Routledge Americanizing Latino Politics, Latinoizing American Politics

Using the most extensive and currently available survey opinion data, this book empirically supports the argument that Latinos have emerged as a convergent panethnic political group, beyond the individual national origin identities dating to the time of the 1990 Latino National Political Survey when Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans were treated conceptually as politically distinct groups. Replete with data and supplemented by an extensive online resource, this book offers scholars, students, and sophisticated general readers evidence and inspiration for understanding the dynamics of Latino politics in the U.S. today. Review Praise for Americanizing Latino Politics, Latinoizing American Politics "Americanizing Latino Politics, Latinoizing American Politics offers a methodologically rich and institutionally grounded study of Latino political behavior through the period in which survey data can be tapped to understand Latino political attitudes and behaviors. Rudy de la Garza and Alan Yang are uniquely positioned to undertake this study. Professor de la Garza led the team that collected the first nationally representative sample of Latino political values, attitudes, and behaviors. In the years since that first study, the Latino National Political Survey, he helped shape subsequent national and regional Latino and immigrant surveys; he was ever attentive to patterns in the Latino political attitudes and behaviors that reflected continuity and change. Americanizing Latino Politics, Latinoizing American Politics documents the bridging of Latino national origin identities in the 1990s and early 2000s into a relatively cohesive and self-aware Latino panethnic political identity. The volume offers a rich analysis of the institutional and demographic factors that shaped the emergence of Latino political identity in the post-civil rights era. This analysis is critical to understanding the Latino political story, but also offers a model to better understanding the process of political identity building in other contemporary racial/ethnic/immigrant communities in the United States. This rich institutional and demographic foundation serves as a platform for the volume’s empirical analysis of the twin-edged process of the increasing cohesion of Latino political attitudes and partisan attachments, regardless of national origin or ancestry, and the increasing Latinoization of U.S. politics. For de la Garza and Yang, this is process of the formation of a Latino political ethnicity rests on a broad process of Americanization among Latinos, with the recognition that Latinos have in the period under study changed what it means to be American. Through this analysis, the authors offer a new, more contemporary model of immigrant/ethnic Americanization that places political identity and political influence at the core of political identity building. Americanizing Latino Politics, Latinoizing American Politics concludes with perhaps its most challenging task, to assess the impact of the Trump presidency, or at least its first 18 months, on the shape of Latino political ethnicity. Here, they find that President Trump’s role as a disrupter has extended to at least a part to disrupt the emerging Latino political cohesion that de la Garza and Yang had documented in the twenty years preceding the Trump presidency. While Latinos, not surprisingly considering Trump’s demonization of the Latino experience, are united in their disapproval of his administration’s policies and the direction of the country, de la Garza and Yang do find some newly emergent divisions among Latinos over immigration-related policies." – Louis DeSipio, University of California--Irvine "De la Garza and Yang provide the most persuasive analysis to date showing that a panethnic Latino public opinion and politics has emerged from Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other Hispanic groups, once regarded as fully distinct. Updating