Defectors would have been a more useful book if it was published a couple of years ago, but better late than never I guess. For those of us who are politically conscious and aware of the news, Defectors will hardly offer anything new. Ramos does, however, synthesize research, news, and observations about the Latino right in a useful and clarifying way, if only to let us know there’s likely not a weird unexpected factor we hadn’t considered yet.
Briefly summarized, Ramos identifies the three elements fueling the Latino far right as traditionalism, trauma, and media spheres in the global south.
This is a surprisingly white supremacist history of Utah Latinos.
Because Ramos is a journalist, however, and not a historian, she fails to trace the historical roots of some of these traditions. For example, Ramos rightly identifies the patriarchal, family values in most contemporary, traditional Latino households, as well as the white supremacist threads in the ideology of a Latino far right leader who defended the statues of Spanish colonizers and celebrated only his Spanish heritage. She failed to identify how common national racial myths, such as mestizaje, perpetuate racism. Defectors makes it seem like these people emerged out of the mists, when I’m sure racist Latinos were apart of nearly every major Latin American populace in the United States. In Utah, this includes figures like Danny Quintana, who celebrated his Latin connection to the Roman empire, one-upping backward white people who descend from less civilized white stock. This part of the book was by far the most annoying and untenable, because what Ramos failed to articulate is that some Latinos are just white, far-right, and fascists and have represented those factions historically in their homelands. Latinos are so far from ideologically, ethnically, or racially monolithic, and Defectors behaves as if we once were.
When it comes to the historical traumas, Ramos sometimes does not articulate some of the deeper contexts behind the masses’ reactions either. For example, her prescient discussion of Salvadoran dictator Bukele failed to adequately describe the gang crisis in El Salvador and the factors that led up to it. For those unaware of the right wing movement in Latin America, from its evangelists to the Republican funders and the fascists eager to bootlick Bukele and Pinochet, this book is critical reading.
As someone who has lost confidence in the social integrity of the Latino label for a while now, considering its net just too damn wide to meaningfully organize around, I found some of Ramos’s appeals to Latino identity to be too romantic. That said, I am inspired by the works of groups like Mijente, who organize and fund Latinos nationwide. I read this book, as a part of Mijente’s book club although I wasn’t able to attend the in-person gatherings. Learn more about mijente here: https://mijente.net/
Overall, I give this book a 4 out of 5, as its info feels spot-on. I just wish it occasionally fleshed a topic out in greater depth.