A road trip to the American Southwest to understand the political soul of Latin Americans

good morning. I’m Gustavo Arellano, a metro columnist for the Times. This means that you are allowed to express your opinion. Like:

It’s cool in the American Southwest.

Before we get into it, here’s what you need to know to start your day.

Guide to the Southwest: A Road Trip Through Latin America

Turquoise and silver. Tucson and Colorado. mountains and deserts. And chili, so much chili.

The Southwest has many iconic features, but I wasn’t looking for any of them when I set out on the road this August.

I was focused on Latinos.

Simple enough, right? Latin Americans have lived in the Southwest for more than 425 years. Even though we are a plurality of the population, we are still viewed with suspicion by too many. But there was a reason I was looking for them. This year’s reason is the 2024 presidential election.

So over seven days, across seven states and nearly 3,000 miles, I discovered story after story of Latinos I knew. They were resilient, independent, and less concerned with competing for the White House and more focused on solving what was in front of them.

Headquarters of Sociedad Protección Mutua de Trabajadores Unidos in Antonito, Colorado. The group is the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organization.

(Gustavo Arellano/Los Angeles Times)

I went to the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego to see the Biden administration completing the 30-foot border wall started by the Trump administration. I visited a copper producing region in Arizona. For years, the area brought Mexican Americans to Southern California and later influenced politics in Los Angeles. In El Paso, I saw two memorials commemorating the victims of the 2019 Walmart massacre, the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern U.S. history.

He drove all over New Mexico and talked to farmers. Head to Antonito, Colorado, home of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organization. I checked with the brewer. We interacted with alumni from the high school youth conference. We didn’t eat the historic tacos, but we did stop to smell the roadside sunflowers.

Lo and behold, I even made a listicle. And videos too!

Curious why Latino voters aren’t politically monolithic? It’s all about Rancho Libertarianism

Here in California, we learn how Prop. 187, the xenophobic policy that voters overwhelmingly passed 30 years ago, drove a generation of Latinos to support the Democratic Party and, as a result, brought us to Lake Tahoe. For a long time, we have been telling the story of how it became bluer than water. But as I wrote earlier this year, Latino voters are tired of Democrats using the specter of Republican anti-immigrant policies to intimidate them into sticking to those policies.

This partly explains some of the gains Trump has made among Latino voters since 2020. But my trip also strengthened my belief in Rancho Libertarianism. The term was coined in 2018 to describe Mexican American voters who are neither fully liberal nor conservative, but who embrace individualism while still embracing it. We work to make our community better.

Some of the people I spoke to were disgusted with Mr. Trump but had little enthusiasm for Ms. Harris.

Voltaire has ties to Latinos in 24 elections.

The Latinos I spoke to were not stuck in the spiral of destruction that many Americans are. They were too busy fighting and defending their lives and communities, especially against distant bureaucrats who only cared about themselves during elections. The approach to America at this point reminded me of the idea underlying the finale of Voltaire’s classic satire Candide. It means that humans need to cherish what is right in front of them instead of getting too attached to other things in the world.

“Instead of fitting everything into a national narrative, we want people to hear local voices and apply it to local situations,” Michael Montaño told me. Mr. Montaño runs the legendary Mitra Café in San Bernardino with his cousin.

If only more people thought like him. Anyway, read the whole series here and don’t forget to till your garden – my garden needs watering. What about yours?

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When Los Angeles hosts the Olympics in 2028, neighboring Long Beach will also play a supporting role. The city plans to host eight Olympic Games and will spend $933 million on infrastructure ahead of the Games. Just over $210 million of this will be spent on Olympic-focused projects,” wrote the Times’ Thomas Kerwin. “But even with such efforts, some warn that the Olympics could distract from solving urban problems.”

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(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)

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A crowd watches as a trucker transports parts of the Space Shuttle Inspiration, a full-scale model of the space shuttle, along Bellflower Boulevard in Downey on Thursday. The city’s space shuttle prototype is headed to temporary housing until its new home at the expanded Columbia Memorial Space Center in Downey is completed, scheduled for early 2026.

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