In almost every election since Nixon’s reelection, somewhere between a quarter and a third of Hispanics have voted for the Republican candidate. But, in terms of how Hispanic Republicans went from supporting individual candidates to becoming loyal Republicans, I would tie it to an important shift in their thinking between 1980 and 2016.
When Reagan was the Republican candidate in 1980, the individuals running his Hispanic campaign made the argument: “We know that the Republican Party hasn’t always represented the Hispanic community, but here, in Reagan, we have the governor of California who has appointed more Hispanics to his administration than any of his 20th-century predecessors.” So, in 1980, the logic was: vote for the man, not the party.
And that’s 180 degrees different from what Hispanic Republicans said in 2016. One person I interviewed a few months before that election told me that even if Hispanic Republicans didn’t love Donald Trump and didn’t feel like he shared their values, they were going to vote for him because they weren’t going to let one man ruin a movement they’d built over a long period of time. The logic was: party over man.
That’s really the transformation I’m trying to map out in the book. How it went from man over party to party over man. Because, to me, that suggests some kind of evolution of party loyalty by Hispanics.
RL: Your book will be important not just for understanding politics but also for history as a field. It’s a reminder that there’s a history of Hispanics who have been involved in the Republican Party and have held positions of power for decades. Hispanics have been a political force since Nixon, but also, really, since 1848, if you look at political parties in New Mexico, for example.
GC: Right. There’s a lot of attention in popular media to the rising political force of Latinos in the United States because of recent demographic changes, but Latinos have been part of the fabric of the United States for a long time, and their histories don’t always make it into the sweeping reappraisals of American politics being written today.
RL: In your book, you include so many voices of individuals who spent time thinking about why the Republican Party made sense for them. At one point, you say that this process is not just about becoming Republican, but it’s also about becoming Hispanic at the same time, right?
GC: Part of what I try to do is recover a Hispanic Republican intellectual tradition, if you could call it that. This is important because if you look at the work of Latino intellectual historians like Carlos Blanton, or Ruben Flores, they’re trying to incorporate Latinos into the history of ideas. Their ideas have been in conversation with the broader picture of American intellectual history, but also with Latino history. There’s a book by Manuel Machado called Listen Chicano2—
RL: I love that name.
GC: Yeah, it’s great. It’s really interesting stuff because, as a Mexican American Republican in the ’60s and ’70s, Machado has a whole different version of Latino history than the one we tend to teach in our college courses.
According to his version, the Spanish colonizers are individuals to be admired because they brought civilization to the United States. In other words, Spanish heritage is something that Latinos should run toward instead of away from. It’s just a whole different point of departure for understanding the Latino past and present, since we now tend to think, and not without reason, that Spaniards were colonizers. I was shocked to learn that Hispanic conservatives celebrate Cortés’s arrival in Mexico.