Book Review: ‘Defectors,’ by Paola Ramos

DEFECTORS: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, by Paola Ramos

For some observers, Donald Trump’s gains among Latino voters in the 2020 election made little sense. Hadn’t Trump talked incessantly about building a “great, great wall” along the southern border? Hadn’t he called Mexicans “rapists” and migrants “animals”? Most Latinos still identify as Democrats, and in 2020 most of them voted for Joe Biden. But Trump still made some serious — and startling — inroads, especially along the border. Take Zapata County, Texas, where 94 percent of the population is Hispanic: Trump flipped it red.

The journalist Paola Ramos was among those who were shocked. Her timely new book, “Defectors,” explores the rise of the Latino far right. She explains that the movement isn’t limited to white Latinos who fixate on their European blood; she interviews Afro-Latinos like Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in organizing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “It’s clear that Latinos, too, can be white supremacists,” Ramos writes. Tarrio, like a number of other extremists in Ramos’s book, insists that’s impossible. “I’m pretty brown,” he once said. “I am Cuban. There’s nothing white supremacist about me.”

Ramos calls such disavowals “the Latin American racial dance,” which deploys “our mixed background as a means to disguise our own racism.” Ramos describes herself as a light-skinned lesbian Latina with a Cuban mother and a Mexican father. Growing up, she writes, “I worshiped the whiteness of my Spanish roots” and “erased my community’s Indigenous past.” Now Ramos, a former correspondent for Vice News and a contributor to MSNBC, is ardently liberal. “Defectors” is explicitly a work of advocacy journalism, intended for her fellow progressives, who have long assumed that Democrats could take Latino voters — with the possible exception of Cuban Americans — for granted.

She argues there are three forces that account for the attraction of some Latinos to far-right extremism: “tribalism,” “traditionalism” and “trauma.” Tribalism manifests as internalized racism and a desperate desire to belong. Traditionalism refers to conservative Christian beliefs and strict ideas about gender norms. Trauma comes from histories in countries marked by violent upheaval and autocratic regimes run by caudillos, or strongmen. All three elements, she says, flow from a colonial past that started with Spanish conquistadors and continued through American meddling during the Cold War.

Ramos recounts some tense interviews with people whose politics repulse her, even if some are canny enough to “say all the right things.” She talks to a conservative evangelical pastor while members of his congregation stand nearby, dressed in MAGA T-shirts and sporting holstered guns. She admits to feeling intimidated when meeting Gabriel Garcia, a Cuban American from Florida who live-streamed his participation in the Jan. 6 attack. But Ramos is struck by how “timid, nervous and extremely fidgety” Garcia turns out to be one-on-one. Tarrio, too, seems calmer and more thoughtful in private than the brash loudmouth he plays in public. Ramos’s empathy is formidable. As frightened as she is by the defectors’ politics, she is always curious to learn more.