Decades of nationally representative survey data show the birth of a Latino political ethnicity in the US

As another year’s National Hispanic Heritage Month draws to a close, this article by Alan Yang provides a look at what political pundits often refer to as “the Latino vote,” implying US Latinos are a unified group in their political behavior and views. But is this notion of panethnic Latino cohesion supported by data? Yang investigates whether and how Latinos of different national ancestries, specifically Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban, have increasingly become panethnic in their political attitudes and values over the past several decades. The article is a summary of the key aspects of Yang’s 2020 book (coauthored with Rodolfo de la Garza), “Americanizing Latino Politics, Latinoizing American Politics.” In the book, they demonstrated that since the 1990s, “Latinos have increasingly converged empirically across national origin groups in their political behaviors, beliefs, and policy preferences.” In this article, Yang included new and updated analyses not found in the book, which focus on political participation outcomes (voting and vote choice) over the period 1990–2016 and on several recent measures of “politically relevant sentiments, appraisals, and perceptions that extend to the second year of the Donald Trump presidency.”

To tell the story of the evolving cohesive political identity among Latinos, Yang drew on a diverse group of data sources, several of which are available from ICPSR and are linked below. Large-scale surveys provided rich individual-level data on attitudes and behaviors, starting with the “groundbreaking” 1990 Latino National Political Survey (LNPS). Yang’s analysis of these data showed large differences in the political behaviors and views of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans at that time. With data collected almost 20 years later in the 2006 Latino National Survey, Yang detected significant convergence across the same three groups since 1990, in political participation and policy preferences, indicating a new Latino political ethnicity. Yang attributed this change to five main factors, including the changing composition of the Latino population during its rapid growth since the 1970s. In addition, growing anti-Latino and anti-immigrant attitudes contributed to shared policy priorities around discrimination. Yang supplemented his analysis with other national surveys like the ANES Times Series Study for the years 2008, 2012, and 2016, as well as the National Politics Study, 2004, and the National Politics Study, 2008. He used these mainstream national samples of White or White/Black public or political views and attitudes to compare to those of Latinos. Additional cross-sectional data from the 2002–2018 National Surveys of Latinos helped confirm Latinos’ increasing cohesion over time across a variety of political measures.

Yang’s overall analysis revealed the emergence of a discernible Latino political ethnicity that had occurred by the 2000s. The updated trend data that Yang analyzed since the book’s publication showed very high agreement in Latinos’ negative sentiments toward Trump, except for some divergence that emerged regarding immigration. Yang also found that one’s level of Americanization also mattered, with highly assimilated subgroups often converging politically even when divisions were present overall. Yang’s analysis ultimately indicates the emergence of a Latino political ethnicity, disrupted but not derailed even by the Trump era pressures on the Latino community.