Gerarldo Cadava, "The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump" (Ecco, 2020)

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Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's Disease, Myastthenia Gravis, or Lambert Eaton Syndrome, and Medications, including Botch Alignem toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxCronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44 Botox to learn more. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hola, and welcome to the New Books and Latino Studies, a channel within the New Books Network. I am your host, Tiffany Gonzales, and today on the program, we have Dr. Hirad Volkadeva, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Northwestern University. He is the author of Standing on Common Ground, the Making of a Sun Belt, Florida land, published with Harvard University Press in 2013. He is here today to discuss his newest work, the Hispanic Republican, the shaping of an American political identity from Nixon to Trump, published with Echo, an imprint of Harper Collins in 2020. Hi, Jerry, and welcome to the New Books and Latino Studies, thanks for accepting. Yeah. How are you doing? Thank you. I'm good. Thanks, and it's great to talk to you, and thank you for inviting me to be on the podcast. Absolutely. Absolutely. I know we're in a pandemic right now, but our lives are still rocking and rolling, and I'm excited that your book has come out to the public. I've worked so hard on it, and there's been a lot of talk over the years, and here it is shining within us. Yes. So, in between covers, it's always nice to see something finally out in the world, definitely. Absolutely. So before we dive into your book, can you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself, tell us about your personal, professional background? Sure. Sure. I guess I've been teaching at Northwestern for 12 years now. I just moved back from a year in California, which gave me the opportunity to reflect on how long I'd actually been at Northwestern, and we moved here to Chicago in June of 2008. And I've been with the History Department and the program in Latino Studies ever since. Before that, I was at Yale getting my PhD, and before that, I actually had a little bit of a flirtation with going to law school, and I worked at a corporate law firm as a paralegal for two years in New York from 2000 to 2002. And before that, I guess I'm going in reverse chronological order just because I, I don't know, I was trying to avoid maybe saying like, well, I was born in 1977, and those kinds of details are less relevant. But anyway, right before I was at the law school, or not the law school, the law firm, I was in college at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and I majored in history there, and I wrote my undergraduate thesis on a Chicano art group called Asco, and they worked in Los Angeles, and they were kind of a counterculture within a counterculture doing a very different kind of Chicano art than other popular artists and muralists at the time, like the East Low Street scapers, or Los Four, or some of these other groups, and when I was at Dartmouth, I was also a melon maze undergraduate fellow, and I think, you know, just the experience of writing an undergraduate thesis and working in a community like the melon maze undergraduate fellowship made me feel like I wanted to go into academia, and even though I had kind of flirted with the idea of law school and tested the waters by working at a law firm, I knew it wasn't really going to be for me, so when I was working at the law firm, that's when I, instead of, you know, pursuing law school, took the GRE and visited history grad schools. So, that's a little bit about, you know, my education and how I got involved in Latino history and what some of my, you know, academic affiliations and, you know, winding pathway has looked like, I guess, interestingly, I guess it, it sounds like I've had a pretty straightforward career path because even as an undergrad, I was writing about Chicano history and, you know, writing a thesis that led me right to grad school, and I was a major in history, and I got my PhD in history, but so in some ways, I guess, I've been working as a historian, thinking like a historian since I was an undergrad, but the path feels much more windy to me than that. Then, that's a little bit about my kind of professional trajectory, but before that, I was born in Tucson, Arizona, and that's the one place in the world where I feel like I've had a constant connection to, and have always returned to, even though I left Tucson when I was five with my dad who was pursuing his PhD at UC Irvine in the 90s. In the 1980s, and I actually moved from Arizona with him, and he raised me while he was a single grad student, I've always gone back to Tucson because that's where my mom has remained, it's where all of my grandparents still live, those who are still alive, that is, and where my aunts, uncles, and cousins are, so every time I returned to Tucson, it still feels like home, and then, you know, the last time I spent a significant amount of time a prolonged period of time in Tucson, is when I was researching and writing my dissertation about the Arizona Sonora border region, and that's what took me back home to Tucson and really allowed me to explore it in a different way than I did as a kid. I feel like I kind of got to know the city on my own terms whenever I visited Tucson before then, I would just kind of, you know, hang out with my family, my grandma, my mom, my aunts, and I would do whatever they would want me to do and whatever we did with them. So, you know, I kind of felt like I, as a child, experienced Tucson through their eyes and through their desires and whatever they wanted to do, and when I moved to Tucson to write my dissertation, I think that's when I really started discovering it on my own terms. And so I think I'm from Tucson, I still think of myself as from Tucson, it's the one place I've returned to and have considered home for a long time, but I did go to middle school and high school in Princeton, New Jersey, where my dad ended up teaching after he got his PhD in Irvine. So that wasn't like a straight chronology from Tucson to Northwestern, but I think I got all the highlights in there. Yeah, I mean, it also tells a little bit about how your lived experiences have shaped your research. Oh, totally. Living in Arizona and your how you envision, how you see, you know, borderlands and Latinos within the U.S. And I think that circles back to your new book, Hispanic Republican, and you mentioned a little bit about before you dive into the actual discussion analysis, you give readers a little insight about your own personal reflection, right, with your family about republicanism and party politics. Can you tell us a little bit about that, like what's driving you, what's now what drove you to write this book? Yeah, it's interesting, you know, I think I remember in the acknowledgments to this book I say kind of jokingly, kind of not jokingly that. I have written two books about my grandpa, my paternal grandpa, and I, you know, it's a joke because I don't talk about him at all in the books, but it's not a joke because I know that both of these books were inspired by his experience and, you know, my experience growing up around him in Tucson. You know, I think that that does point something larger in our field of Latino history, but probably not only our field, I think most of all historians research interests are kind of driven by their own experiences growing up in the world and, you know, their experiences growing up in the world shape. How they see the world and, you know, the questions that they ask about times and places are very much, I think, informed by their own experiences. So, you know, I think this, this book, the Hispanic Republican really was, I mean, in a more direct way than my first book in some ways, was influenced by my grandpa because he is a dedicated Republican, a Latino Republican. And I spent many years during my childhood and teenage years kind of arguing with him about politics, in a way it was a kind of unfair debate because he was a grown man arguing with a child at the time, but also it was really the kind of whole family ganging up on him about his politics and why he thought the way he did about politics. And so he is a Colombian Panamanio Filipino, he was born in Panama and became a US citizen by joining the US military right at the tail end of World War Two, and he moved to San Diego through San Francisco, and he went to high school at San Diego's Union high school. And then stayed in the Air Force until the late 1960s when he retired at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, and then he went on to wash dishes at a country club, the 49ers country club, and he worked in the silver bell mines near Tucson, and he became a Republican in 1980 and voted for Republican for the first time. When he voted for Ronald Reagan, and he told me stories about how he voted for Reagan because Reagan had promised to put more money back into his biweekly paycheck by lowering taxes. This was the single issue that brought him into the Republican Party in 1980, but then over the decades between 1980 and now he evolved, and his politics evolved, and he came to embrace pretty much every position held by the Republican Party from immigration control to welfare, to education and charter schools, you name it. Religion wasn't so big for him, he's Catholic nominally, but I don't remember beyond the time that I was a very small child, us going to church or anything like that. So, you know, he was a mystery in more ways than one, based on what we're often told about the history of Latino conservatism. I mean, whenever I started talking to people about this project that I was writing there, first two questions or statements were, well, you must be writing about the Cuban exile community, or you must be writing about Catholics. And I would always say that yes, those are important parts of the story, but they're certainly not all of the story. And I think when I said that, even before I knew it, I had my grandpa's experience in the back of my mind, because here was someone who's entry point into the Republican Party wasn't really about religion or Catholicism in particular. It certainly wasn't about the Cuban exile community, because he was Colombian, Panamanio, Filipino, and, you know, beyond that, he was a Colombian, Filipino, Panamanio in predominantly Mexican, American, community, and Tucson. So, I think his experience was always a reminder to me that the story of Hispanic conservatism was always just much broader and, you know, deeper than simply being about the story of Cuban exiles and Catholicism. As I was talking, that's the end of my answer, but as I was talking, I was thinking I should just state right up front that I'm going to keep referring to Hispanic Republicans as Hispanics, because that's the term that they preferred for themselves as opposed to Latino. I guess they're kind of on board with Latino now, especially a kind of newer generation of Latino Republicans, but they draw the line at Latinx for sure. So, yeah, that's identity, yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I mean, that's the history that you gave us about your own personal history. It really opens up a discussion about what you prove without your book in that it's evident that Hispanics have been voting for the Republican Party longer than just the 2000s. George HW Bush or Ronald Reagan, there's an actual history of what's going on with this demographic, but you write Cubans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and one of the arguments that you say is that Hispanics have continuously fought for inclusion within the two main party system and this is evident, right? And that seems to be a theme that's connecting each chapter is that there's always a fight for inclusion. So, I guess it's start off discussing the book. Can you tell us who are the Hispanic Republicans? Like how are you defining this, who are the people you're talking about? Yeah, they're spread across the country. They include Mexican Americans, they include Puerto Ricans, thank you include Cubans. I have to say one of the things that I was most surprised about most surprised to learn is that the Hispanic Republican movement really grew among Mexican Americans in the Southwest, which is another thing that kind of went against. Everything we thought we knew about Latino conservatism that it was primarily a movement started and led by Cuban exiles in southern Florida after the Cuban revolution. But decades before that, decades before the Cuban revolution, Mexican Americans in California and Arizona and Texas were joining the Republican party and forming groups that were admittedly small at the time in the 50s and early 60s that were dedicated to electing Dwight Eisenhower. And then they tried to elect Barry Goldwater but failed and then finally came out in full force during Nixon's first term when Nixon was up for re-election in 1972. So, you know, who are Hispanic Republicans? They're Hispanics of all national backgrounds. There are certain things that they hold as the most important issues to them. So among Puerto Ricans that was always the territorial status of the island and Republicans were the ones arguing for statehood and another interesting fact I think about the Republican party and Puerto Rican Republicans is that it was the Republican party that included statehood in the Republican party platform in every platform since 1940. And really the Republican party and Republicans on the island of Puerto Rico who are arguing to make Puerto Rico the 51st state ever since the 1930s and 40s and 50s and increasingly into the 60s and 70s. So really I think you can't kind of delimit it to just Cubans or Catholics. I think I would return to that point continuously. I mean I think we still look for individual issues to hang arguments about Latino conservatives on like their culturally conservative they are opposed to abortion or they tend to be the ones who serve in the military and develop some sense of American patriotism. Through their military service or maybe they're the ones with lighter skins or the ones who make more money than other Latinos and all of these things are kind of parts of the story but I think if you focus too closely on any one of these things you're going to miss a bigger picture of the kind of national and even international history of issues that have brought Latinos into the Republican party. on any journey. using Uber, it helps to know you're getting into the right car. Pin verification adds an extra step to make sure your ride is your ride. Before the trip begins, your app gives you a unique pin. Just tell it to your driver, and they'll enter it in their app before the ride can start. Hey, what's your pin? Mm-hmm. Two, five, three, eight. That way you know you're in the right car taking the right trip, and your driver knows you're the right passenger. Make sure your ride is your ride, with pin verification from Uber. Good thing the newly designed Chrysler Pacifica has a few tricks of its own, hands-free power sliding doors and lift gate, rear seat entertainment, and stone-go seating and storage that adapts faster than your family's weekend plans. Chrysler is a registered trademark of FCAUS LLC. Absolutely. And I see that. I see that. And for me, when reading the book, I mean, when you're tracing these histories of the demographics, it also seems really particularly the space and time of where they're at. I mean, when I think of living in Texas and growing up more inland, whenever for that, growing in around Fort Worth and the suburbs of Fort Worth, there was a lot more white Republicans a lot more Mexican-American liberals, but near the border was Hodgepodge, right? Mexico border growing up. My parents still live in Chicago and-- I didn't know that. Americans. Yeah. They were more democratic, but when I found Mexican-American Republicans, it was certain issues, military, or being so far away from the border that they didn't relate themselves as seeing themselves as part of that. Immigrants. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's complicated, but you do such a beautiful job of explaining the issues and what's the mindset, right, the political consciousness of what's driving certain Hispanics into the Republican Party. Mm-hmm. And so you do this. And so this specifically, you mentioned that there's a new generation of Hispanic Republicans in 1960, with particularly with the connection of Barry Goldwater. So why is that, what's the trigger happening within the Hispanic community for wanting to leave the Democratic Party? 'Cause I mean, historically, there's been a lot written about Mexican-American, especially specifically, Mexican-Americans being part of the Democratic Party, right? Yeah. We have the Americanity campaigns and a lot of blue lacquer and American geography are also involved in the Democratic Party. But you're saying there's a new generation, though, happening in the 1960s. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, totally. And so, you know, I guess the first thing I would say is that, you know, I think historians like Rosina Luzano have shown how, in the 19th century, even in the early 20th century, it wasn't weird at all for Mexican-Americans to be Republicans. I mean, if you look at the early state legislatures in California, New Mexico, you know, many of the politicians were Mexican-Americans, and there was a much more even split between Republicans and Democrats, and maybe even more of them were Republicans. And you know, we know that that's also just a function of the shifting identities of the Republican and Democratic parties in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Republicans, if anything, were the more liberal party. And so, partisan identity really shifted, but the point is that it wasn't kind of odd to be a Latino and a Republican, I mean, specifically a Mexican-American and a Republican until the 1930s, when the rise of the New Deal and the election of Franklin Roosevelt as president. So, it's really during the 1930s that Mexican-Americans, like African-Americans, begin to identify much more strongly with the Democratic Party. And I just came across this over and over again when I was reading, you know, letters from Hispanic Republicans to other Republican leaders and Republican strategists about how the Republican Party was going to break the stranglehold that the Democratic Party had on Latino voters and the argument was always that Mexican-Americans, Hispanics had developed an intense loyalty to the Democratic Party with the election of FDR, and the argument was basically that, you know, during the Depression, during the New Deal, it was Roosevelt and Roosevelt's party that kept them employed, that put food on their tables, but the argument of Hispanic Republicans from the '50s forward was that, you know, what has that loyalty got you? The Democratic Party only comes around when they need your vote and at all other times of the year, they ignore you. So, you know, one of the main recruiting pitches that Hispanic Republicans use to recruit other Hispanics to join the Republican Party was that the Democratic Party has ignored you. Republicans are the ones who will take your issues seriously and pay attention to you. And, you know, we still hear arguments today about which party ignores Latinos, which party pays attention to Latinos and the truth is, I think over the past 50, 60, 70 years, both parties at different times have legitimate arguments for, you know, the other party ignoring Latinos and only seeing Latinos strategically. I think the other thing that happens, or using Latinos strategically, I think the other thing that happens in the 1960s is that the Republican Party and its candidate, Barry Goldwater, in particular, really become defined by their opposition to civil rights. And this is the moment where African Americans really flee the Republican Party and leave the Republican Party unmasse to the point that ever since the 1960s, only about 10 percent say, of African Americans have voted for Republicans over the past 50 years, 60 years at this point. And many political analysts, many Latinos have always been waiting for this moment when Latinos would make a similar decision and abandon the Republican Party unmasse. And it hasn't happened ever since the 1960s. So what was going on in the 1960s was that that's when you start to hear Hispanic Republicans also starting to make the argument that the Democratic Party really only cares about African Americans. They have a kind of singular focus on the civil rights issue as it applies to African Americans. And this becomes just another version of the argument that the Democratic Party is the party that ignores Latinos. At first, it was just about how the Democrats only came around at election time when they needed votes. Then it became about how the Democratic Party, to the extent that they care about minorities at all, care only about African Americans. And so that was another reason that Hispanic Republicans tried to recruit other Hispanics to become Republicans. So that's what's going on in the 50s and 60s that starts to lead Hispanics in greater numbers to join the Republican Party. And I want to be clear and say that in the 50s and 60s, this is a movement that builds very slowly. It is small in numbers and it only happens regionally. Very Goldwater's campaign, for example, in 1964, really focused only on Mexican Americans in the Southwest and Cubans along the Eastern Seaboard. But remember in 1964, not many Cubans had even naturalized. They were still kind of focused on Cuban politics and ousting Castro. So they hadn't naturalized and weren't voting in American elections. But Goldwater, who was outspoken about Kennedy's failures in Cuba, especially with the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, still saw kind of kindred spirits in Cubans. So he had a kind of Goldwater campaign official who was a Cuban named Fernando Penabas. He was a kind of conservative columnist in Florida and had gone to Duke for a law school. Had him working to recruit Cubans in the East Coast or on the East Coast. So it was really regional until the Nixon years and really not even Nixon's first couple of years. It only became a national movement. I would say say, um, during the second half of Nixon's first administration in 1972. Yeah. And that's you also show another ship that's going on. You mentioned Nixon, right? It's not only there's, there's a couple more things that you unravel, right? It's the the continuous argument that the two major party systems are not paying attention to the Hispanic vote. They're just courting them and then just let them be after they got their vote. There's also the rise, or the not the rise, but the development of civil rights movement and they're feeling Hispanic Republicans are feeling that policy is not paying attention to them. Politicians are not paying attention to their demographic. There's African-Americans are, um, are gaining more political power, vis-a-vis, um, political positions in government. There's more resources, economic resources at the ground level. Um, so it seems like a very, they're pitting themselves against another demographic group fighting for, right? Inclusion and changes from a larger political system, but and also another common thread is that each, each political figure, each person either writing for, for a public office is figuring out some way to continue to create a larger Hispanic Republican movement. And you mentioned Nixon. Nixon does, I mean, he starts recruiting, he focuses on recruiting and mobilizing the Hispanic voters within his campaign. And you mentioned specifically, you know, the Brown Mafia within Mexicans and Cubans, and this is where it seemed Cubans have a little more, yeah, no little more in the fight now. And when I was reading that section, um, I was just like, well, I was really blown away. I laughed a little bit, but I was like, wow, I mean, the things that we don't know about the Watergate scandal. And if you want, I mean, I don't want to say too much, but I'll let you take over now. We can tell us what's going on. Oh, man, that was a, that was the first chapter I wrote in this book, um, just because it was the thing that I was most excited to get into the kind of unknown role that Hispanics played in the unfolding of the Watergate affair. I mean, that was just so fun to write because, I mean, fun is one way to put it. I mean, fun as a historian like the kind of thing that a historian could nerd out about. I mean, what were the things I was discovering? I mean, maybe those weren't fun because it involved Latinos and some, some of the kind of see me underbelly, see me underbelly might be some mixed metaphors, but um, some of the kind of darker corners of the Latino political past, but it was a really entertaining chapter to write. So anyway, um, yeah. So, you know, the, the first thing to say is that, um, between goldwater's loss and Nixon's re-election. So between 1964 and 1972, the Republican Party and Republican Party strategists, um, start to be really explicit about how they needed to find new votes to replace the African-American votes that they were losing. So it was clear that African-Americans who had been pretty reliable voters as Republicans, even into their 40s and 50s, you know, I think, I think for sure, African-Americans were reliable Republican voters until the New Deal and then FDR and started to kind of eat into the Republicans hold on African-American vote. And, um, but it maintained, you know, it was pretty respectable until the 50s and early 60s, but after their Republican Party's opposition to the civil rights bill, uh, Republican, African-Americans leave the party, you know, uh, quickly, um, decisively, etc. So the Republican Party gets worried about this and they start to talk openly about how they need to replace African-American voters that they were losing. And they, they're very explicitly, I mean, even in, within single sentences, say that we need to do, to kind of redouble our efforts among Hispanics because we're losing the African-American vote. And very goldwater, even though he lost and Richard Nixon, even though he didn't do especially well among Latinos in 1968, he did much better among Latinos in 1972. They've become an important part of this effort to recruit, recruit Hispanics and to bring them into the Republican Party. They start to argue that they are Western politicians. And so, um, I think Barry Goldwater, in fact, I, you know, don't want to make a wrong assertion, but I think he's the first Western candidate in a long time, if not all of the 20th century, but he's one of the first Western presidential candidates. And he was seen to be familiar with the issues of Mexican-Americans based on his, his, um, experience growing up in Arizona. And if, if any of the listeners are interested in Barry Goldwater, some of the more interesting aspects of Barry Goldwater's past and his political views, I would really recommend Peter Iverson's book called Native Arizona, in which talks primarily about Goldwater's relationship with Native Americans and Native communities. But the point is that Goldwater really saw himself as a product of the US-Mexico borderlands and kind of prided himself in his concern for the Western environment and Native communities. And so, um, you know, that's just a little glimpse of why Goldwater felt like he couldn't make an argument about, you know, being a credible candidate among Mexican-Americans in particular, Latinos more generally. So, he talked a lot in 1964 about how he was practically born on the US-Mexico border and spoke Spanish before he spoke English. This was part of his kind of sales pitch to Latinos. And Nixon had a same kind of, um, you know, political origin story that his family owned a business in Whittier, California, he owned a gas station and a grocery store. And, you know, as some of his Hispanic Republican supporters recall it, Nixon basically worked alongside them in the fields. I mean, we know that's not true. Nixon himself did not actually pick or harvest crops or anything like that. He drove trucks out into the fields and maybe, you know, socialized to a degree with Mexican agricultural laborers, but he certainly didn't toil alongside them in the field. Nevertheless, he used that experience to his political advantage to claim kind of great familiarity with Latino issues. And so, ever since he got elected in '68, not really ever since, I'd say beginning in '69, he kind of articulated a commitment to having Latinos be an important part of his re-election strategy in 1972. And this is when he kind of continues Johnson's, oh, I'm gonna, I know I wrote this book and I should remember this, but I think it's called the ICMA, ICMA, Johnson established this thing called the Interagency Committee on Mexican-American Affairs. And Nixon renamed it when he became president and called it the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish-speaking people. And this was an important part of the nationalization of the Hispanic Republican movement because to Nixon's mind, the Interagency Committee on Mexican-American Affairs prioritized the experience of Mexican-Americans and Nixon recognized that Cubans were a growing political force by the late 1960s, early 1970s, and Puerto Ricans were a growing political force and they had helped the Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller win election. So he knew that any kind of Hispanic outreach efforts efforts by his administration to serve the needs or meet the needs of Hispanics and to recruit Hispanics to become Republicans would have to also include Cubans and Puerto Ricans. And interestingly, the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish-speaking people was originally imagined as a kind of nine person body. And the members of this organization were to be kind of evenly distributed according to the percentage of the population that each national group represented. So it was going to be mostly Mexican-American, but then there would be a kind of lesser but equal divide between Cubans and Puerto Ricans. But this is this is when kind of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans certainly at the kind of elite national level started to come together to think about Hispanic Republican identity nationally. And that started during the next years. It came together even more during the Ford presidency when the Spanish-speaking affairs committee of the Republican National Committee started the Republican National Hispanic Assembly and made the Republican National Hispanic Assembly an auxiliary of the Republican National Committee. And that was the moment of the kind of, as Hispanic Republicans saw it, the full incorporation of Hispanics into the Republican Party apparatus. Learn more on the Uber app. Good thing the newly designed Chrysler Pacifica has a few tricks of its own, hands-free power-sliding doors and lift gate, rear seat entertainment, and still-en-go seating and storage that adapts faster than your family's weekend plans. That's, you move into that to discuss that's when they put the the acronym RNA-J, correct? That's put it on the national map. And there's one, I mean, I remember when recently when Juliane was running for for the presidency, right? But he wasn't the first, I guess, he's the first, I guess Latino, Mexican-American, but you say there's someone else, Benjamin Franklin, or not Benjamin Franklin, right? Benjamin Franklin, and he's now ran for public office for the president's slot. He's also part of that RNHA auxiliary, right, with the Republican Party. He devoted a chapter to him. Why is he, what's going on with who is he? He's fascinating. I think he is super, super fascinating. If there is an individual who captivated me the most, it would probably have to be Boxcar Ben. I mean, if only because he has a nickname, Benjamin Boxcar Ben Fernandez, because he was born in a railroad Boxcar, at least this is the lore. He was born in a railroad Boxcar in 1925 in Kansas City, and so he kind of embraced the nickname Boxcar Ben. And when he ran for president in 1980, he likened himself to Abraham Lincoln and the very humble circumstances that Abraham Lincoln was born into and he kind of claimed to identify with Lincoln in that way. But yeah, this guy, I have to say, I've written the book. It's done. The book's out. I still don't really know what to make of Ben Fernandez. I mean, there are lots of questions that linger for me. Like, first of all, how important is he in a kind of political power sense? He clearly had a very high opinion of himself and a super-inflated idea of his own importance. But how important was he in terms of electoral might? He was certainly highly visible, probably the most visible Hispanic Republican over the course of the 1970s. And he just has this kind of amazing story of how he rose up from his Boxcar in Kansas City, and both of his parents were Mexican immigrants. They moved to work in the agricultural fields of Upper Midwest, and he started working alongside his parents at the age of five. The family eventually settled in East Chicago, Indiana. And he went to Purdue University for a year, but then dropped out of Purdue and went to the University of Redlands in California. Then he moved east and worked with General Electric, got a business degree from NYU, and then became an economist. And once he became an economist, that's kind of when he entered formal politics. He served in the Nixon administration as the chairman of the National Economic Development Association, or maybe it's agency. I think it's association. And he basically helped other Hispanics start their own kind of savings and loan banks or kind of retail banks. So that was his entrance into politics. But then he became the first national chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly. And by the late 1970s, he was kind of seeking to capitalize on the national news about the rising influence of Latinos and politics. So famously, historians, famously time magazine puts on its cover in 1978, the 1980s, the decade of the Hispanic. So they're looking ahead two years into the future, kind of proclaim that the 1980s will be the decade of the Hispanic. Other scholars like Benjamin Francis Fallon in his book The Rise of the Latino Vote and Christina Moran, her book Making Hispanics, they write about this magazine cover as well. And Ben Fernandez declares himself a candidate for president like a month after this time magazine issue is published. And as I see it, he was really trying to seize the momentum of the national discourse about the rising influence of Latinos. And, you know, of course, he did terribly in the primary. He was running against much better known and established politicians like George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, who would eventually go on to win the presidency. But this guy just had so much, gosh, I don't know another word that besides like Hutzpah or something to think that he was actually going to win the presidency and his whole electoral strategy revolved around doing well among the nation's 16 million Hispanic voters. So, you know, most presidential candidates start their campaigns by focusing on Iowa or New Hampshire. But Ben Fernandez started by focusing on Puerto Rico, which for the first time ever in 1980 was having its first Republican party primary. And it was actually held in the days and weeks before the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire. So, Fernandez had this kind of novel idea that he was going to run in Puerto Rico as the first Hispanic candidate for president. And he was going to win there because there would be some solidarity between himself as a Mexican-American and Puerto Ricans on the island. And then a victory in Puerto Rico would kind of launch his campaign elsewhere. And people across the country would start to take notice after he won in Puerto Rico. But that did not happen at all. I mean, I think he won a total of like 1% of the vote in Puerto Rico. I might even be overstating it. Honestly, if I remember right, David Duke, who was also running, and at the time he had just David Duke, that is, had just wrapped up a five-year term as the grand wizard of KKK. He ran in the primary and got more votes than Ben Fernandez did in Puerto Rico. But the clear winners of the race in Puerto Rico were George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. And so in many ways, you know, Ben Fernandez's story is one of failure. And I mean, he didn't win. He didn't come even close to winning. He may have made the path a little easier for later Latino candidates to run like Bill Richardson or Marco Rubio. Although it's not even clear to me that people like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or Bill Richardson even knew who Ben Fernandez was let alone draw inspiration from him. But I think he's nevertheless a really important symbol of what many Hispanic Republicans believed was possible in the late 1970s, both as Hispanic Republicans had, you know, been incorporated into the party structure more than they ever had before. And as nationally, Hispanics were receiving greater attention as, you know, in many ways, being the future of American politics. And I think we still hear about that a lot today given demographic change. Absolutely. And there's something that you mentioned predominantly that it's connecting to today's politics with immigration. You mentioned with Ronald Reagan going into the, I guess, chapter seven of your book that there's something in the beginning, you mentioned that they were Hispanic Republicans were more moderate in that view with immigration. But something shifting, known in the larger scale with Ronald Reagan, can you talk a little bit about what, and I guess what exactly are Hispanic, what are the views of Hispanic Republicans with immigration and immigration policy? policy? Has this changed over time? And how do we understand it with today's discussion of what's going on with immigration? Yeah, you know, I guess I've had to put it in a nutshell. I would say that the positions or views of Hispanic Republicans toward immigration actually probably haven't changed that much over time. I think the views of the Republican Party toward immigration, on the other hand, have shifted dramatically. And you know, in the 1960s, it was really Republicans who were arguing for the continuation of the Bressero program because it was seen as a kind of pro-business stance. And it was really Democrats who were arguing against the continuation of the Bressero program because of labor interests and, you know, famously even labor leaders like Cesar Chavez who were at an earlier moment in their careers against the importation of Mexican workers as agricultural laborers because they threatened Mexican American jobs and American jobs broadly. So on a Minyan writes about this in her book Undocumented Lives, I'm sure others do as well. But just about how, you know, the politics of immigration really shifted in the early 1960s, mid 1960s around the time of the end of the Bressero program and the immigration and nationality act. And really it was the Republican Party, that was the kind of pro-immigration party and the Democratic Party that was, I don't want to say anti-immigration because that's not exactly true either. But that was much more wary of programs like the Bressero program. So part of the story is, you know, just part of the broader shifts in Republican Party politics and Democratic Party politics when it comes to immigration. But those kind of positions of the two parties flipped in the 70s and 80s where the Republican Party became much more the party of immigration restriction. This had to do with a lot of things that I think scholars like on a Minyan or even Jeff Cowey or sociologist like Douglas Massey cover really well. You know, it has to do with the end of the Bressero program, the rise of undocumented immigrants, the stagnation of the American economy, the perceived rise in crime that Mexican Americans in the border region are responsible for the import or the exportation of American jobs as a rise as a result of a rise of the Makila Dora industry, all these things. The rise of nativism within the Republican Party as evidenced by John Tantin's, you know, zero population growth and federation for American immigration. Reform and the rise in the early 1980s of US English movement that kind of spun out of John Tantin's network and sought to make English the official language of the United States. So, you know, you start to see this kind of nativist backlash against Latinos in the late 1970s and early 1980s and slowly this creeps its way into the Republican Party. And I think I should say that Ronald Reagan in many ways wasn't on board with this. I mean, he throughout his presidency talked about how the United States didn't need a 10-foot border wall. They needed stronger relations between the United States and Mexico. He's the one who also favored the amnesty provision of the immigration reform and control act and the granting of amnesty to two million immigrants without papers who naturalized and became naturalized citizens as a result of America. That's another reason that Hispanic Republicans kind of claim Reagan as one of their own. So, the leader of the Republican Party wasn't necessarily on board with this rising nativism anti-Hispanic approach or attitude. And in point of fact, he appointed many Hispanics to his administration, including Linda Chavez, Kathy Villapando, Ben Fernandez's best friend from Indiana, Frank Cassias, his name is escaping me right at the moment, but I'm pretty sure it's Frank Cassias. And so, you know, things are changing, though, because Pat Buchanan, for example, was playing a greater role in Republican Party politics. You know, famously, he ran his own campaign in 1992 against George H. W. Bush in one 37% or something like that, approximately a third of all Republican primary votes in 1992, and that really forced the Republican Party platform to the right, especially on issues like immigration and border control. Many others to abortion, etc. But, you know, throughout the 80s, that influence within the Republican Party is kind of rising. And Hispanic Republicans are not at all on board with that version of the Republican Party. They had just spent a decade and a half fighting for inclusion within the Republican Party and then a decade later, a decade and a half later. The rising nativist wing within the Republican Party is, it feels hostile to them. So this comes up during the debates over the immigration reform and control act. That's another kind of point of division that starts to drive a wedge between Hispanics and the Republican Party and leading Hispanic Republicans like Ben Fernandez and Fernando Alhaca are very vocal in their opposition to the immigration reform and control act. They support the advocacy provisions, but they don't at all support the employer sanctions provisions of Erica because they argue correctly as it turns out that it lead to discrimination against all, you know, quote unquote foreign looking workers, including Hispanics who are citizens of the United States. So that's a wrong-winded way of saying what I said at the very beginning, which is I think that Hispanic Republicans attitudes on immigration actually haven't changed all that much. There have been, I think, much more open to immigration and sympathetic with the conditions of immigrants than other members in the Republican Party have, even as the Republican Party has moved increasingly to the right on immigration. So I think it's the party that's really shifted its views of immigration and less so Hispanics. And clearly, Hispanic Republicans are here to stay and they can continue to grow within the Republican Party and it's I'm waiting to see, you know, with more data and more polling to see what are the, what is the political behavior of Hispanic Republicans now with the age of Trump, right? And post Trump, whenever that may be. Where were the systemic graphic Hispanic Republican, where they weren't what are they doing within the Republican Party. And so, but you give us this history, you give us this really groundbreaking history of inside of who Hispanic Republicans are, how did they originate? Who are the major personalities within it? And you break it down that even when I mentioned Julian Castro was not the first Mexican American to run for public office or not for public office, sorry for the presidency. It was Benjamin Fidan on this and, you know, he, he for like a better way to explain it, he still failed at it, right? Unfortunately, there's so much more to it for Hispanics or Latinos to reach that higher power of national political figure as the president. And I really appreciate it and I really thank you for writing this book, Jerry. Sure. I have, yeah, I have one question before we sum it up. What projects are you working on now? Yeah, a few different things. I mean, I think I'll just give a quick answer because I realize I've been kind of long-winded about these other things, but I do think that I want to continue working in the area of Latino political history. And this strikes me that so many of the histories, Latino historians have written over the years, they're of course, of course, political by their very nature. I mean, movements about high school walkouts during the Chicano movement. That is political movements about says or books about says our chavas or youth movements or neighborhood segregation, any number of things. These are certainly political topics, but less has been done in the kind of sub area of formal engagement in partisan politics. And so I think I'll keep working in this area. This book, writing this book led me to many other questions like about Latino non voters, for example, I mean, I'm paying close attention here to the Latino voters who vote for Republicans. It remains true that Latinos have kind of lower turnout rates than other groups sometimes. as low as 50%, so that means 50% of eligible Latino voters don't vote, and I want to write about the history of that, and all of the reasons that Latinos either have chosen to not vote or have been unable to vote, either because of their citizenship status or because they're not a vaged vote, all of those things, so I think Latino non-voters is one thing I want to work on, and then also this came up a lot in my book about the relationship between Latin American politics and Latino politics and all of the reasons that Cuban exiles or Venezuelan exiles or Mexican immigrants would choose to identify with one of the two major political parties in the United States, but I think we still don't know a whole lot about the process of how Latin American political identities get translated as American political identities, so I want to know, for example, did a Mexican immigrant choose to identify as either a Republican or a Democrat because the views of those parties or the policies of those parties related closely to the politics of the party that they identified with in Mexico? I mean, this is complicated because the free was the dominant party in Mexico, so it's not like there's a two-party political system or a fully developed two-party political system in Mexico, although, you know, the Partido Axial Nacional has all seen itself as a kind of insurgent force within Mexican politics over the past 80 or 90 years, so, you know, these comparisons of how a member of the pre or a member of the pan comes to identify as a Democrat or a Republican, we don't know a whole lot about that history, so I want to try to write a little bit about the translation of Latin American political identities into an American political context, and, you know, I'm sure other political history projects will come to me too, and some of them will be written by graduate students or other scholars as well, but I think that those are two of the ones that I might tackle in the next few years. You're not going to disappoint anybody, I promise you that you haven't disappointed us yet, and we really look forward to your future projects. I really appreciate that Tiffany, and, you know, these were great questions, and I also appreciate, like, you know, when you're talking in other venues, I mean, sometimes you're kind of forced to speak in little soundbites that don't fully give you the opportunity to flesh out the history and go deep into the history, so I really appreciate this podcast in particular for giving me that opportunity. You're welcome, you're welcome, and so for folks wanting to learn more about political behavior of Hispanic Republicans, I really encourage you to read and buy Jerry Patrick in book, and thank you for writing this book, Jerry. Thank you, Tiffany, thank you for reading the book and inviting me on. Absolutely, and for those listening, thank you for listening, which, um, to this episode which featured Dr. Hittouta Gadava's work, the Hispanic Republican, if you want to send me a message on Twitter, um, you can find me on there, and I encourage you to share this episode with fellow podcast listeners. I'll see you next time. On any journey using Uber, it helps to know you're getting into the right car. Mm-hmm, 2538. Learn more on the Uber app.