The Construction, Connection, and Communication of Latino Identities and Politics

Past outlooks on US demography, ethnoracial identity, and party politics had predicted that Latinos would become part of a dominant, multiracial, and liberal Democratic political coalition. These predictions, however, have failed to come to pass. Instead, Latinos have increasingly voted for Trump between 2016 and 2024. In The Construction, Connection, and Communication of Latino Identities and Politics, I draw on in-depth interviews with 66 Latino Republican, Democrat, and Independent partisans to understand better how Latinos interpret the relationship between Latino identity, partisanship, and racial, ethnic, and immigration politics. I challenge approaches that assume a rigid, linear, and a priori link between social identities and politics. Conversely, I argue that Latinos ambivalently articulate the relationship between ethnoracial, immigrant, and political identities. To theorize this interpretive process, in Chapters Two and Three, I draw on Stuart Hall and other social science scholars to theorize how individuals use ideologies to articulate how they see themselves in relation to partisan politics and racialization processes. I empirically develop my argument and theorization through three empirical chapters. In Chapter Four, I analyze how Latino Republicans “reconcile” their “paradoxical politics” by using ideologies to align how they see themselves with the Republican Party. In Chapter Five, I analyze how Latino Democrats navigate partisan ambivalence as they see Trump and the Republican Party as categorically invalid options while believing that the Democratic Party is insufficiently pursuing their interests. In Chapter Six, I analyze how Latino Republicans and Democrats navigate and interpret intra-Latino political conflict within their families. Through that case study, I show how Latinos draw on ideologies to articulate divergent interpretations of ethnoracial and familial solidarity. Overall, this study contributes to interdisciplinary research at the intersections of the sociology of race and ethnicity, Latino Sociology/Studies, and political sociology/science.