IIRC, as far back as the 1980s, studies showed that African Americans sympathized with Hispanics as fellow persecuted “persons of color”.
However, this was not reciprocated.
Hispanics perceived themselves as classic upwardly mobile American immigrants.
Here, the distinction between real and relative inequality is germane.
Relative inequality involves people comparing themselves to their socioeconomic superiors or inferiors.
If people compare themselves to Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, they might feel frustrated or inadequate.
In fact, even if one’s socioeconomic conditions have improved over time, if the wealth of the super-rich has become stratospheric, a feeling of discontent seeps into one’s life.
Real inequality involves actually becoming poorer.
This seems to have been happening in the UK for quite a while.
In contrast, salaries and wages of the middle class in the USA have stagnated for decades, but not fallen.
Moreover, new technology improves quality of life, and the cost of technology keeps falling.
However, since 2020, it seems that much of the population is falling behind in real terms.
Many Americans are now getting poorer.
A consciousness of real inequality often involves contrasting one’s own condition with one’s own ancestors.
Immigrants from poor countries might live in tough working-class neighborhoods.
However, their life is still better than the tough neighborhoods that their parents and grandparents lived in.
Such immigrants and their descendants are very conscious of this, especially if they live in multi-generational households.
Life might be tough in New York City, but grandma will quickly remind you how tough it was in Guatemala.
The Republican Party seems very cognizant of the potential for Hispanics to become upwardly mobile conservatives.
The mantra in the Bush dynasty has long been that Hispanics are the future of the Republican Party.
There might be glimmers of this in the early life and career of Jeb Bush.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeb_Bush
At the age of 17, Bush taught English as a second language and assisted in the building of a school in Ibarrilla, a small village outside of León, Guanajuato, Mexico,[7] as part of Andover’s student exchange summer program.[8] While in Mexico, he met his future wife, Columba Garnica Gallo.
Though many in his family had attended Yale University, Bush chose to attend the University of Texas at Austin, beginning in September 1971.[1] He played on the Texas Longhorns varsity tennis team in 1973.[1] Bush graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Latin American studies.[1][12] He completed his coursework in two and a half years.
In 1974, Bush went to work in an entry-level position in the international division of Texas Commerce Bank, which was founded by the family of James Baker.[14] In November 1977, he was sent to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, to open a new operation for the bank, where he served as branch manager and vice president.
Following the 1980 presidential election, Bush and his family moved to Miami-Dade County, Florida. He took a job in real estate with Armando Codina, a 32-year-old Cuban immigrant and self-made millionaire. Codina had made a fortune in a computer business, and then formed a new company, The Codina Group, to pursue opportunities in real estate.[16] During his time with the company, Bush focused on finding tenants for commercial developments.[17] Codina eventually made Bush his partner in a new development business, which quickly became one of South Florida’s leading real estate development firms. As a partner, Bush received 40% of the firm’s profits.[18] In 1983, Bush said of his move from Houston to Miami: “On the personal side, my mother-in-law and sister-in-law were already living here.” On the professional side, “I want to be very wealthy, and I’ll be glad to tell you when I’ve accomplished that goal.”
The Bush dynasty are sometimes seen as the final remnants of the American leadership under elite New England WASPs — “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants”.
There is a theory that WASPs maintained a position of benign leadership throughout American history.
According to this theory, the WASPs nobly dismantled their political and economic control in the postwar era.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-not-to-mourn-the-aristocracy
Amidst all the current talk about high tech “monopolies”, it is strange not to see through the good qualities of the old WASP elite.
When elites are civically minded and have a sense of duty, it is largely because they own the society.
In that case, public service is akin to good housekeeping.
It’s like taking good care of your home and car.
If an elite exhibits modesty, humility and self-restraint, that is because it is the etiquette of insiders who frown on the rough manners of their inferiors.
It’s a form of gatekeeping.
Rich outsiders like the Kennedys might find their way in, but — as in the class-riven UK — the system is designed to accommodate new talent that might pose a threat.
The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite of New England is quite distinct from ordinary white Protestants.
However, more than others, ordinary Protestants had a way of moving up in the ranks into the elite.
So there has long been a perceived blurring of the borders between the WASPs and regular white Protestants.
(Siskel and Ebert give the WASPs and Protestants two thumbs down)
The ordinary white American Protestant might take exception to this equation of themselves with the privilege of the WASP.
The history of the Bush family suggests that reports of the death of the WASP leadership are greatly exaggerated.
What one finds instead is the disguising and rejuvenation of the old elite.
Reputation laundering happens everywhere, but in the USA this process is counter-intuitive.
In India, individuals cannot move up in the caste system, they are assigned to their caste for life.
However, IIRC, an entire caste can have itself reclassified so that it has higher status.
In France under the old monarchy, individuals could buy an aristocratic title and thus move themselves up a notch in the caste system.
In the UK since the Industrial Revolution, the rising business classes have disguised themselves as aristocrats.
They did this by sending their sons to elite boarding schools and by marrying their daughters to aristocrats.
In the USA, the aristocracy takes an inverse trajectory in order to maintain power.
They disguise themselves as ordinary folks.
They move to Texas and take on the aura of self-made oil men, or they move to Florida and implant themselves in the world of self-made Latino real estate moguls.
But in rightly identifying Hispanics as the future of the Republican Party, the Bushes did make one error.
They did not perceive that the Republican Party would become populist rather than remain conservative.
In particular, the Republicans did not see that Hispanics in particular would be drawn to “conservative populism” rather than conservatism.
For example, Marco Rubio has been described as “pathetic” in his pandering toward Trump, who Rubio seems otherwise to despise.
But Rubio has no choice.
His voter base loves populism.
For example, the Proud Boys are held up as paradigmatic neo-fascist, all-male, white supremacist political organization.
Yet since early 2019, Enrique Tarrio, who identifies as Afro-Cuban, has been the chairman of the Proud Boys.
Tarrio is also the Florida state director of the grassroots organization Latinos for Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Boys
In 2016, Latin American commentators pointed out the pervasiveness of nationalist populist authoritarianism in their region.
They stated that it was appalling how authoritarian populism seemed to be openly growing in the USA.
However, it could be that nationalist populist authoritarianism is openly establishing itself in the USA in part because of immigration from Latin America.
They bring the contagion along with themselves.
And so it turns out that the Democrats are not the only party out of touch with the American voter.
Throughout the world since 2016, politicians discovered that there is a mysterious tidal wave of populism sweeping the Earth.
They can surf it, or just get out of the water.
This phenomenon may never come to be properly understood, even as it plays itself out over years, or even over generations.
