Defectors Quotes

“Storytelling has always been a form of resistance for generations of Latinos. Some have used it to resist assimilation; others to resist change and preserve the past.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“The truth is, it’s very hard to understand Latino identity without acknowledging the way it’s been fundamentally shaped and transformed by centuries of Latin American colonialism and the U.S.’s own violent history with race and racism.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“Yet, I believe that, as Latinos, we have a particular predisposition to fantasize and romanticize the past because our complicated relationship with colonialism has not only distorted our perceptions of good and evil, but it has also allowed us to view ourselves as both the victors and the oppressed, as both the colonizers and the colonized. Both the beauty and the curse of our history as Latinos lie in the way our race and ethnicities are deeply mixed and intertwined.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“How is it possible that you can have so much hate in your heart towards your own people?”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“most Latinos today can trace their genes to some variation of both Europeanness and Indigeneity. It means that many Latinos can pass as both “white” and “brown.” When the situation calls for it, they can prioritize their whiteness and erase the specificity of their Indigenousness. It means that even those generations of Latinos who have come of age in a United States that has systematically discriminated against them can still, somehow, legitimize their allegiance to white supremacy by way of their “Spanish blood.” It ultimately means that they can be a brown person in America yet look at themselves in the mirror and see a white, Spanish person in the reflection. In the end, that was what the Juan de Oñate statue that became a point of debate in 2020 represented to many Latinos: their ability to see their European reflection, to fantasize about who they were and who they aspired to be.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“The image America has of us doesn't necessarily translate into the image many Latinos have of themselves.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“To understand our history, which tells us that Latinos can carry white supremacist tendencies, whether they are racially coded as white or not, is to understand that Latinos can easily act as the majority that we are supposed to reject.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“The fact is that Latin America has some of the highest rates of gender-based violence and femicide in the world, according to the Wilson Center.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“The Latino mind is a product of centuries of colonialism. A brutal force that engraved Christian nationalism's core tenets into our psyche.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“Anti-immigrant sentiment is visceral. It is tribal. And it provokes a feeling that can transcend lines of race and ethnicity because it taps into one our most essential human traits, our core sense of identity and belonging.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“confirm that Latinos in the U.S. are more likely to consume, spread, and receive fake news and misinformation online compared to the average population.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“We've always been one foot in, and one foot out.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“While collective solidarity certainly exists among Latinos, their unique background has forced many to buy into American individualism and the belief that they must vote to advance their own specific interests as they intersect with whiteness, capitalism, and Christianity. This is a hard truth many Latinos come to terms with once they realize that the American Dream immigrants are sold can mostly be achieved by succumbing to individualism, and not always by defending our common good”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“And, despite the Republican Party’s attempt to link migrants with child sex trafficking and a fentanyl crisis, those claims are unsubstantiated. According to UNICEF, most U.S. domestic trafficking victims are in fact U.S. citizens rather than undocumented immigrants, and according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the majority of fentanyl that is crossing the southern border is being smuggled through official ports of entry by U.S. citizens, not by asylum seekers.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“They taught me that they were more willing to align themselves with an authoritarian leader rather than engage in the historical reckoning and civil engagement needed to liberate the United States from its dark past. In many ways, the United States own complicated of interventions in Latin America had led us to this exact point in history, conditionting generations of Latinos to opt for strong men and undemocratic belief systems.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America

“However, where Anthony is wrong, is in his keenness to conflate that trauma, cartel violence, and the border's humanitarian crisis with migrants' personal characters.”
― Paola Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America