Though many Cuban-Americans benefit from the Affordable Care Act, many also own or work in small businesses. They cheered the removal under Mr. Trump of the Obamacare requirement that most Americans have health insurance or pay a fine. Michael Binder, a University of North Florida pollster, noted that business owners liked Trump’s message that the coronanvirus pandemic was “rounding the turn.”
Protecting your interests is classic American individualism.
Finally, maybe part of the appeal of a leader like Mr. Trump is that he feels familiar. I was parsing the results with Ariana Diaz, a Venezuelan friend living in the United States, the day after the election. “We come from a place where there hasn’t been a working democracy in at least 20 years,” she said. She wondered if perhaps that’s why Venezuelan voters were more susceptible to his message. They’re not the only ones. Many people who lived through the socialism brutally foisted upon Central America in the 1980s vote Republican, and consider Reagan a hero.
Mexican-American voters in Zapata County in Texas also helped Mr. Trump hold onto the state. But of course plenty of so-called Latinos did vote for Mr. Biden. In Wisconsin and New Mexico, they helped him win. While the votes are still being tallied, Latino activists and grass roots political organizations may also help him win Nevada and Arizona.
But Mr. Biden spent little time and resources on outreach to Latino voters. This is also not new. Most campaigns court our vote only every two or four years. They assume we all speak Spanish, look the same and vote the same. Only one Senate candidate, Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat who won his bid for the U.S. Senate in New Mexico, had a Latino campaign manager or senior consultants on staff, according to the political consultant Chuck Rocha.
This isn’t just about how politicians woo some voters while taking others for granted; it’s also about how the news media sees and reports on these groups. At a social event a few years back, a fellow journalist introduced me to a friend as someone who rose from being a custodian to a self-taught journalist and master’s degree candidate. But I’d never been a custodian. It was as if she was shocked that someone like me could do something other than clean.
The language society uses doesn’t just shape the national narrative, it ascribes an identity independent of who we are. “Audre Lorde said that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Nathalie Nieves, the president of the New York chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists told me. “One of those tools includes language and the way the media continues to refer to us as Latino or Hispanic.”
If I’m totally honest, I only learned I was a Latina in the last few years. I still don’t know what that means. Growing up, I thought of myself as Cuban, or maybe Caribbean. Eventually, I became a citizen and thus a Cuban-American. These days I think of myself as an American.