I’ve spent two decades as a newspaper reporter and have long dreamed of writing a book, but had never settled on a topic that I was willing to commit the time and energy that a book project would require. After the 2020 presidential election, there was a collective shock in much of mainstream media and politics about Latinos, primarily over the movement toward Trump and the Republican Party. After feeling frustrated for years that Latinos are largely ignored, in some ways it was validating to see Latinos voters in the spotlight. But there was so much history and context being glossed over and misunderstood. So I decided to use that frustration to fuel my work even further. We tend to think of race in this country solely through the Black-White paradigm. And yet, Latinos have long been racialized here and now make up nearly 20 percent of the country and are increasingly important in political battlegrounds. I am eager to explore the many implications in that reality.

The biggest change has not been the beliefs and actions of voters themselves, but the way in which they’ve received so much attention from both parties, along with the media. There’s a pernicious and well worn stereotype that Latino voters are a “sleeping giant”—but they haven’t been sleeping, they were simply being taken for granted. Latinos are a very young population, so the number of Latino voters is constantly growing. Part of what we’re seeing now is that Latinos want to be spoken to in a positive way—I’ve talked to so many Latino voters who say something along the lines of: Republicans seem to hate people like me, but I don’t see how Democrats have made my life any better. The conventional wisdom was Trump would repel Latino voters, but what we see is that was not enough.

I was a young teenager when California voters passed Proposition 187, an anti-immigrant ballot measure. My high school was overwhelmingly Latino and many of my classmates lived with silent fear that they or their families could be deported at any moment—this was long before anyone was calling themselves “undocumented and unafraid.” It made me deeply aware that politics is not some kind of abstract thing that happens in a far away capitol and rhetoric has real world consequences. My goal as a reporter has always been to show how politics and policy impacts people’s everyday lives. I am less interested in the palace intrigue of politics and more concerned about how who we elect changes—or doesn’t—the trajectory of our country.