years ago, like today, minorities and immigrants—two separate groups that overlap but shouldn’t be confused as synonymous—didn’t always see themselves as coherent groups with aligned identities and interests. They haven’t spoken with a single voice. This is one problem with the thinking behind majority-minority futures. You can be a minority who wants to be part of the majority. The League of United Latin American Citizens, for example, was founded in 1929 in Corpus Christi, Texas. It was a group of largely Mexican American professionals who preached assimilation—not exactly as white, because they embraced their mixed-race status as Mexicans—but as Americans. Their members had to be American citizens, spoke English at their meetings, and the group adopted George Washington’s Prayer as their official prayer.
You can also be both the majority and the minority. I mean, my mom’s family is from Wales and Scotland, while my dad’s family is from the Philippines, Colombia, Panama, Mexico, and who knows where else. So, sure, call me Mexican American, which is what people assume when they hear my name and when I tell them that I’m from Tucson, Arizona, because that’s how most Hispanics from that part of the country identify. But I’m also Colombian, Panamanian, Filipino, all of it. Half Hispanic, but half not. So, when you think of someone’s ethnic identity and how it maps onto partisan politics, I think we just need to abandon any sense that any group should vote a certain way, in part because we’re always part of groups, but not fully; our relationship with the groups we belong to isn’t exclusive.
That’s fundamental to the Latino experience. Republicans and Democrats have argued that we’re natural Republicans and that we’re natural Democrats, but they’ve done so for their own political gain rather than as true statements of our character. We’ve always been both, and we’ve always been neither. Since the 1960s, most of us have voted for Democrats, but many of us every election have voted for Republicans. Moreover, the political beliefs of many of us were shaped more in Latin America than in the United States; only here do our beliefs get coded as liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, and only after years spent trying to become citizens—for those who do try to become citizens—do beliefs forged in Latin America but tweaked in this country have any effect on electoral politics. And of course, about half of us don’t participate in presidential elections; we have some of the lowest turnout rates of any American voters.