I grew up hearing a wide range of political beliefs in my mostly Hispanic and Latino community in Calexico, California. It was perfectly normal to go from one class where a teacher was showing examples of former President Donald Trump violating the U.S. Constitution to crossing the hall and seeing another teacher with posters calling Bernie Sanders a communist. My community showed me how identity plays a central role in political beliefs — why many Catholics were strongly anti-choice or why the men in my community never seemed to care about women’s rights or sexism. Such notions went against the way they were raised. It came down to a form of self-preservation. You wouldn’t vote for something that conflicted with who you are. 

That’s why seeing Latino and Hispanic voters flock to support Trump in the 2024 presidential election felt like a personal hit and brought a moment of disillusionment.

In 2019, Trump visited my hometown in Calexico to assess the border and argue that border security was a national emergency. When my ninth grade class got wind that Trump’s car was going to pass by our school on his commute to the Mexican border, even the most aloof and politically uninvolved students talked about walking out of class to boo or scream at the president’s motorcade, shouting that he was not welcome in our town. At the time, we were around 14 or 15 years old and probably more occupied with quinceañeras and our extracurriculars than politics. We lacked a full understanding of inflation, and political discussions were confined to the walls of our history classes. But that didn’t matter because we understood one key fact: Trump was not on our side. Trump stood for deportations and hatred toward immigrants. And knowing that, simply and inherently, meant we could not support him.

But now, the people who once disavowed Trump in class and leapt from their seats to scream at his car when he passed by are the ones I see supporting him on Instagram.

In this election, around 46 percent of Hispanic voters voted for Trump, a 13 percent increase from 2020 and a historic high for a Republican presidential nominee. In my community, where more than 95 percent of residents identify as Hispanic, 45 percent voted for Trump. And one in 13 residents in Imperial County — in which 14,000 of almost 180,000 residents are undocumented. Almost 60 percent of the county’s undocumented population has lived in the county for at least a decade, but almost half of voters in my community and half of Hispanic voters in the country voted for Trump.

The president-elect has promised to execute a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in the United States, possibly affecting 11 million people. And Trump in the past has tried to get rid of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which gives temporary protection to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children so they won’t be deported and can receive work permits or social security numbers, allowing them to build a life for themselves. 

I have grown accustomed to the fact that I can’t make people believe what I believe if it doesn’t immediately affect them, specifically in my community. I have given up trying to make the men in my family care or understand women’s rights, sexism and misogyny or basically any other rights that don’t concern their specific demographic. I almost resent how much I get it. My cousin being indifferent to women’s rights? Yup, I get it. Not caring about the Supreme Court ruling on homelessness? Makes sense. Or still wanting to vote for Trump despite the fact he threatens the possibility of me completing my education because of how it would affect my financial aid? I can even understand that because I’m the only one in my family currently going to a four-year university and the only one to be impacted the most.

But when my cousin praises Trump’s economy and says he’s going to vote for him with a grandpa who was undocumented and crossed the border illegally with his whole family — I can’t understand that. When the only reason that our grandpa was able to stay in the United States was because someone decided to help him out and offer him a job, eventually receiving his citizenship and allowing us to build a life here — no, I don’t understand that. 

When others express they want to vote for Trump because they liked the way things were in his previous administration, despite living in the United States for less than a decade and having the privilege to move from Mexico to their California border town and obtain residency — something that will become harder to obtain under Trump’s presidency — I can’t get it. 

Or when those in my community who so strongly believe in making “America Great Again” or my old classmates who relish and celebrate his victory on social media as if their neighbors, workers or classmates aren’t one of those one in 13 undocumented people and possibly part of the 11 million people Trump could deport, I can’t get it. 

But no, self-preservation seems to have come first by a mile. Who cares about the rest of the Latino and Hispanic community when you have residency or citizenship? 

No, let’s ignore the fact that it is possible that most Hispanics and Latinos probably have ancestors who were undocumented as many immigrants between the 1960s and 1980s entered the United States illegally. Let’s pretend our grandparents or great-grandparents were not undocumented. Let’s pretend we didn’t vote against our heritage, against ourselves. 

I once wrote that when Trump says something degrading about undocumented immigrants, I think of him saying it about all immigrants. Now, months later, when I see that almost half of Hispanics and Latinos have voted for Trump, I don’t believe they only voted against undocumented immigrants. They voted against our entire community and our entire people. They haven’t only voted against their neighbors, co-workers, friends or classmates. No, they voted against their own family, their great-grandparents who left behind their families, communities and country in Mexico for the “American Dream” for future generations. They voted against their ancestors who came to America so that they could go up to that booth and fill in the circle next to Trump to stop others from having a future.