How the GOP Built a Loyal Hispanic Base: For decades, Republicans used appointments and policies to win a reliable third of the Latino vote.

• Author: Munoz, Cecilia

The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump

by Geraldo Cadava

Ecco, 448 pp.

What's the deal with Hispanic Republicans, anyway? For anyone following Hispanic politics, it's a perplexing question. The GOP is associated with the rollback of policies that are intended to benefit minorities and communities at the economic margins--the very policies that made the vast majority of Latinos Democrats. The current standard-bearer of the party launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, and is regularly, famously, deeply insulting. And yet roughly 30 percent of Hispanics voted for him. Indeed, Republican candidates for the presidency have generally been able to count on 25 to 35 percent of the Latino vote for most of the past century. How could the party build a base of support stable enough to withstand what seems like constant attack?

It's a question that Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern University who specializes in politics, policy, and American Latinos, gets from his students and attempts to answer in his most recent book, The Hispanic Republican. As he explains, there are many reasons why some Latinos have embraced the GOP. Among Cuban Americans, Republican support has deep roots in Cold War anticommunism. Some Mexican Americans in the Southwest identify strongly with Spanish roots going back centuries, and, as Cadava writes, for complex reasons, identification with Spain became one of the hallmarks of Hispanic Republican identity. Some Puerto Ricans, for their part, connected to the party in the years during which Republicans flirted with the possibility of statehood for the island. And many Hispanics, like other Americans, simply embraced the GOP for its generalized commitments to free enterprise and liberty.

But Cadava makes the point that Hispanic loyalty to the party can't be understood through the simple lens of conservatism, and the book is a deep dive into the specific history that created a relatively stable and resilient base of Hispanics among the Republican ranks. Cadava introduces us to individual leaders who fostered ties between the Republican Party and their communities and details the outreach efforts that Republicans ultimately adopted in order to keep--and hopefully grow--a Latino base. What results is a chronicle of the ways in which a segment of the community, inclined toward Republicanism for historical reasons, worked with the party...