I know the handful of you who follow my posts are wondering what I think about the recent midterm elections in the US. I’ve been traveling since last week and am finally in a place where I can share my thoughts. My readers know that I spend most of my time analyzing the forces of populism on the right and left in American politics and the role of understandings of race at both populist poles. Another research interest of mine is ‘minorities in the middle’ of the racial landscape. In this piece I wish to explore this issue regarding a minority in the middle in American politics: Latinos.
Middleman Minorities [1]
The classical literature on minorities in the middle, or ‘middleman minorities’ discussed the way that immigrants arrived in certain societies and found a niche in the economy providing goods and services for the lower classes of people that the upper classes had no interest in servicing. Scholars described the way those immigrants filled the ‘economic status gap.’ Jews immigrating into Europe in medieval times began to fill such a role. They also served the same socioeconomic function in urban African American communities across the 20th century. The literature referred to them as ‘ethnic entrepreneurs.’ [2]
Middlemen came to be disparaged buy the ruling elites who were alarmed by their rising socioeconomic fortunes. They were also resented by the poor that they served, because they were seen to be stepping over those indigenous to the society. Thus, they tended to stay out of politics, keeping their heads down to avoid the crossfire.
My research has revealed the presence of another dimension of middleness: the political status gap. This refers to the way that actors at the opposite poles of the racial and ideological continuum seek alliance with middleman minorities to build a hegemonic coalition and govern. [3]
Those minorities in the middle occupy the political status gap. In American politics most White people are on the right ideologically, because they are White assimilationist, i.e., they believe that the way America has always operated regarding matters of race is the way things ought to be. African Americans, though they are now outnumbered by Latinos occupy the left pole, because they are more unified in their belief in multiracialism.
Historically, Indigenous, Latino and Asian Americans have been in the political status gap in US politics. This I will argue continues to be true for Latinos even though they now outnumber Black people. As I will attempt to show here, this is because the impetus driving the multiracialist project is anchored primarily in Black politics.
The Racial Middle in the 2026 Midterm Elections
The recent mid-term congressional elections in the US have once again featured a wild swing in the outcomes between Democrats and Republicans from the 2024 elections. Central to the success of Democrats this time and that of the Republicans in 2024 has been the posture of the middleman minorities: Latinos, Asians and the Indigenous. Here I want to focus on Latinos.
In an earlier article I have argued that because Latinos now outnumbered Blacks and had demonstrated their political clout during the 2006 immigrant rights protests nationwide. I said they perhaps were at the left pole in American racial politics, and that Black folks were now middlemen. However, I went on to point out that the longstanding political clout of Black people re-emergent with the Black Lives Matter Movement, especially after 2014, showed that they still had some purchase on the definition of the racial political landscape from the left. I said that ‘African Americans (were) alongside Latinos in a complex multipolar political terrain.’ [4]
The unrelenting attack on brown immigrants unleashed by Trumpism after 2015 have kept Latinos mobilized. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 did the same in Black politics. What we could have been witnessing by 2020 was a situation in which both Blacks and Latinos sought to fill their political status gaps by seeking alliances outside the race. That conceivably could have been with one another with a minority of Whites (and the Indigenous and Asians) included to create a majoritarian hegemonic project. [5]
But Latinos have a problem, and American political pundits seeking to frame politics share it with them. Latinos are not a homogeneous group. They are descendant from virtually every country of Latin America. They are of every race that we use to categorize people, and they are from every socioeconomic class.
Class is an important factor here. Most Latinos continue to be working class people who work in the fields, meatpacking, healthcare and other service industries. Most of them who are citizens reliably vote Democratic and can be part of a multiracial hegemonic alliance. But in places like Florida, Texas and California many affluent people from South American countries like Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil and Chile fled north to escape the leftward trend in politics there at the beginning of this century.
These folks tend to be better off, and where they came from they were ‘White.’ Many of them experience cognitive dissonance upon arrival in the US by being categorized as ‘other’ than the prototypical American they had in their heads when they got here. Paola Ramos has written an important book, Defectors, which portrays the desire for belonging to the America they heard about.[6] Once naturalized most of these folks completely buy into the White assimilationist project and vote Republican.
This is not the place to parse through immigration numbers from every country in Latin America, and their class and racial identities. But a major reason that Latino voting behavior differs 20-30% points from that of Blacks has to do with this racial, class and national diversity within that population. Black Americans have class and some national diversity given the presence of Black immigrants. But the persistent alienating impact of Black skin as a marker for exclusion makes Black people (even immigrants) more likely to see that they share a ‘linked fate’ with their racial brethren. [7]
Black people know that Donald Trump is a fascist. That’s why even though some low-information Black men responded positively to Trump’s sexism and voted for him in 2024, 86% of Blacks voted for Harris; and early returns from this year have Blacks voting 90% for Democrats countrywide. Conversely, Latinos went 56% for Harris in 2024 but voted 67% for Democrats this year.
Historically, when Democrats get over 60% of the Latino vote then usually win nationally. But coming as they do from such divergent backgrounds Latinos makes the consolidation of a unifed Latino voice and hegemonic project hard to manufacture.
Ramos describes the kind Latinos that deplore those who arrived without documents even if they are central to our economy today. Many of them voted for Trump thinking that only ‘rapists and criminals,’ and ‘illegals’ would be rounded up by ICE, not them or anyone they cared about. Will the horrors of Trump 2.0 wed these ‘White assimilationist’ Latinos to the project of multiracialism permanently? Or will their deeply seated desire to merge with ‘White’ America continue to make them available to the proper enticements from the other side?
The massive Black turnout everywhere, but especially the South, has once again affirmed and solidified Black leadership as the fulcrum of the Democratic Party, both the establishment and populist factions within it and the multiracial democratic hegemonic project. Black leadership is busy trying to fill its political status gap with those Latinos who flail back and forth but have once again landed on the ‘left-hand side.’
Though based in a certain way on the unflagging Black presence, there are heavyweight Latinos already committed to the multiracial project. We can start with the indomitable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. OC. Add Greg Casar of Texas who chairs the Progressive Caucus in the House and Jesus ‘Chuy’ Garcia of Illinois who is the ‘Whip’ for the caucus to name a few.
Could it be that in this complex multiracial terrain a Black-Brown led hegemonic thrusts can compel most Latinos to move to the left and away from the illusory hopes of acceptance from a fascist right who will never embrace them in their humanity.
References
[1]
When I presented the first draft
of my article on this subject at an
academic conference years ago a woman in the audience criticized me for using
the exit term ‘middleman’ to describe the population I was studying. She was right. But I thought it wiser to use
the term already established in the research literature to place my work in a
professional journal.. If I ever write a book on the subject I will change the
term, perhaps to something like ‘interjacent ethnics.’
[2]
Bonacich, E. (1973). A theory of middleman minorities. American Sociological
Review, 38, 583–594. Cohen, N. (1970). The Los Angeles riots: A sociological
study. New York: Praeger Publishers.
[3] Vernon D. Johnson, ‘Coloured South Africans: a middleman minority of another kind.’ Social Identities, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2016.1175930
[4] Vernon D. Johnson, ‘Coloured South
Africans and African Americans: Cultural similarities versus Political
Differences in Post-Settler Colonial Societies. In Alex Amtaika, editor. Culture,
Democracy and Development in Africa. Austin, Texas: Pan African University
Press, 2017, 363-82.
[5] Recalling that Antonio Gramsci defined hegemony is intellectual
and moral leadership in civil society.
[6]Paola
Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for
America. New York: Pantheon Books, 2024.
[7]
Michael Dawson introduced this term in his book Behind the Mule : Race
and Class in African-American Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press.
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