The Defective Premise of Paula Ramos’ ‘Defectors’

The most important lesson I took from my doctoral work was an understanding that empirical, results-driven research must first be conducted in a way that is free of bias. One of my mentors, Dr. Kent Jennings, drilled this home. The key to this methodological design was a testable research question, a set of variables, and a theoretical correlation or causation relationship.

One of the worst things we can do as political scientists is “select on the dependent variable”. In other words, someone only chooses cases that lead to a very specific conclusion, which is like doing research in reverse. You know what the end product will be, so the process of finding evidence to support that outcome is already biased.

This is the major flaw of Paula Ramos’ Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for America. The book is a long exercise in selecting-on-the-dependent-variable with many stories and data points supporting Ramos’ position that Latinos have strayed too far to the right but with little explanation of the trajectory and analysis of this alleged shift in voting behavior. This also illustrates another challenge for Ramos: are conservative Latinos really the eponymous defectors, particularly after Donald Trump’s absolute thrashing of Kamala Harris in the electoral college? Perhaps the Defectors should now be the Disruptors or the Diligent. How relevant is this book now, just three weeks after the election?

Ramos is a journalist and not an academic, so her lack of accurate methodology might be excused if not for her frustrating insistence that fellow Latinos have let her down by supporting Trump. So much of Ramos’ arguments here reflect a deep sense of disappointment in her people. She wants so much to believe and love again; “I am convinced that the vast majority of the nearly 64 million Latinos in this country are driven by a desire for social justice and equality.” How do Latinos not see their trauma-guided actions, she laments. “That a Latino could be a white supremacist, or a racist was simply unfathomable.”

Is it? Unacknowledged trauma, for Ramos, is the most significant predictor of Latinos voting for strongman personalities like Trump. In conjunction with Christian nationalism, Latino conservatives have allegedly completely bought into “the myth that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation.” Ramos’ argument, however, is that Latinos swoon over Christian nationalism because they have “internalized an unconscious form of submissiveness that normalizes indoctrination.”

Over three distinct sections – “Tribalism”, “Traditionalism”, and “Trauma” – Ramos builds a case that Latinos, particularly older people, have been swayed from their moderate origins by a group of charlatans, clergy, and colonial figures who have been reinvented by modern-day “heroes” fighting wokeism. These include religious leaders (Pastors Luis Cabrera and Guillermo Maldonado); politicians (Juan de Oñate, Mayra Flores, and Monica De La Cruz); social media influencers (Mario Presents, Alex Otaola); and (para)military figures (Enrique Tarrio, Colonel Santos Benavides). Tarrio is the most infamous of the lot: a Latino of Afro-Cuban descent and one-time head of the Proud Boys who was “obsessed with the illusion of white power.” He is currently serving a twenty-two-year federal prison sentence on sedition related to the infamous January 6^th attack on the U.S. Capitol when Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

The core argument of Defectors is essentially that Latinos desperately want to be accepted by white people as equal citizens and “are caught between the pulls of progressive and ultraconservative political beliefs. We, too, dance on this spectrum.” If that means Latinos develop anti-immigrant attitudes and engage in rampant anti-blackness, then so be it. Ramos does provide rich historical accounts of how Latinos’ anti-black sentiments have colonial roots and were manifest for centuries before the establishment of a unique Latino American culture. However, to only focus on Latino Americans’ racist tendencies downplays the complexity of identity and, again, encourages the idea that antiblackness is the norm, not the exception.

My research with Chloe McCarthy and Analee DeGlopper points to similar nativist attitudes among Asian-Pacific Americans. We coined the expression “new nativist publics” to describe American minorities, including recent immigrants, who quickly develop resistance towards other immigrants, seeing the newcomers as an existential threat to the real American identity. I understand Ramos’ arguments here and agree that “there is nothing more nationalistic than making immigrants, a sworn enemy of many white Americans, your enemy as well. Especially if the enemy forces others to question your belonging.”

Yet despite these occasional glimpses into what Defectors could have been with more objective and cogent research, the book stumbles more often than not. Its narrative arc increasingly feels lost; Defectors sometimes reads like three separate books that would have been more impactful if not packaged together. This is especially true when Ramos engages with her sexuality and discomfort as a lesbian in heteronormative spaces. My earlier point about a skewed research question turns up during these moments too, when I wondered if the author is using Christian nationalism to explain why transphobia exists (once she had determined that Latino transphobia was the outcome she wanted to prove).

When Ramos spends time with Anthony, one of her interviewees and a self-described Latino border vigilante, she writes that he “carries a massive blind spot: His eyes have been trained to see criminals everywhere. To him, taking the red pill means viewing the world through a prism of suspicion and distrust.” Unfortunately, Ramos has more than one “massive blind spot”, which makes this ambitious project not scholarly enough and too good to be true.