By David Hoffman 

With those words of challenge to Democrats in Virginia, still looking and hoping to return Hispanic voters to the Democratic Party fold on Election Day November 4, Marco Davis addressed a group of party activists gathered to hear him speak last week at the venerable Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington DC. 

“Don’t guess what Latinos need and want.  Ask them!” Davis explained at the WNDC event, held at The Whittemore House in DuPont Circle. “The Hispanic population is not a monolith but is instead a patchwork quilt born of at least 20 countries and not always even speaking the same language,” after pointing out that some speak Portuguese not Spanish, and many speak English primarily or exclusively.

Even if they speak Spanish, “their heritages, their national customs and traditions, are not identical,” he declared, adding that just getting “close is not good enough to motivate a voter.” (He acknowledged that using the terms Hispanic and Latino in overlapping ways is somewhat imprecise, but that most co-called Brown people use the terms essentially interchangeably.)

“There is no shortcut to the Brown vote,” explained Davis, president and CEO of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the research arm of the all-Democratic Hispanic membership.  (Until 2000, when its three Republicans resigned, the caucus was bipartisan.)

“Increasingly in Congress there’s a toxic mood,” he added, largely due to the near total grip on the Republican Party today by Donald Trump’s malevolent and feral style. 

“Party politics have overwhelmed the Hispanic caucus, especially concerning Latino Republicans, where loyalty to Trump has triumphed over ethnic solidarity with Democrats.”

Davis himself identifies as Afro-Latino, as his father is Jamaican but entered the US via Mexico after time spent there.  A graduate of Yale University, he currently is a Terker Distinguished Fellow at George Washington University and a former member of President Biden’s Commission on White House Fellowships.

Davis told the WNDC gathering that there are now roughly 68 million Hispanics in the US, citing Census Bureau estimates, so about 20 percent or one in five are US residents, including those who are undocumented as well as those legally living in this country.  He said that 80 percent are believed to be US citizens.  “More than 25 percent or one in four of those under 18 are Hispanic, and of those 95 percent are US citizens.”  According to Davis, Latinos are now the largest so-called non-White ethnic group on college campuses.

When it comes to Hispanic voting behaviors, Davis agreed that the data clearly documents an increased Hispanic trend to vote more Republican than before.  This trend towards the GOP accelerated in 2016 and continued to jump higher still in 2020 and 2024. But Davis demurred when asked to project what will happen in Virginia next month. He just didn’t know enough to be confident, he said.

During an exclusive interview with him, I asked if an explanation for the past increase in Republican Hispanic voter turnout might be the presence of the so-called Latino Machismo Factor, one driven of late by the explosive psycho-sexual dynamite of heated community controversy over Transsexuals in school bathrooms and sports locker rooms.  Again Davis demurred. “I just don’t know enough,” he said, adding that “The jury is still out.”

Then Davis challenged the very notion of so-called Machismo even being especially more prevalent among Hispanics.  Patriarchal attitudes and deeply embedded misogyny are widespread throughout all corners of society, he explained, including women as well as men, arising in how the masculinist culture reproduces itself widely beginning in childhood and beyond.

Perhaps our gaze needs to shift from Davis and social science and go instead to literature and art, to the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and the Mexican American memoirist Richard Rodriguez.  Rodriguez, who is gay, is the author of a trilogy of meditative books reflecting on his life, the most recent of which is “BROWN: The Last Discovery of America” published in 2002.  It’s been cited by one reviewer as filled with “linguistic bravado” and “images with the brio of Shakespeare and the wicked humor of a political cartoonist.” 

I first spoke to Rodriguez in 2003, when he appeared at a discussion of his book hosted by the US Department of Labor, and he confided in me that his book and his appearance was of course, among other things, a “performance” meant to challenge listeners and readers, and not always to be taken strictly literally.  For one thing, he told me that he did not feel especially Hispanic himself and that he personally identified more as African American and also as Irish Catholic.  

In his book, he reflects on the color Brown itself and the meaning of Hispanics in America today. According to Rodriguez, America has actually been Brown since its inception after 1492 through what is now often celebrated as Indigenous Day, not Columbus Day.  Profound and poetic, the color Brown comes into view, says Rodriguez, in the very moment of ultimate diversity when the African and the European meet within the Indian eye.

But I stand by my literal forecast for how Virginian Hispanics will vote this Election Year, which is Democratic, and in a landslide.  I got a hint of how right my prediction will turn out recently, over lunch in Arlington’s Pentagon City.  Our waiter, Jose, was from Mexico originally.  At first, he was a little hesitant when I asked him pointblank how he intended to vote next month (he’s a citizen now).  But when he finally answered his voice was steady: Democratic.  (Next question, why?  To be continued.)