Thoughts on The New American Gothic (and the recent election)

 

Detail from Criselda Vasquez, "The New American Gothic"

Trump was going to build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it. I remember this, it was (quite rightly) a big criticism of the man and his policies. In one soundbite Trump signalled that his racism wasn't just about black people but hispanics too. The result was, as we remember, four years of unrelenting accusations of 'white supremacy' levelled at Trump, his family and his supporters. Now I'm not one to find excuses for Donald Trump but, while the media assailed him for his wall and his anti-immigrant rhetoric, something else happened:

“55 percent of Florida’s Cuban-American vote went to Trump, according to NBC News exit polls, while 30 percent of Puerto Ricans and 48 percent of ‘other Latinos’ backed Trump.” Nationally, he went from 28% among Hispanics to 32%.

Despite four years of rhetoric about immigrants (plus the media focus on Trump's aggressive anti-immigrant, anti-Mexico language) the former President got more votes from hispanic voters than he did in 2016. And this matters because the hispanic vote is the single largest bloc of working class votes in the USA. Indeed the USA, especially California, Texas and Florida, has a working class now overwhelmingly hispanic. When Criselda Vasquez paints her parents as the New American Gothic, the image is instantly recognisable to every American - a middle-aged hispanic couple stand in front of a battered Chevrolet truck, he's a farm worker, she's a cleaner. The latino maid is almost a Hollywood cliché these days but this shouldn't surprise as overwhelmingly US domesic workers - cleaners, carers, gardeners, even the pool boy - are hispanic.

And these domestic workers, almost without anyone noticing, got sacked as the pandemic sank its teeth into the American economy:

Domestic workers are facing unrelenting struggles. Their desperation is driven by unemployment rates of over 70% — far higher than what Americans faced during the Great Depression, when unemployment breached 25%. And most of those who have lost jobs during the pandemic have no idea whether their employers will ever hire them back. Most domestic workers surveyed by NDWA are their households main bread winners.  More than half were unable to pay the current month’s rent. Eight in ten now worry about eviction.  And for many, hunger is at their door. One third cannot afford to buy food for the week, and more than half were uncertain if they would have enough to feed themselves and their families.

So when the progressive pitch, the Democrats' big sell, to you is about something other than jobs, taxes, transport and housing, why on earth would you give your vote to them other than out of habit? In South Texas, Trump won places once reliably Democrat:

So the improvement from [2016 to] this year in all these counties—Zapata County, Starr County, Webb County, Zavala, Brooks County, Hidalgo County in Southern Texas. And this is not a Hispanic vote, right? This is a Mexican American vote. This is the heartland of the Mexican, of the Tejano vote. This is a Tejano vote in Texas.

The man who was going to build a wall got Mexicans to vote for him because they watched Biden and Harris attack the oil industry, criticise farmers and offer nothing to working class domestic workers clobbered by the pandemic. It remains true, however, that two-thirds of hispanic voters voted Democrat with the populations in northern cities especially pro-blue. But, if we take a different perspective, one not based on race but on economics, then what's happening here is part of a political reset as conservative voices become increasingly focused on working class issues (jobs, industry, cost of living) while progressive voices talk about middle class and elite interests like group rights, climate change and student loans. If you're a Mexican farm worker, you're far more bothered about how much a tank of gas costs you or the month's electricity bill than you are about using the right pronouns or elite arguments about white fragility.

Given that hispanics (of various origins and flavours) are a fifth of the US population and probably 40% of the working class, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Assuming Trump toddles off to play more golf, the next Republican leaders will need to speak good Spanish if they're to make the nativist offer - jobs, family, security, nation - work as an election pitch. Here in the UK, our media filters East Coast media to present an American that is black or white. Yet it's likely (unless Biden and Harris do better than Obama and Trump on stopping immigration) that there will soon be twice as many Hispanic-Americans as there are African-Americans. And on the West Coast - as the campaign against the California elite's affirmative action proposition 16 shows - the Asian-American vote is beginning to matter too.

So much of our analysis of the recent elections in the USA is simplistic (and, yes, the analysis here is only one slice of better analysis) but it is clear that, if the future for Republicans is a centrist pitch to the working classes around bread-and-butter issues like jobs and security, any successful candidate has to make a serious appeal to the hispanic working class voter as well as rednecks, 'Joe Six-Pack and the mid-West left-behind vote.

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