Review: Geraldo Cadava's "The Hispanic Republican"
On August 28, 1970, a group of constituents penned a letter to Chester Holifield, California’s 19th District Congress member.[1] Comprised primarily of women, the authors asserted that welfare recipients in their suburban communities constitute a “burden on the taxpayer and the homeowner.” Decades of conservative angst over the New Deal state birthed nativism throughout suburban Los Angeles. “Aliens of any country should not be allowed in our country if they have no means of support,” they argued before asking rhetorically, “have you seen the cars these people drive?” And, in a move that became so emblematic of Ronald Reagan’s brand of conservatism, the authors pathologized women who depended on government assistance in arguing that “unwed mothers, divorcees, dope addicts…and aliens” deserved no public benefits.[2] This was not George Wallace’s Alabama; it was Reagan’s California. Latinx population increases in those suburbs, and others like them across the state, fueled local populist anxieties that nested in state and national Republican Party platforms. Spanish surnames like Andrade, Ochoa, and Saldivar,to name just a few, scrawled across the final page revealed an unsettling truth about the suburbs east of East Los Angeles; an emerging Hispanic conservative base had found its voice.
In The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump, Geraldo Cadava explains the origins of the GOP’s Hispanic constituency (Hispanic is the preferred identifier for most in this group). Hispanic support of the Republican Party has calcified over the last five decades and yielded considerable support for Donald J. Trump’s GOP despite its bombastic rhetoric and lethal policies. Since the early 1970s, Hispanic conservatives have influenced elections by siphoning off votes from Democrats and pointing a new direction in American racial politics. Even when the GOP loses, as in the 2020 presidential election where Trump lost to Democratic challenger Joseph R. Biden by a considerable margin, Hispanic support for the GOP remains steady. Polls show that Trump actually gained in Hispanic voter support from 2016 to 2020 — a concerning statistic for many. Indeed, Cadava argues that a principal objective of his book is to historicize and contextualize Hispanic support for Republicans, including Trump (336). Why there are Republican Hispanics is not so much the driving question, as that would presume a political authenticity that is not true of any group. As Cadava asserts, “Latinos aren’t naturally liberal or conservative. They aren’t naturally anything” (xvii). Rather, Cadava explores how Hispanic Republicans crafted collective identities within the conservative movement and to what extent they wielded real institutional power.
Argued over ten chapters and divided into four sections, “Awakening,” Influence,” “Doubt,” and “Loyalty,” Cadava’s book is a sweeping survey of the leaders, organizations, and shifts that make up the Hispanic Republican leadership and the opening to an increasingly urgent conversation about the intertwined futures of Latinx politics and the evolution of the GOP. As Cadava writes, partisan issues such as border-wall funding, taxes and business regulations are a result of an electorates’ set of concerns in a given place and time. However, a significant contribution that he makes here is to extend “issues” into the past in order to expose the ideological foundations upon which they rest. More than any single problem, Hispanics have become loyal Republicans over the last seven decades based on a web of dogmas about U.S.-Latin American relations; the United States’ role in spreading democracy around the globe; government-supported capitalism; and a “contrarian identity politics that is every bit as pronounced as the liberal identity politics they’ve spent decades criticizing.” (xvi).
The first wave of Hispanic Republicans formed their political identities through the crucible of the Cold War in Latin America and its manifestations within the territorial boundaries of the continental United States. Prior to the 1950s, Hispanic partisanship vacillated between both major parties, but Cadava argues that World War II and national political realignment following Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency shaped Hispanic politics just as it did for other Americans. Cuban American exiles like Desi Arnaz of I Love Lucy fame, and Mexican American business leaders like Lionel Sosa, a graduate of Sidney Lanier High School in San Antonio’s West Side barrio, embraced the party’s tough stance against communism, its position on law and order on the domestic front, and its business-friendly policymaking laced with rhetoric of self-determination. For Cadava, Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential bid in 1952 proved a testing ground for the GOP’s appeal to Hispanic voters. The 1952 “Latinos con Eisenhower” campaign and its successor “Me Gusta Ike” in 1956 promoted Eisenhower’s Cold Warrior credentials and beckoned supporters who felt like the Democratic Party took Latinos for granted. Disaffected Latino Democrats proved a source of recruitment for Republicans during the Eisenhower years. John Flores and Manuel Mesa, both from California, created the institutional frameworks to recruit Hispanics to the Republican camp by tapping into the same disillusionment that spurred leftist community organizers both in the cities and in the fields. The Republican Party adopted a militant anti-communist platform and won Hispanic support, particularly from those with roots in regions touched by revolution, CIA-backed coup d’états, and draconian immigration enforcement policies.
In anti-communism Republicans readied the assault on domestic labor organizing and civil rights efforts. The 1950 deportation of renowned labor organizer and civil rights activist Luisa Moreno is testament to the emergence of Cold War maneuvers on the domestic front. However, rather than oppose such actions, Hispanic Republicans became more defiant in their racial politics. Democratic Party leadership, at least rhetorically, had taken up the mantle for civil rights. By contrast, conservatives such as Barry Goldwater innovated new modalities of anti-blackness by hanging their arguments for segregation on outcomes of the free market.