US elections: Where two stories reveal Hispanic political diversity

PHILADELPHIA/WILMINGTON: Savvy Gurule is a 22-year-old student pursuing a masters in education at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadephia. She is queer. Her sister, a 27-year-old, who is a designer in New Jersey, is transgender. Both support Kamala Harris for president because they believe in “human rights”. Their father, a first-generation Mexican immigrant, runs a business and will vote for Donald Trump “because of money”. And their mother, who works with her husband in business but is also a pillar of support for the two daughters, hasn’t told the family who she will vote for. All of them are US citizens.
Louis is a painting contractor in North Carolina’s Brunswick county. Originally from Mexico, he is not a citizen, but the rest of his family are Americans. They will all vote for Harris. Louis employs several other Hispanic men. Among them, a few will vote for Trump because they had to “wait their turn to work”, and are resentful that today’s illegal immigrants are being able to walk in through a broken border.
Hispanics constitute about 15% of the US electorate. The community, deeply heterogenous in itself, play a key role in swing states such as Arizona and Nevada. And while an overwhelming majority backed Joe Biden for president in 2020, the Hispanic support for the Democratic candidate, polls estimate, is dropping. There is a corresponding increase in the support for Donald Trump, counterintuitive as it may sound given the Republican hostility to immigration from the southern border.
In the two stories of Gurule and Louis lies the story of the complexity of the Hispanic vote, where families and colleagues are grappling with their internal contradictions in terms of political choices.
A family divided by politics
Sitting outside the UPenn bookshop, Gurule said that her world, even as a high school student, changed in 2016 when Trump was elected. “It created a divide in the country and made all conversations political.” She felt that Trump had introduced and legitimised a “narrow-minded view” of the world, but added, in a rather profound insight into the current moment, “The angrier people are with Trump about who he is, the more his power grows among those who believe in him. His presence reduces the room for debate.”
Gurule was not a fan of Joe Biden either, saw both men as reducing the American presidency to a “meme”, and said that she wouldn’t have voted for Biden. She was excited about Harris, though Gurule felt that the outcome would still not resolve the fundamental divide that had grown in the country. “Harris will be seen as the lesser of the two evils, better than Trump but not celebrated in her own right. Just look at Mexicans coming together to celebrate their first woman president. We are not there.”
When asked whether she noticed men in her community gravitating towards Trump, Gurule smiled and said, “My dad.” Why? “Business was good under Trump. And that is true. I saw it. We benefited from it. My dad ran a metal business. Trump’s years were good from taxes and regulation point of view. And when Biden came, it did become tougher for him. He is very clear that this is what matters and frankly, he does understand economics better than me.” Strikingly, her father does not like Trump. “Oh, he actually almost hates Trump. He just thinks he will be better for us financially.”
Do they argue? “All the time,” Gurule said, laughing before she opened up about her sexual identity. “I am queer. My sister is transgender. One of my dad’s own brothers is gay. Human rights matter to us. My dad says he doesn’t believe in these identities. It took him a while but he accepts us and supports us. But he is clear that this is not an issue on which he will vote.” She said that her mother, who ran the business with her dad, listens in to the conversations but hasn’t told the family which way she will vote. “She did vote for Biden last time, she cares about bodily autonomy, but I don’t know what she will do now.”
The Mexican-American student said that everyone in her extended family, all her dad and mom’s siblings, were for Harris, except one cousin. “From very early on, he was very religious. He did have a difficult upbringing and his grandmother raised him. He deliberately went to the most conservative university in the country, Wyoming. He married his girlfriend at the age of 18 because he wanted to ‘give her respect’. She is now pregnant. I don’t know why he turned up so conservative, but he is the only other Trump voter in the family”.
The working-class divide
Louis came from Mexico 25 years ago. His wife and two children are Americans, while he remains a legal resident. His family and his wider cohort remain Democratic.
“Trump doesn’t want Hispanics. He doesn’t see us. We can feel it. We know it. He is racist,” Louis said, just days before Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden over the weekend saw a display of racist tropes deployed against Hispanics. A painting contractor, who was overseeing his employees finishing a painting job at North Carolina’s New Brunswick Community College, Louis said that he wasn’t fully certain of the legal status of all his employees but, in the context of Trump’s rhetoric against Hispanic workers, said that they ran the economy. “I put out a recruitment notice on my company’s Facebook page and no one turned up. It is hard to get White people to do this job. I pay $20 bucks an hour. That’s a decent wage. But either they don’t join, or work for two days and go. Who will work if there are no Hispanics? Farmers will go broke, construction work will get halted, who will run this economy?”
And yet, Louis, after this staunch defence of the value of his community’s work, said that Democrats had made a big mistake. “The border is out of control. They have just people come in. People who came in legally feel upset. Some of my own workers who came in illegally say they had to wait 15 years for a work permit but now people are walking in and getting assistance. They are then calling their relatives back home to come too. This is too much,” Louis said while adding that this did not mean Trump was right. “There is a way to treat people right. Trump doesn’t do that”.
Back in Pennsylvania, Gurule said that even among the Harris voters in her family, there was a growing feeling that Democrats had mismanaged the border. “There is an awkward duality there, of us being immigrants who don’t like others coming in. But that sentiment is real.”
Like any other voting bloc, Hispanic voters — as Gurule and Louis’s stories show — can’t be treated as homogeneous. Indeed, even within the same voter’s mind, there is a duality at times. How it reflects in the polling booth is to be seen, but like the rest of American society, the Hispanic community too is grappling with issues of rights and sexuality, economy and immigration, religion and bodily autonomy as it decides on the next American president.