Sorted by Belief and Belonging: Latino Republicans in a Polarized Era

In recent elections, Latino alignment with the Republican Party has not only persisted but intensified—even as the party has embraced increasingly right-wing policies and candidates. Based on the assumption that Latino partisanship is weak and unstable, scholars and commentators attribute this shift to weakened racial identity, diminished ties to the immigrant experience, or baseline conservatism. While insightful, these accounts fall short of explaining why this alignment has intensified within the last decade.

This book draws on over 80 in-depth interviews with Latino Republicans across five majority-Latino counties in South Texas—Hidalgo, Willacy, Cameron, Zapata, and Starr—regions long considered Democratic strongholds but which have experienced a marked and sustained shift toward the Republican Party in recent electoral cycles. These counties, shaped by immigration patterns and restrictive immigration policies, offer a critical lens into the broader dynamics of Latino alignment with the Republican Party. The data show that as the Republican Party increasingly mobilizes around culture war issues (e.g., immigration, abortion, LGBTQ+ rights), many Latino Republicans perceive a stronger alignment between their socially conservative values and the party’s contemporary agenda. This research brings much-needed attention to how system-level trends may be structuring Latino political behavior in an era marked by political polarization. 

By centering the voices of Latino Republicans, this project challenges dominant narratives and advances a new framework for understanding Latino politics—not as an outlier to standard theories of partisanship and identity, but as central to contemporary processes of polarization, cultural conflict, and party realignment in the United States.