Leo R. Chavez, "The Latino Threat: How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network – Interview with Leo R. Chavez, "The Latino Threat: How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation" (3rd Edition, Stanford UP, 2025)

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Episode Overview

In this insightful episode of New Books in Latino Studies on the New Books Network, host David James Gonzalez speaks with anthropologist Leo R. Chavez about the third edition of his landmark book, The Latino Threat: How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. The discussion explores how anti-immigrant rhetoric—particularly against Latinos—has moved from the political fringes into the mainstream of American discourse, the evolution of 'the Latino threat narrative,' and the profound individual and societal impacts of such rhetoric. Chavez also highlights updates in the new edition, especially his research on the psychological effects of negative rhetoric on Latino individuals.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Leo Chavez’s Background and Motivation

• Personal & Academic Roots
  • Chavez traces his roots to New Mexico, with a family presence dating to the early 1600s. He notes the irony in "go back home" rhetoric, having deeper generational ties to the region than many nativists. (03:11)
  • His professional evolution since the 1980s has centered on understanding why immigrant communities, especially Latinos, are persistently misrepresented in U.S. society. (05:18)
  • Quote:

    "When I hear a lot of this rhetoric about, you know, Latinos should go home... Well, I kind of ask, well, where did you come from? Because we were here a lot longer than most of the people who are talking." (03:24)

• Motivation for New Edition
  • Dramatic shifts in the public and political rhetoric about Latinos, especially after Trump’s rise, prompted a comprehensive revision.
  • Quote:

    “Where I thought [the Latino threat] was dying out under the Obama years... you have Donald Trump, and I felt like, who gave him a copy of my book? Because it's almost everything I wrote about the myths of the Latino threat narrative. He basically was shouting them and extolling them and claiming them as truth.” (09:45)

2. From Fringe to Mainstream: The Latino Threat Narrative

• Historical Context
  • In earlier decades, nativist and alarmist rhetoric was fringe, associated with figures like Samuel Huntington and Pat Buchanan.
  • In the 21st century, notably post-2015, these ideas have become central in mainstream political discourse, often endorsed by prominent politicians.
  • Quote:

    "It was the super fringe... but it has now been pushed... and it's become mainstream... I think Trump's biggest effective message is this, right? Is the Latino threat, is the immigrant threat. I think that's how he pulls his coalition and holds them together in many ways." (18:33)

• Right-Wing Media & Policy
  • Right-wing media and politicians deploy concepts such as "white replacement," "remigration," and explicit eugenics-era terms, normalizing ideas once considered taboo.
  • Quote:

    "The willingness in this administration to use terms that are so clearly coming out of a white racist rhetoric is unbelievable." (21:17)

3. The Function of Rhetoric vs. Empirical Evidence

• Rhetoric as Political Tool
  • Chavez’s research illustrates that the Latino threat isn’t grounded in empirical reality (e.g., immigrants causing more crime), but is a constructed rhetorical tool serving political and social goals.
  • Quote:

    “It's not empirical evidence that's pushing the Latino threat narrative. It's rhetoric... So I felt I had to put the evidence just so people realized how powerful the rhetoric was.” (26:49)

• Narrative as Social Motivator
  • The "Latino threat narrative" helps channel public frustrations and economic anxieties toward scapegoating, obscuring the real sources of inequality and stagnation.
  • Quote:

    "A narrative like the Latino narrative... is a scapegoat narrative. It's a way of saying, you know what?...It’s not our policies that are causing the problem. It's those people." (28:32)

4. Political and Policy Consequences

• Motivation for Radical Policies
  • The narrative catalyzes drastic policy responses: militarization of the border, family separations, mass deportations, attempts to end birthright citizenship, and endorsement of racial profiling.
  • Quote:

    "It motivates policies that seem radical, like putting barbed wire on the Rio Grande, so when people... they get caught up and drowned. I mean, it's just a macabre set of policies that seem to work.” (35:26)

• Erosion of Constitutional Protections
  • Even basic constitutional protections, like those against racial profiling or for birthright citizenship, have become targets.
  • Quote:

    “Racial profiling was illegal until the Supreme Court told us to do as much racial profiling as you wanted to, because how do you really tell who's a citizen or not?" (46:56)

• Diminished Citizenship
  • Chavez describes a new social hierarchy, where those “perceived as immigrant or non-white” experience “diminished citizenship,” subject to discretionary harassment and fewer protections.
  • Quote:

    "You have citizenship, then you have diminished citizenship. Those who don't have quite the same safeguards anymore..." (47:47)

5. Media Spectacle and Information Fragmentation

• Role of Media in Spreading the Narrative
  • The transition from mainstream magazines and cable news to fragmented, algorithm-driven social media has intensified the echo chamber effect and expanded reach of alarmist rhetoric.
  • Quote:

    "This fragmentation of the sources of information is really, in a sense, worked to enhance the idea that there really is no truth. That the truth is what we're going to tell you right now." (54:35)

• Challenges to Critical Thinking
  • The barriers to locating credible information make it difficult for individuals (even students) to verify or challenge dominant narratives.
  • Quote:

    “How hard, if you really wanted to counter that information, that was your sole source of information, where would you begin to look? ...Even my students, you want them to think critically, but you have to kind of lead them by the hand to go find information." (57:22)

6. Psychological and Social Impact on Latinos

• Laboratory Findings: Rhetoric's Psychological Toll
  • Chavez’s new edition features research co-conducted with a psychologist at UC Irvine. They exposed Mexican-origin students to negative, neutral, and positive rhetoric, measuring physiological and emotional responses.
  • Negative rhetoric raised stress and lowered subjective health and belonging; positive rhetoric improved well-being and reduced stress.
  • Quote:

    “If you talk bad about people, they feel bad about themselves. If you talk good about people, they feel part of society, they feel like they belong.” (66:17)

• A Broader Lesson for American Society
  • Chavez cautions that anti-Latino rhetoric is a bellwether: once normalized, it easily expands to target other minorities and dissenters, undermining social cohesion for everyone.
  • Quote:

    “I talk about for Latinos isn't just for Latinos... Well, then he starts talking about the, you know, the Chinese pandemic and rhetoric... or the Somalis right now not being, being disgusting, being animals, it's the same.” (65:03)

7. Final Reflections

• Both host and guest express hope for a political pendulum swing but acknowledge the cultural and legal damage wrought in the meantime.
• Closing question from Chavez:

  “What kind of country do we want? Do you want to have where we're calling immigrants, we're calling Mexicans rapists and murderers... or do you want to have a society where people feel like they belong?” (71:17)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On rhetorical scapegoating:

  “It's a motivator for action by people who want to pursue that kind of a line of thought to blame Latinos and immigrants for whatever bad thing in their life they feel is happening.” (27:32, D: Leo Chavez)

• On the normalization of extremist rhetoric:

  “The willingness to just borrow those phrases and use them as if somehow they don't matter. Someone asked me, well, isn't re migration just return migration? I said, no… one’s in ideology, one’s trying to understand a phenomenon.” (21:44, D)

• On the decline of meaningful truth in media:

  “There really is no truth. The truth is what we're going to tell you right now.” (54:36, D)

• On the stakes for all Americans:

  “It's sort of like that old saying, you know, you didn't say anything when they came for me, but now they're coming for you.” (65:14, D)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:11–06:00: Chavez’s family history and his entry into immigration studies
• 09:08–15:17: Why and how the third edition of The Latino Threat came to be; focus on the Trump era
• 18:33–20:30: Host/guest discuss mainstreaming of anti-Latino rhetoric and MAGA movement
• 25:59–32:09: Chavez’s anthropological approach—what narrative accomplishes vs. evidence
• 35:08–42:20: What policies are justified or motivated by the Latino threat narrative?
• 46:56–51:13: Constitutional erosions, racial profiling, and the hollowing of protections
• 54:35–59:39: Media spectacle shifts with the internet—truth, echo chambers, and algorithmic reinforcement
• 62:37–68:00: Psychological studies—measuring the real, negative impact of political rhetoric on Latino well-being
• 71:17–73:13: Final reflections—What kind of country do we want? Invitation to societal self-reflection

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Conclusion

This timely and thoughtful conversation between David James Gonzalez and Leo R. Chavez thoroughly examines the history, mechanisms, and consequences of anti-Latino rhetoric in American life. Chavez’s updated research illuminates not only the sociopolitical movement of these ideas from margin to mainstream but also their deeply personal psychological effects on individuals and their corrosive impact on the fabric of American democracy. The episode closes by reminding listeners that the question of who belongs, and on what terms, is urgent—not only for Latinos, but for the nation as a whole.

Transcript

[A]

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[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[C]

Right Hello and welcome back to New Books in Latino Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm David James Gonzalez, your host for today and I'm pleased to be speaking with Leo R. Chavez, author of the award winning book the Latino How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation in its third edition, released earlier this year by Stanford University Press, and that is in 2025. Leo R. Chavez is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of several books, including Covering Immigration, Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation, which was published by uc Press in 2001, and Anchor Babies and the Challenge of Birthright Citizenship, published by Stanford University Press in 2017. Dr. Chavez is the recipient of several awards, including the association of a Latina and Latino Anthropologist Book Award or the Latino Threat, which he received in 2009, and another from the Society of the Anthropology of North America's Award for Distinguished Achievement in the critical study of North America. He was elected a fellow of the American association for the Advancement of Science in 2018 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. Hello, Leo, and welcome to the New Books Network and New Books and Latino Studies.

[D]

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure.

[C]

Well, I'm hoping you can begin today by just introducing yourself a bit more to our audience. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, perhaps personally and professionally.

[D]

Sure. I mean, you gave a pretty good background there, but I could add a few things and you could ask me some more questions. I was born in New Mexico, which, you know, previously was part of Mexico and before that part of new Spain. I'm 13th generation new Mexican and my family came in the early 1600s. And so when I hear a lot of this rhetoric about, you know, Latinos should go home, well, I kind of asked, well, where did you come from? Because we were here a lot longer than most of the people who were talking. And even the president is the son of an immigrant. So a lot of the rhetoric sort of falls on deaf ears when it comes to people I know in the Southwest who've been here for generations and generations. So I was fortunate to be born in a place like New Mexico. Absolutely beautiful state, long history, great people. And then my family moved to California when I was really young. And it was an interesting time in the 50s. I'm an old guy, so in the 50s we forget what the demographics were like in the Southwest. In California, it was foreign born. Latinos were relatively a small proportion of the California population. And Latinos who were citizens who were born here and whose parents or grandparents came in the 1910s. 1920s were much more common in the 50s. And so the great migration into California and Southwest really began in the 60s and 70s and you start seeing the demographic shift to where about 44% of the Latino population in California is now foreign born in US Or Mexican born. So in my lifetime I've seen this big shift. And now we'd have to say in contrary to the rhetoric, most of that shift has been very positive. It's been a great set of contributions to American life, culture, society and economy over the last 40 years. And so that sort of prompted me to think, well, why are we seeing so much negative rhetoric? My own personal experience doesn't sort of really suggest that those are all true in quotes, claims. And so I was kind of urged in my own mind to think, well, how can I investigate this? And so basically all my books sort of grew out of the same set of ideas. You know, one book is, you know, as a scholar, leads to the next book, to the next book, to the next book. As one chapter in one book said, I could expand that and think about that even more. And so I'd say my whole career looking at immigration, which began about 1980, has really followed that same trajectory of really trying to understand what's going on and why there's this misrepresentation of immigrants in society. So that's sort of my career. In short, um, if you have any other questions, please let me know.

[C]

No, we will, definitely. I'm. I'm fascinated by somewhat of your background in that my dad's family's from northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, and particularly in the Mexico part. Rio, Rio Arriba area were there for several generations. So we should compare notes. Maybe there's. There's some type of relation somewhere along there.

[D]

Anybody from that area is pretty much related. They've been couple of generations. That's what we're all called. Privos.

[C]

There you go. That was my thoughts exactly.

[D]

But I'm sure you're not being biased in this interview just because we felt related.

[C]

I grew up in Southern California also. It was my dad's parents that moved to Los Angeles actually, really right around World War II. And so, you know, my experience in Southern California was really highlighted. You know, I think when I went to college and I started to read books like yours, that started to shed light on something I felt that I saw. You know, I grew up a bit later than you, 80s and 90s or my school age years, elementary school through high school, Prop 187, which I'm sure we'll talk some more about, came about when I just entered high school and the aspect of this Latino threat I'm bringing up here. When I read your book, I had never, I think, heard that phrase before. But when I read it perhaps a decade or so out of high school, I had a very different trajectory educationally and professionally. So I came upon your book probably around, I think, 2011, 2012, a little bit after it was published. I had done some work as an undergrad before that and started to become fascinated in the politics of immigration. But when I read your book in that title, it just rang so true that this is what I had grown up amidst, particularly in the media, that the place that I lived at, I lived in which I. I split my life between Ventura county and San Diego. The latter half of my life was in San Diego, particularly Chula Vista. So Very close to the border. And so this leading to my question that this book came out in 2008. You talked somewhat about what kind of started motivating and getting your thinking along this lines. It's in its third edition, which is pretty rare for an academic book. So. So it's had quite a bit of legs, if you will, and necessitated multiple releases. And so will you tell us a bit about what prompted you to update it and revise? Because this is not just a slap on a new prologue and maybe tweak an introduction or a conclusion. You update several parts of this book. We talk about what prompted that.

[D]

Well, yeah, basically the second edition came out in 2012 because Stanford said, hey, I said, my book just came out. Why do you want a second edition? They go, because things have changed already, dramatically. I mean, it's just what you wrote about in 2008 has become incredibly, even more pervasive. And of course, now it's been 13 years or something, and a lot of things took place in that time period that I didn't suspect would happen. And I thought, basically after writing the Latino threat, you know, sort of the way we think as academics, we find a problem, we discuss the problems, we critique the problems and put it out there, and people will say, that problem's over. We now understand what's going on. Well, that didn't happen with the Latino threat. The Latino threat became even more pervasive. And where I thought it was actually sort of dying out under the Obama years and earlier, you know, you have Donald Trump, and I felt like, who gave him a copy of my book? Because it's almost everything I wrote about the myths of the Latino threat narrative. He basically was shouting them and extolling them and claiming them as truth. And so he was there saying everything I wrote in my book. Immigrants, particularly Latinos, are invading the United States. They're nothing but criminals. They're unable to assimilate or unwilling to assimilate. They don't want to learn English. They. They don't want to interact with people socially. They want to maintain themselves in their own little ghettos and never interact with people. They're taking all our jobs. They have uncontrolled reproduction. All they want to do is have babies. And this leads to the demographic threat, which I wrote about, was that somehow whites are becoming a much smaller part of the population, which is true, but not because of what they blame people, because of the natural changes that are occurring in society. And therefore, this. This idea suggests that you have to have radical solutions, like putting Military at the border, trying to get rid of birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants. And it just goes on and on. So I was sitting here thinking, wow, did he read my book? And just decided that they were all. It was a documentary I was writing and decided he was going to use those same ideas, which he used incredibly effectively. So I figured I had to write another book. And this book was going to be focused on rhetoric, and a lot of it was about Donald Trump and how he was able to use the Latino threat narrative so effectively through his using rhetoric in aspects of rhetoric and strategically aspects of rhetoric to get people to buy his line. And so I spent a lot of time talking about why he was effective, not just saying, oh, Donald Trump's a bad guy. But my question was, why was he effective? When it. So clearly these are not true and people know they aren't true, how is he effective? And so I figured I had to rewrite the book, really, in the sense I really rewrote it with this new idea and focus in mind, because I felt I owed people who like my book a chance to see me, in a sense now taking it and using it to try and understand the current situation, rather than just leaving it out there from 13 years ago and let people try and figure it out themselves. And so Stanford bought the idea and said, yeah, let's try it. Let's do it and see if people like it. And I think it worked out great. It's a little longer than the original because I added some things to it that weren't in the original, obviously, and I got rid of some things. But I added a whole new section because when Donald Trump first came into play in 2015 or so for his first run, I asked myself, this rhetoric is really awful. And people say sticks and stones will break your bones and words will never hurt you. But I said, is that true? I mean, these things he's saying about Mexicans and Latinos are just so God awful. And so I got together with a psychologist friend of mine at UCI and I said, I want to do a study. You're the psychologist. Help me set up a laboratory where I bring Mexican origin students in blind, no idea what's going on, divide them into different groups and show them positive rhetoric, negative rhetoric, and then neutral rhetoric as a control. And let's do a psychological experiment. What is rhetoric do to people in terms of the psychological status? So I had to add that section onto the book. So it made a little longer. But I think it's worthwhile because the question that I had there was, how does it affect people to have people talking so badly about you? And of course, even since I wrote that book, it hasn't changed. I mean, obviously Trump is still railing against immigrants, claiming they're eating dogs, claiming people are just. They're animals, literally calling them animals. So everything. It's almost as if this, my Latino threat narrative, just ceased to exist in the mind of people who are trying to pursue this idea that immigrants are a threat to society. And so I wrote that book because I felt that I had to find a way to deal with these issues. And that's how this book came about. It's not so much a refutation, so much as a way of looking at how Donald Trump got here, because he didn't invent any of these tropes that I'm talking about. 2008 was way before Donald Trump, right? And 2012 was way before Donald Trump. So he didn't invent this. He used these ideas incredibly effectively to get his base upset about immigrants. And we see it today as just an awful sin. The Supreme Court's thinking about getting rid of birthright citizenship. And so he used it very effectively. So I, I felt that it was time to do the third edition, to try and really try and figure out how I felt. My book and my ideas helped me frame and understand the contemporary ethos that's happening in politics. And that's why I wrote it. I felt an urgency to do it. It's like one of those things as academics where you feel like, I really got to do this.

[C]

No, I'm glad you did. As I shared with you before we started recording, I've always felt over the years that I've been podcasting just of how, you know, applicable impression your book has been ever since I came across it. I think about that timeline of 2008 when it first comes out to now, and oh, my gosh, I can just imagine maybe that maybe within the first few years when it came out with the Obama era and all of the thoughts and emotion of are we in this post racial era? Right. That was early on in the Obama era, right? And then you see the Tea Party movement, right? And so it. The honeymoon was over pretty quick. In fact, I remember the day after Obama was elected, and I'm kind of just, you know, on a cloud two, just thinking, wow, this is incredible. I'm. By this point, I'm. I'm kind of pursuing my second career, which is. Which I'm now in academia and I went back to school, I was commuting from Chula Vista to UC San Diego and actually working out in the eastern part of the county too. So in my commute the day after Obama's election, I'm driving around and I see someone's car and it has a homemade sign, right? They've taken an 8 by 8 and a half by 11 piece of paper and wrote in color, used Obama's name as an acronym. And that acronym was one big ass mistake. America.

[B]

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[C]

Right. And when I saw that and it's, it's just, it's, it struck with me ever since because when I saw that I thought, oh wow, maybe this isn't going to go how we think it's going to go. Right. Maybe America isn't fully ready to turn a page on, you know, its past and it's close proximity and attachment to white supremacy. Right. And its cultural, you know, symbols. And so with that one thing, your book really point does this phenomenal job. It's always done a phenomenal job pointing out is how these ideas from the fringe and because that's where again, I mean, just when the book came out, it was just, it was crazy. It was crazy to think, you know, a lot of this rhetoric, you know, it was, it was the super fringe and used. You pointed those out the, you know, the Buchanans of the world, the Samuel Huntingtons and Samuel Huntington, I mean, you know, an academic in Harvard, right. That you know, but these people were very fringe saying that Latinos or immigrants poison the blood. I mean this is very old, right. Nativist, xenophobic rhetoric in American history. But it had now been pushed thanks to the history of eugenics and Nazism, this type of talk in the post war era was not really acceptable. And so while it still existed and was always an undercurrent of our politics and our rhetoric, it was off in the fringes and it's become mainstream from there from 2008 to now. This is almost for many people, what we could, I don't know, is it a third of the country? I don't know how big MAGA is or whatever and how many of these people are really. I think Trump's biggest effective message is this, right? Is the Latino threat, is the immigrant threat. I think that's how he pulls his coalition and holds them together in many ways. So whatever the percentage is, they think this is truth. And now we're on the side, seemingly.

[D]

Right.

[C]

I'm teaching my Latino history, my immigration history classes to some students that come from rather conservative backgrounds. And when I share these facts with them. Right. It is almost like I'm now in the fringe. Right. I don't know. So can I just get to your. Some of your thoughts on that? You've been kind of speaking to it, but some of your thoughts of just, wow, we are, we are truly in this era where, where what you detailed has really become mainstream and, and academics are perceived now, in the age of misinformation in the post truth era as the ones that are just making this stuff up and saying, no, this isn't real. Right.

[D]

No, that's, that's true. I, I spent some time at the third edition talking about how the Latino threat became mainstream and particularly in the, you know, Trump years, because what we see is just, I mean, some of the media, the right wing media, so readily puts out ideas that in the past were considered fringe, as you put it, and Tide put it, like white replacement theory, that whites are somehow being targeted and that the policies of the Democrats are to get more non white voters. And the idea that we have to stop women of color from having babies because they're having too many babies and whites aren't having enough babies. Well, whites could have babies. The willingness to use terms that are so much a part of fascist Nazi history, like re migration, I mean, that's a huge concept from, I guess, the white nationalist movement in Europe and the willingness to just borrow those phrases and use them as if somehow they don't matter. Someone asked me, well, isn't re migration just return migration? I said, no. Return migration is a concept we use in academia to understand migration. The other one is based on the ideology of whiteness and racism. I mean, so the Two have to be understood in terms of their actual differences. One's in ideology, one's trying to understand a phenomenon. And so yet the willingness in this administration to use terms that are so clearly coming out of a white racist rhetoric is unbelievable. And to have people in the administration talk about Hitler being a good guy or racism's okay. It's just, can you imagine the Ronald Reagan administration doing that, John Kennedy's administration doing that? Even the Bush, even he was reviled, but even the Bush administration doing that? I mean, it's just such a new low that most of us have no idea how to really contemplate it. And so in a sense, I hope my book helps us understand that a little bit what's going on, how that that's taken place over the last 30, 40, 50 years. Because it's almost unexplicable that there's people willing to allow this kind of rhetoric and actions, but rhetoric really to be so front and center in the administration of the United States of America, it's just unbelievable, really. And so I think like many academics, we're all trying to just get over the actual awe of what's happening to try and make some sense of it. And that's, I hope my book adds a little bit to that sense of trying to come to grips with what's happening. And I think what we're seeing in the polls, as you know, is that people are trying to reject those ideas because in a sense, they're very un American. I mean, they're extremely un American. And I think people recognizing that and hopefully we'll see, as we always do in politics, a sort of one wave begets another wave in the opposite direction. And I'm hoping that's what happens. And I think, well, as you put it, we're sort of lambasted as inventors of information rather than scientists or creators of knowledge in this, in the contemporary right wing political discourse. People get tired of that and I think hopefully they're going to start asking, well, where's the evidence for what you're saying? I mean, you're saying it, but that doesn't mean it's true. Is it, I mean, is there any other sources? And that's where academics, I think, will become back to the center and people will start asking them again, what's going on, how do we understand what's happening? And you know, to be. But it's hard, I think, as you know, as an academic to be recently to be continually called out as being fake or that data doesn't matter. That information doesn't matter. Critique and analysis doesn't matter. If I say it's true because I'm who I am as a president or represent Stephen Miller, then it's true. And that's, you know, that's what academics refuse to accept truth in that way. That's where our basic reason for living is to challenge truth in quotes. And that's been the history of intellectual thought for last 500 years. Right. I mean, when people start asking, does the sun really rotate around the earth? Is the earth really flat? I mean, we challenge and that's what we do. And that's what Trump hates, is to be challenged. But that's our very nature, that's our very job, and that's who we are as a part of our identity, is to challenge those kind of ideas. But they're shocking. They're shocking. It's hard to look at what some of that rhetoric is saying and not think, wow, where are we in America? How did we get here? And that's what I think my book tries to show. It just didn't happen overnight. I was looking at these things from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and this progression of this rhetoric and, you know, it goes up and down. Some people accept it, some people don't. But more recently it's been up. I think hopefully it'll come down.

[C]

Indeed, I hope so, too. I want to talk about this aspect of, you know, of science, of evidence and how you've approached this topic through your particular field. As an anthropologist, how have you examined this extreme form of anti immigrant, anti Latino rhetoric? Can you give us an example or two?

[D]

Yeah. Let me say, first of all that the reason I chose to look at rhetoric, even though I present a lot of information like immigrants really don't cause more crime, immigrants really do learn English, immigrants aren't invading, et cetera, et cetera, is to show that it's not empirical evidence that's pushing the Latino threat narrative. It's rhetoric. It's a set of decisions that are put out there that people want to believe.

[C]

Right.

[D]

So it's not evidence based. Latino threat narrative is not based on evidence, it's based upon rhetoric, and which is a key thing. So I felt I had to put the evidence just so people realized how powerful the rhetoric was.

[C]

Right.

[D]

And as an anthropologist, I came to this idea because, in a sense, what anthropology tries to understand is culture and how we think about things, how we feel, how we have emotions and where those emotions come from. And in a sense, a narrative is a way of encapsulating emotions and encapsulating understandings that people have that could be used to motivate them to take particular actions. And so that's what the Latino threat narrative is. It's really a motivator for action by people who want to pursue that kind of a line of thought to blame Latinos and immigrants for whatever bad thing in their life they feel is happening. Right? And so, as an anthropologist trying to look where does this narrative fit into society? Why do people want to believe it? And that forces me to think broader than anthropology. I just have to start thinking like an economist. What's inequality? How has inequality been a persistent fact of American life for the last 50 years, where in the 60s, we were relatively narrow in our inequality? And over the last six decades, our inequality has just not changed under a Democrat or Republican president. And so the Latino narrative fits within that context of the last 50 years of people feeling they're getting less and other people are getting more, the rich are getting richer, and the middle class and poor are just can't maintain they can't tread water. And so a narrative like the Latino narrative, as we all know, is a scapegoat narrative. It's a way of saying, you know what? Particularly for politicians to use it. They say, you know what? It's not our policies that are causing the problem. It's those people. It's an us them narrative, right, that allows people to say, you know, they're the problem. And, you know, politicians love that because it takes the. You know, people aren't looking at the politician and their policies. They're looking at this scapegoat. And so I had to ask myself, you know, anthropologists would look at the emotions, the narratives, the kind of cultural aspects, but there's economics involved, inequality is involved, people getting less today, people who feel they're never going to achieve as much as their parents did. I mean, the baby boomers are the richest generation in American history. Their kids don't feel they'll ever be that rich. Who do you blame? And you gotta blame someone. They feel the housing costs are really high. Who do you blame? You gotta blame someone, right? It's these undocumented immigrants who, you know, their bids on $5 million houses is what's causing the housing. Come on, give me a break. Right? But that's what people sort of are thinking. Or these people, you know, taking care of elderly people for minimum wage and changing diapers or taking. Doing things that citizens don't want to do. They're the problem. And I don't see people lining up to do that work. As we're deporting people, all we're finding is just a vacuum. People aren't lining up to do the kind of work that people are being deported for. And so you had this context within which the Latino narrative, both cultural, social, and economic, made sense to some people who want to believe the rhetoric. When people say, you know, whites are becoming a lesser part of the population. That's true, but not for the reasons that the right wing would say. Whites are basically an older population. Older populations have fewer children. And that demographic reality shifts very quickly. People say, well, why are there so many Latino and Asian kids in grade school here? Because their parents are at the reproductive stages of their lives. The average white woman in Orange county, when I started writing this was 45 years of age. They're already not having kids. And it's so easy to see how change occurs because of demographic realities. Not to blame people, just to recognize the realities. But blame is the game that's very popular in politics, unfortunately. And so I kind of asked myself, these are the contexts within which the Latino theft narrative thrives. And unfortunately, those aspects of American life aren't going to change in the near future. You know, the fact that people. There's a difference in who's having kids, there's the age differences, there's the fact that immigrants are the highest working population in America in terms of proportion. I mean, these are all facts of life. And it's just not going to change in the near future. In fact, as I write about in the book, particularly the epilogue, in contrast to having people deported, we need to have a rational policy that allows people to come and be part of our society and integrate a new guest, a new way for people to regularize their status. I mean, these are the things that are important in our society, not deporting people. I think that's going to become very clear to a lot of people in the near future. Remember, I'm an academic, so you want to stop me from talking, just give me a signal and I'll stop so you can ask me another question.

[C]

No, this is great. And I agree. And also it's. I think the. This rhetoric is, you know, also seemingly circulated in a vacuum, right. Wherein Americans have. In my estimation, and this is my estimation through the students that I've taught, you know, over the last 12 years or so, and the co workers I've had in other careers and other fields over the last 25 years or 27 years, whatever it may be, of adulthood, wherein they don't realize that these, these problems, right. Like declining birth rates. Right. This is, this is a, a global thing. Across the so called global north, right. All of the, you know, northern European countries are experiencing something similar, right. We see global migration throughout the world, coming from the global south to the global North. Right. For a lot of the reason, the inequality that you discuss. Right. And so these anti immigrant movements and nativist movements that we see here are represented throughout Europe, also in the United States. They've come to take on again its own, you know, I think uniqueness in that, particularly our fascination with the border, again, the southern border. Latinos, you know, throughout the 20th century have been, you know, essentially become, or at least the very least throughout the mid to late 20th century and early 21st century become the favorite, the favored boogeyman. Right. To continuously point to, although others circulate in, right? Certainly. But I want to go to this idea of that you point out that so these ideas that form the Latino thread aren't just random, right? It's a cohesive set of beliefs. And then you've made that connection to where it forms into a narrative that is supposed to motivate people to action. Can you talk a bit more about who is it supposed to motivate? You talk some about politicians. So what are some of the actions that politicians take being motivated by this type of narrative? And some of it we've discussed, right. They're trying to cover up really the failed policies, right. The policies that have failed over the latter end of the 20th century as the rest of the world caught up to the United States and our policies have failed to, I think, respond in any ways create the economy that everyone likes to think back to. That's what America was great in the 50s and 60s, supposedly, I hear. I mean, my dad talked to me about being afraid of nuclear annihilation. So the 60s and 70s didn't sound so great to me and I caught the tail end of the Cold War. But anyways, you know, it's. That's what people are pushing back against, right? That things used to be so phenomenal until we had all these immigrants and now. So that, that aspect of motivation, this, this cohesive ideas that are trying to motivate action, part of it's to blame. But what are the specific actions they're doing then that it's.

[D]

Well, I mean, first and foremost, the Latino threat narrative is very effective in getting people to vote for certain candidates. It's a very effective motivator because it's a motivation of fear that if you can get people afraid, and you can say you can solve the problem. You hopefully get a chance to get people to come out and vote for you. And the ads that we've seen continually over the last probably 100 years, but particularly over the last, since 2015, when I say Latino threats become mainstream, it's in the willingness of politicians to use it to get elected. I mean, you see it in Miami, you see it with the governor of Florida, you see it across the United States and Texas particularly. And so it motivates policies that seem radical, like putting barbed wire on the Rio Grande. So when people, if they slip into it, they get caught up and drowned. I mean, it's just a macabre set of policies that seem to work. Or right now, it allows the Supreme Court to allow the administration to basically pick people up because of racial profiling. I mean, this is unheard of. But it's the Latino threat. How did the judges even, you know, rationalize it? Well, there's so many of them. How are you going to tell? You can't get a warrant for everybody. You got to just pick them up, right? And if they look brown, then you pick them up. It's almost like, well, where did that come from? How did that allow to be happening? Because things like the Latino threat narrative are so pervasive and taken for truth in quotes that even the Supreme Court allows racial profiling in America. And you talk about the policies on the border, having the Marines at the border slamming US Citizens who are Latinos on the ground, because for whatever reason, because you think they might be undocumented. These are all things that are actually happening, and they wouldn't happen if you didn't have a strong sense that there's a threat, the Latino threat narrative that allows it to happen. The other alternative would be, you know, if they want to have America, great again, they should have had a series of regularization programs or amnesty programs over the last 30, 40 years. I mean, then people wouldn't be undocumented. They'd be working hard, they'd be getting educated, they'd be increasing their. Their, their income. They'd be making life better for everybody. And, and, and, you know, that's the way you incorporate people. You just don't want let this population build up for decades post Ronald Reagan amnesty with no place to go. They're just sitting there trying to figure out how they're going to change their status. And then you come now and say, why are you here illegally? We got to get rid of you. Well, they're here illegally because you wouldn't let them status even though they're contributing billions of dollars to the economy. And now you're spending billion dollars to get rid of them. That's not a fair exchange. It's not a good exchange. And I mean, rather than spending billions of dollars, get rid of them, allow them legally to work to make billions of dollars for the economy. I mean, whoever's running the show is a little bit off, I think. And of course we know Stephen Miller is the one who has a lot of these ideas. And so going back to your question, what kind of policies are motivated, Number one, voting people want to vote for people who scare them and they can find a solution. I mean, that's the whole rhetoric that's been so popular lately. It's also allowed policies to be implemented about surveillance, about apprehension, about deportation that seem incredibly extreme. But you have an extreme idea. Invasion. Invasion is a war metaphor. You have to deal with war metaphors with war challenge. And so these policies on deportation, surveillance, et cetera, are in a sense allowed because of the extreme nature of the rhetoric that says we have a big problem. And then you have not just those policies, but now you have challenges by one person who's in the presidency who thinks he can change the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution is very hard to change for a reason. You need majority of the states to agree to it. It's got to go through a whole process. They often take a years and years and years. One man should not be able to say we got to change the Constitution. They could promote it, suggest it, and then let society and Congress and politics see if it works. It wouldn't work. That's our. It's very hard to change the Constitution. But that's what he wants to do. And he wants the Supreme Court, which he stacked to support him in doing that. It's so unbelievable and unconstitutional and yet that's what he's pushing for. And the idea that one person can change the Constitution is incomprehensible. People are saying, well, the Supreme Court's in his back pocket. But as I wrote about in my book on anchor babies and threat to society because of these issues, the Won Kim Ark case back in the late 1800s was so clear, I would suggest you download it and read it. It's such a clearly written case and I quote a lot of it in my book. It's as if the judge was thinking ahead 100 years that there's going to be some guy in the White House who wants to get rid of birthright citizenship. So I'm going to write directly to this person. And he writes in his case, the Supreme Court justice writes, it's really not whether the parents of someone born in the United States is allowed to be here. His parents weren't allowed to be here. They were Chinese who weren't allowed to be in America. He said, but that doesn't matter. That doesn't matter. The 14th Amendment says if you're born here, you're legally here. And it's as if he's just saying it doesn't matter if your parents are undocumented. Parents are this. If you're born here, you're a citizen. And he says that so explicitly to ward off any challenge, that there have been challenges and they were warded off pretty quickly. And they wanted to get rid of Japanese American citizenship, they wanted to get rid of more Chinese citizenship. Yuan there's been challenges to birthright citizenship for a hundred years. None of it's stuck because the Constitution is so clear and the 14th amendment is so clear and the cases that have been brought, like Wong Kiem mark case in 1898 was so clear that this is what the Constitution says, that it's going to be very hard. But then people say, well, you know, the Supreme Court's in Trump's back pocket and it looks like it is, but we'll see if even they are willing to let one person change the Constitution of the United States, which is something that it's so hard to change because it takes a lot of work to change and create. That's why we haven't had that many amendments to the Constitution. It's just very difficult to do. And so we'll see if he's able to do this. It's just, it's almost unthinkable but, well, who knows what the Supreme Court will do.

[B]

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[C]

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[C]

That's how good leads the way. I agree. I think. I figure I find myself. I just wrapped. We just wrapped up our semester here at Brigham Young University, and I was teaching my immigration history class. And your comment there. We'll see. I find myself saying that a lot because looking at the law and talking about the history of immigration policy, and I have students themselves who are trying to understand how after, through all these constitutional protections that we have or believe that we have, are we seeing people all over the country here in Provo, Utah, I know I have people that I know that I go to church with who are not Latino, but perceptibly look Latino. And we're stopped by ICE driving down the street, and one of them shared on Facebook how the ICE agent pulled him over, came up to him, asked him for his id. He gave him his id, asked him what the problem was. The guy looked at his id, laughed and laughed, perceivably because he saw clearly the name wasn't Latino. He chucked the id, tossed the ID back at him and said, you can go. And this is the era that we're living in. We're living in where people who, even with legal status, it doesn't matter whether they're legal or not, and US Citizens are being arrested or being detained or being put into immigration detention centers for days, are literally being disappeared for days. Families can't find them. Right. They are intentionally moving people that they detain from one immigration detention center to another. And the point of we'll see. Like, my students keep asking me, like, this is unconstitutional, right? And I'm saying, like, yes, we have this case law that says, you can't do this, but we are also in a period where we will see on if the law will hold, shockingly, because we have two branches of government that view the Latino narrative, apparently, whether they believe it as fact or not, whatever reason, I don't get why people follow Trump. I try to learn and read, but we have two branches of government that are on board with this stuff. They're on board with amassing a national police force now, right? They're building ICE's ranks, recruiting all over the country, hiring people that are thugs, literally people with criminal records and everything else. I'm not trying to criminalize ICE necessarily, but they are not vetting people the way they claim they're. They're vetting. They want to vet immigrants. And we're just in this we shall see period of time. We shall see if we value the law. We shall see if we as a people are going to hold our institutions to the law. And I think earlier you mentioned that it seems people are turning away from this. And I think recent polling is showing, particularly among even all those Latinos that voted for Trump, they're like, okay, we're done with this guy, right? We thought you were going to fix the economy, right? Not do this crap. But it does seem to me that we're almost in this twilight zone period where we have to wait to see what aspects of the law are going to hold up, because we do know the law. You mentioned the Wonkama Arc decision. We have court cases, we have laws, we can read them. I assign them in courses. I know you did, too, and others do, but we're waiting to see.

[D]

Well, we used to think racial profiling was illegal until the Supreme Court told stuff to do as much racial profiling as you wanted to, because how do you really tell who's a citizen or not? And you know, that's where we're at. You're right. It's almost, it's really alarming that that could happen. I mean, Trump wants to get rid of birthright citizenship. I think he's like 100, 200 years too late. They should have got rid of it 200 years ago. And then none of the people who came here from Europe would be citizens. And that's. He came, it's a little too late. And, you know, why should he be a citizen? And yet I think what you're talking about in terms of how the racial profiling that's existing, occurring right now is really an attempt to push up white position in society and say, basically there's going to be a hierarchy here. We with power who are white are going to be the top of this social hierarchy. And this is an attempt to basically make other people feel that somehow they don't belong as equally as others, that they're a second class type of citizenship, that we can pick you up and harass you at any time. We can slam you to the floor. We can detain you for days or weeks or months at a time. We can even deport you until somebody brings your birth certificate, which you don't have to carry. We can do all these things to you because, well, you're not really equal. You have diminished citizenship because I write about it in my book. Basically, you have citizenship, then you have diminished citizenship. Those who don't have quite the same safeguards anymore are treated the same. And even though they're US Citizens because they're considered to have immigrant parents or whatever, they're basically profiled. And so we see a diminishing of the kind of protections, privileges and guarantees that we all thought we enjoyed somehow becoming lost or becoming diminished. You know, kids whose parents might be immigrants are not allowed into classes or afraid to go get medical care, afraid to do this, afraid to do that. Well, that's shortchanging their citizenship when they're afraid to do all these things, so they're not allowed to do those things. And so that's what we're. You're right. That's the sort of the state we're living in. And when that gets turned around or how it gets turned around, it's going to be very important to see, because it's like any ship that's moving in the same direction, once you've got this sort of set of practices occurring, that ship is going to shift very slowly over. And even if we have a major shift in the electorate the next election, Congress is going to still have to find a way to rest some of these policies away from the administration and, and assert itself into, you know, putting order back into the system. But right now, what's being said very clearly, symbolically and in real practice is that this, the society is going to be made up of different types of people, those with power, those who are seen as part of the white establishment. And there's going to be immigrants coming in who are white, not these people who don't fit in. And that's the rhetoric we're hearing to say somehow we're going to get rid of all refugees except white South Africans. It's almost unheard of. And basically. And Trump's saying, why don't we have more people from Denmark or Norway or Sweden? Because they're doing extremely well. Why shouldn't you migrate here? Migration is a process of people who want hope and a better future. If you have a better future already, there's no reason to come and, and slave away to try and find a better future. You know, migrations for people who have. Who have hope and willing to put up with a lot to have that hope for their kids. And you're not going to find people from northern Europe who want to do that. But to have White South Africans who are really, are they really oppressed? But the black South Africans, I've been to South Africa, it's still extremely apartheid type of place, right. And it's almost like saying, well, the white slave owners in the south are the ones who should have amnesty, not the black slaves. And a lot of people think that makes sense. Unfortunately.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, a key. The other thing that shocked me about again this, on the theme of things going from the fringe to the mainstream, is just how obviously racist this rhetoric is. Immigration has, through the, through the lens of legality and illegality has often been tried to use, right. As you know, to cover the racist implications of it. To say, oh no, we're just about people doing things the right way. And no, what you see with this administration, they have no problem, they have no problem talking about race. He's got no problem saying we want white people here, we don't want brown people here. They literally just said that, right. Shut down migration from brown countries, right.

[D]

All third world countries are not going to be able to come here anymore.

[C]

Right.

[D]

And those who here who don't fit in, who aren't really part of us, we're going to try and get rid of. And I think that's the whole basis for all this diminishing of the kind of guarantees of citizenship people who are not white have thought they enjoyed and suddenly finding, wait a minute, I'm not enjoying these anymore. What's going on? And so we'll see, as you'll say, we'll see what happens. I mean, I don't know when we're going to see what happens, but how long it's going to take to see what happens. We've got 14 more years of this, so it's really going to be interesting to see where this goes.

[C]

I want to talk about the role of media spectacle. So I have two more questions. One's about media spectacle and then the last one we'll talk about the impact of this rhetoric on Latinos themselves in various ways. So on the aspect of media spectacle, what strikes me is that when you publish the book, right. The prevailing media, right. That was, that was facilitating, was spreading. And I think of as I was just reviewing your book, I think like the way this media spectral work, it's like a pathogen, right. In the way that it's spreading this rhetoric, right. Was used to be cable news and kind of the whole, you know, the right wing media universe, right. We all know the names of the people, so I don't want to talk about them, but I mentioned their names and give them any more credit than what they did. But now, right. How does that media spectacle work in the age of social media? Right? Because when I talk to my students and like reference the news, right? It's. It's so obvious, like they don't watch the news. Okay. They, when I was, you know, trying to giving them some of the examples of, like I was showing them ABC News clips of, you know, people getting, you know, the, you know, tackled to the ground, pulled out of cars, right? All this stuff, they hadn't seen it yet, right? Like they hadn't seen it because they don't watch the news. And I had to explain to them what ABC News was, how this is mainstream right down the middle, like, this is not extreme left, right. They just didn't know, which was continues to shock the heck out of me. But either way, how the media spectacle, right, Even as we've transitioned from, you know, the medium or pathogen being cable news and now it's. Right. Social media. Just your thoughts, I'm interesting on your thoughts on that. How is that facilitated, maybe even, you know, increased, like facilitate this mainstream movement of the Latino threat narrative?

[D]

No, sure. I think it's this fragmentation of the sources of information is really, in a sense, worked to enhance the idea that there really is no truth. That the truth is what we're going to tell you right now. And if you, in our political and ideological bent, you're going to be watching these and I'm just going to reinforce all the things that I'm telling you over and over, and that's what you're going to believe and that's what leads to sort of the cult mentality that we're seeing right now, I think, is that a lot of people don't know where to go to look for more authoritative information. Right? Where do they go look? Where do you, you know, you know, like, if I wanted to give some information on how Latinos think, I might go look to the pure Hispanic. Some of their, some of their information they put out there all the time. But a lot of people don't know that, right? They have no idea. Or you, you can. Even in the old days, you even go to government sources to look for data on immigrants and crime and everything. But no, they're going to turn to the same ideological source of information that's not going to represent that information in any coherent way. It's going to cherry pick and pull out things it wants just to reaffirm the kind of ideas they want to pursue in the Old days, it was a lot different. I mean, like, I write about the images on covers of magazines which are, you know, basically dinosaurs today. You know, like U.S. news and World Report, Time magazine and U.S. news World Report. You know, we talk about fringe or in mainstream, they're about pretty mainstream. And yet they perpetuated much of the Latino threat invasion rhetoric for, for, for decades. In fact, in a way, I almost think they helped start it. And, and so back in the 70s and 80s, you had the headlines, I point out, invasion from Mexico. It, it just keeps growing. Well, you know, Boone, did you invent that or are you just following the orders of somebody to say that? But that's mainstream, right? And you know, and, and so now where. A lot of people in those times would have looked at Time magazine because they were, you know, people got them in their houses, you know, people bought them at stores, you know, and Time magazine was something people had. You don't, those are, those are dinosaurs now. People don't have those. And so, you know, if you turn on NBC, ABC News, NBC News, or listen to npr, you might get some information, but you might not because you're not going to turn it on. I mean, you're going to go to a source of information that reaffirms your ideology. And it's in a sense of fragmentation of information that leads to an almost impossibility of finding the sources, of finding ways of countering that information. I mean, think about how hard you have and how, how hard you have to work. Say you're like somebody who, you know, really buys into the rhetoric and turns on the right wing news all the time. And you're hearing things and I meet people, they just repeat those things over and over. How many, how many immigrants are there? Aren't there like 200 million? How many, how many, how much crime? They do all the crime, no one else does crime. But how hard, if you really wanted to counter that information, that was your sole source of information, where would you begin to look? What if suddenly one day you woke up and said, you know what, this sounds a little strange to me, maybe I should go check it out. But they don't know where to go. They don't know where to go. I mean, you know, even my students, you want them to think critically, but you have to kind of lead them by the hand to go find information and say, no. I always tell them, you don't have to believe me, just go to your Internet, look it up. They go, what?

[C]

I think that's the thing now that they don't even have to look things up because the algorithm just feeds you a constant stream of what is perceptively information that is taken for truth because it fits so much. Right. One's worldview. I mean, even this generation, like we talk a lot about this in my classes and my students, they seem to be, they're aware that algorithms, you know, work to feed you this stream of information. But what you said is still. Right. They still don't know where to look because again, as I, as I bring up the evidence, they haven't seen it. Right. So it's all new to them.

[D]

Right, Exactly. It's kind of discouraging that that's where America's at today. But, you know, what's the solution? I'm not sure. I just saw today that, that a lot. Some right wing organizations are asking the FCC to get rid of NPR's licensing. They don't even want NPR out there. It gives too much real information. They're trying, there are forces out there trying to kill anything that provides more objective kind of information out there. They're trying to destroy it.

[C]

Elon Musk is trying to kill Wikipedia.

[D]

Who doesn't pay taxes, who's an immigrant himself and lives off the taxes I pay. Somehow, you know, who is this guy? Why is he here? You know, that's another question. But he. So they're trying to destroy all sources of any valid information that people might be able to look up so that they just are just spoon fed their ignorance and become part of the clique that keeps putting people into an office, the culture. And right now I think the cult is breaking up, but there's still going to be hardcore cult members who are never going to, you know, give up the idea that Trump is telling the truth all the time, even though he lies 99% of the time. You should hear, you know, that his father still say that Obama wasn't born in the United States. I mean, it's just, it's crazy. Yeah, go look up the information. But the media spectacle, even though it's fragmented, I think is still alive because it serves a purpose. I mean, when people go to the border to stand there and rail against immigrants, they're using the media to create a spectacle. How far it gets disseminated and who sees it the way you see may not play as much on NBC News, but it might play very well on Tucker Carson. So you might see a lot of it there or some other place. But so I think it's the media spectacles are still useful. People still want them to be there. You know, Trump worked very hard to try and get a media spectacle out of the people who come to his rallies, even though they've been diminishing. And he'll even use old ones from a few years ago, right. And they'll downplay the, the, the anti Trump demonstrations to say, oh, no one showed up and try and show a picture with nobody in it, right. When it's not true. So they're trying to recreate their own ideas of what the media spectacle should be saying, but it's extremely hard because it's so fragmented and no one knows which is true, which is untrue. And then you have all the images that are created without anybody actually being in them anymore. It's just incredible. Actually, I think it's really hard for many people just to understand what's going on. And I don't know how to combat that. I mean, with our student people going to school is diminishing. Males aren't going to school as much as females. And I think. And the challenge that somehow they're always saying universities are hotbeds for liberal thought. It's just, I think it's going to be very difficult to overcome these challenges for academics to try and say, well, you know, what do you got? What else do you have on board? What other place are you going to look? Where else are you going to get educated? Where else are you going to learn to think critically without becoming part of a cult and accepting everything? And it's going to be hard for us, I think, to meet that challenge.

[C]

I think, I think when we look at how the Latino narrative, what it fits into and I guess how it's used, what motivates people or why they would accept it. You know, we are, we are living in an increasing age of extreme cynicism and nihilism, right? This, this complete loss of faith in institutions across the board. And I think a lot of what your comments are saying that, you know, people do not know where to look. And they're being fed, again, a constant media spectacle through their social media feeds and through their, their networks. That seems to again, and both can give them something to blame, but it's not showing them a way out. And I think, you know, that's where hopefully this, this will fizzle out slowly. Hopefully. You know, I mean, I'm confident in the pendulum swinging back at some point, right, that there's just, you know, with American politics, it goes one way, it goes another way. The government, things are meant to move slow. My faith is in the chaos that this is causing and that it's unsustainable and that something will cause a swing back. I want to be respectful of your time. So I did want to get back to something else as we wrap up here that this newer book, the new edition, focuses more on. And it's the impact on Latinos themselves psychologically. You mentioned that kind of effort to, or not the effort, but that you created a psychological study. And I wonder if you could talk a bit more about that. And you know, so how does this impact, what is the emotional toll on Latinos? And, and why does this matter? Right? So if you're not Latino, right, And maybe you don't, you don't have too much empathy for how words are hurting, right. Latinos, we've, we've talked, hopefully we provided plenty of more evidence that this is more than just words and rhetoric. It's truly harmful. It's impacting policies, it sparks of violence. You know, I think back to the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, right, At the Walmart that guy was quoting. Right. Replacement theory, right. Part of the Latino threat narrative. Right. So this is more than just words. But talk about again how this impacts that emotional, psychological toll and then why does that matter to the country at large?

[D]

Well, I mean, there's the toll on Latinos who are being basically the targets of this rhetoric. But if for the nation in general, I would say it's sort of like that old saying, you know, you didn't say anything when they came for me, but now they're coming for you. And I think you have to realize what I talk about for Latinos isn't just for Latinos. Well, they, and he starts talking about the, you know, the Chinese pandemic and rhetoric. I mean, how many Chinese got beat up and how many Asians got, you know, harassed. When he talks about the Somalis right now not being, being disgusting, being animals, it's the same. The psychological impact that I'm talking about is the same. And the physical impact because, you know, people like you said about the shooter are impacted, they're weak minded and this rhetoric gives them a reason to do something. Even if it's just harassing people or shooting people, it justifies their actions. But in terms of the individual, I mean, the Somalis you taught you, which you had the President of the United States calling them animals and disgusting. It's similar to what I'm talking about with the Latino threat and the implications of that rhetoric, the Latinos. So it's sort of like it's not just the Fact that negative rhetoric, as I showed in our lab, our experiment, that basically negative emotions raised the stress levels of the people we interview that we had take the tests, that lowered their sense of subjective health. When we asked them, after we showed them the rhetoric and we asked them psychological kind of indexes, people actually said they felt sick inside. It actually affected how they subjectively understood their health. It lowered their subjective sense of well being, which means they don't feel like they belong when they hear that rhetoric that somehow they're being targeted, that they're somehow not as American as other people. But then I contrasted that. We show people positive rhetoric that immigrants, Latinos, contribute to the economy, they do this, they do that. And when that happens, it was like the reverse. Their stress levels went way down, they felt healthy, their subjective health indicators went way up, their sense of well being went way up. And so my conclusion was rhetoric matters because if you talk bad about people, they feel bad about themselves. If you talk good about people, they feel part of society, they feel like they belong. And so my point was, which kind of society do you want? Do you want to have where we're calling immigrants, we're calling Mexicans rapists and murderers, we're calling Somalis disgusting and animals, we're calling Chinese people who just basically bring us pandemics every. And this is an old story with Chinese. This goes back a hundred years. That rhetoric isn't a rhetoric of inclusion or cohesiveness. They're rhetorics of exclusion, us them. And it makes for a society that's incredibly divided with people who feel that they're being targets of people in power. And I think that's where when I talk about the negative political rhetoric on the psychology of Latinos, it's much bigger than Latinos because people who have this rhetoric don't. Just Latinos or Mexicans particularly have been a convenient scapegoat for 100 and something years. They're not afraid to go out and attack other people. And so they should be reading the Latino threat narrative when I'm writing about to understand why they feel so bad or what are they going to do with this target. Originally, when I did this study, I wanted to do it with larger numbers of people in different groups. But you know, you don't get the money to do, do all that. And I was really more important at this point for the Latino threat narrative. But you know, the idea I really wanted to do a study that would include people like Somalis, like Chinese, like African Americans, I mean, because they get their own rhetoric that's targeting them as well. And so I would assume that basically a lot of similar kind of negative responses would be there for them as well. So I would say that it's like, you know, it was okay when they came for them, but now they're coming for me. Shoot. I better read about what's happening with the Latino threat because I think it's important for a lot of people in America to understand that. And it's harsh. It's harsh to be the target of rhetoric coming from people who are in power. And it seems extremely unfair to people and extremely. Why me? What have I done? I've done nothing but work hard on my life. Sure, there are bad people. There are bad people in every group, but that doesn't mean that they're all bad. Just like now all Somalis are bad, all Mexicans are bad. It doesn't make a lot of sense. But for the individual who's the target of that rhetoric, it hurts and it makes them feel extremely vulnerable and ask themselves, what should I do? Should I leave? Should I go someplace else? But I don't know anyplace else. You know, what would I do if I left some left here? This is my country, right? And I think what the prospect of mass deportation and as he says, even if you're a citizen, you're not safe. Well, what does that tell you? I mean, that's pretty scary stuff. That's not just being a target of negative rhetoric. It's being the subject of practices that could basically change your life forever. There's probably nothing scarier than that in the world. Think about the Indians who were kicked out of Uganda back in the 70s, right? And Mandami's mother wrote. I mean, she made a great film, you know, on this Mississippi Masala, one of the great. One of my favorite films of all time. And it's about people like her who were kicked out of Uganda, her family, and they came to the United States, and she made this great movie about it. And it's incredible. I can see where he gets his heritage from. And his father's an academic, an anthropologist. And so I think it's not just Latinos who are the subject of this anti immigrant and anti Latino rhetoric. It's other people. And they should really be aware of what I'm talking about because it's going to affect a lot of people until things change. I mean, not about you, but I feel sorry when I hear the rhetoric about the Somalis. I feel bad when I hear other people, the Haitians. I mean, you could Just go on. The so called shithole countries, all these people coming from, what kind of. What is that about? And so we all know what he thinks about Latin America. He wants to make Latin America now his playground. It's going to be very harsh. We'll see what happens. So anyway, that's why I look at the political. The. I figured it wasn't enough just to look at how people talked about people. I really wanted to see what the psychological impact of that rhetoric was. And I think it came out really interesting. It came out really met my expectations for what I find, I guess which is just good. It really affected people both positively and negatively. And so it just made me say, what kind of country do we want?

[C]

True, true. No, it's powerful. And I think that's a great question too. An idea to end on here. What type of country do we want? And seeing that we're all in this, we're all in this boat. And I've thought so much about that, you know, right. If it doesn't bother you what he says about someone else or what's being said about someone else.

[D]

Right.

[C]

You just wait because it's, it's coming, it's coming. It's anyone that opposes. And that's what we see historically. Right. This is what this ties into. Well, Leo, again, just thank you again for your time and to our audience. I just, I can't recommend this book again enough. Again, I've just been. I was thrilled to see the, the Release of the 3rd edition. My opportunity to both discuss it with you here on new books and Latino studies. We're reading it in my Latino history class that starts. Is going to be starting in January, so I'm glad to, to be able to use it again. So thanks so much for your time and thanks for your scholarship and for what you've shared with us today.

[D]

Yeah, thank you very much. Great interview. I really enjoyed it. Good luck.