Opinion: What Mexico’s election means for Latinos in the U.S.

On June 2nd, Mexico elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist by training and Morena politician by choice. She is set to take office just weeks before the U.S. presidential election on November 5, in which people of Mexican-descent, which constitute approximately 60% of the Latino population in the U.S., will play a crucial role. 

Indeed, mere hours after Sheinbaum’s victory, President Joe Biden announced he would crack down on asylum claims at the U.S.-Mexico border in the lead-up to his own presidential race. Biden’s announcement on the heels of Sheinbaum’s triumph, and his subsequent expansion of protections for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, demonstrates the divisiveness of immigration in North American electoral politics. Add to this the Trump campaign’s recent rebranding of their Latino outreach effort from “Latinos for Trump” to “Latino Americans for Trump,” and the battleground is set for the soul of North America.

It is crucial to understand the rhetoric of the U.S. presidential race in light of the Mexican election. For one, the June 2 election marked another historic first: Mexicans abroad could vote in-person for the first time at one of 20 U.S.-based consulates. It is entirely likely that many of the voters who lined up for the Mexican election will also vote in the U.S. one. And those who can’t vote — approximately 48% of the so-called unauthorized population hail from Mexico —  stand to benefit, or lose, the most from the election’s outcome. Sheinbaum will, regardless of who wins the election, be expected to enforce some version of U.S.-sanctioned border policy on her side of the line.

The Mexican vote in the U.S., needless to say, matters, especially given the transnational ties diasporic Mexicans retain across the border and the specific race-class dynamics that animate Mexican American worldviews. In light of recent census changes that threaten to render nuances within the Latino voting demographic illegible, it’s worth naming salient ideological perspectives of Mexican American voters that may shape the outcome of American democratic futures.

First, it’s key to acknowledge the anti-Blackness that runs rampant in Mexican American communities. This anti-Blackness is made all the more intractable by the fact many Mexicans on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border maintain that, as a mestizo or “brown” country, Mexico does not experience racism as a problem as does the U.S. This is partly why, despite centuries of Afro-Mexican presence in Mexico, the Mexican government only included a category for Afro-descendants in its census in 2020. The anti-Black sentiments of Mexican society is amplified among the U.S. Latino community at large: Afro-Latinos fear erasure in the next U.S. census, a development that cannot be separated from the recent corrections to the Mexican census. 

Secondly, the ideology of mestizaje, a concept which encompasses Mexico’s national ideology and state project of racial mixing, remains salient for thinking through emerging developments in Mexican America. For example, a recent study by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute found that, in the last 20 years, the population holding both Latino and Asian American or Pacific Islander heritage in the U.S. has more than doubled. And though there is optimism about being able to retain cultural connection to both heritages, the history of racial mixing in Latin America, and to a large extent within the U.S., suggests homogenization and erasure may be more likely. This is how, for instance, Kevin de León, whose father was Guatemalan of Chinese-descent and whose mother was Guatemalan, can come to identify strongly with Mexican culture, including its worst tendencies, like anti-Blackness. 

By the same token, though wealth was a more salient determinant of voting patterns in the Mexican election, there is evidence of U.S. racial discourse seeping into Mexican social life. See, for instance, the proliferation of the often tongue-in-cheek self-identification of certain members of the elite as “whitexicans” or the reclamation of terms like “prieto” by the likes of prominent (and embattled) public figures like actor and writer Tenoch Huerta. Still, as author Juan Pablo Villalobos tweeted in the wake of Sheinbaum’s victory, the existence of the concept of “whitexican” suggests that no Mexican is “truly white.” What, then, do we make of the paradox of conservative Latinos whose politics suggest an affinity for, if not a true welcoming into, whiteness? Perhaps it points to an altogether new dimension for racial discourse, one that can only be understood when taking North America as a whole, rather than one divided into three parts.

To be sure, there is more to the story of how the battle for the soul of North America will be fought, let alone won. But the recent Mexican election, and the November election to come, serve as two important flashpoints to gauge where we are headed as a continent, and how much work remains to be done to forge a transnational collective that is worthy of the historic firsts marked by Sheinbaum’s electoral triumph.

Natalia Reyes is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project. Her research focuses on the emergence of brownness as a racialized form in American cultural production. Reyes was born in Indio, California to immigrants from Michoacán, Mexico.