Letters to the Editor: A ‘wokoso’ on the reasons more Latinos voted for Donald Trump

Supporters of Donald Trump wait for him to speak in Tucson on Sept. 12. To the editor: Gustavo Arellano has an interesting viewpoint on the evolving politics of some Latino voters who favored President-elect Donald Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris. I guess that I fit into his category of the “wokoso.” My mindset was created by the challenges of the Great Depression, the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, World War II, the labor movement and the racial attitudes behind signs saying, “No dogs or Mexicans allowed.” Added to this was the activism of the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the murder of our idols John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Fast-forward to the post-baby boomer generations, and we have voters of Latino heritage influenced by the Reagan revolution, with its benign amnesty of the undocumented, recompense for incarcerated Japanese Americans and its underhanded dealing that brought about the Iran-Contra scandal. Arellano says Chavez spoke of a “California ‘dominated’ by the descendants of farmworkers, who would change things for the better and never forget where they came from, generations later.” Regardless of why, voting in greater numbers for Trump and his vulgar, white-supremacist screeds seems to define forgetting where you came from. Also, midway through the column, Arellano states that “2024 is the year that Latinos finally became Americans.” Yet in the rest of the column he never references them as Americans, rather always as Latinos.