John Leguizamo: Latino Republicans Suffer From ‘Self-Hate’

 

Actor John Leguizamo is having a tough time processing the news that President Trump performed well with Latinos in the past election. According to him, such Latinos suffer from self-hatred.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Leguizamo explained why President Trump got such a high percentage of Latinos, arguing that some suffer from a sense of self-hatred due to past racism.

“There is that unfortunate self-hate through all my culture, through all South America, Central America and the Caribbean from the Conquest,” said the actor. “And that’s hard to fight. When that beautiful woman from ‘Roma’ [Yalitza Aparicio] was put on the cover of Latin Vogue, people wrote horrible letters. ‘How dare you put such an ugly face on magazines?’ That’s the insidious self-hate. Because like the majority of us are mixed race — Black and Indian and white. And the majority in our countries who run everything are white European. This doesn’t really go away that easily.”

Leguizamo specifically referred to Texas, where President Trump was able to shore up votes in southern border towns.

“Texas is a trippy place. El Paso, Austin, San Antonio — very liberal, very Democratic. But you’re going to have your people who grew up there under hundreds of years of serious oppression: Jim Crow laws against Mexicans; “No dogs or Mexicans allowed” signs; lynchings of Latin people,” he said. “Six thousand Latin people from the 1800s to early 1900s were lynched, shot and burned alive. So there is this continued fear of being other. You can’t discount that, because when I go to Texas and Arizona, a lot of Latin people say to me, ‘Oh, I’m not Mexican. I’m not Latin. My family comes from Spain.'”

Despite his disdain for President Trump and Republicans overall, Leguizamo did criticize Democrats for failing to “court” Latinos in the way that President Trump did.

“I know Biden had a lot of Latin people in his campaign, but he needed to talk about our issues and about us and mention us. And court us. You’ve got to court us,” he said. “Trump did court us and did go down there and microtarget Latino people in really clever and devious ways. They do it via WhatsApp in Arizona and in Florida — targeting Latino people and telling them things that would scare them. They even attacked radio stations, Spanish radio stations in Florida, to scare Colombians.”

“They would say to Colombians on call-in radio in Miami — because there are about 400,000 registered Colombians to vote and another million Cubans registered — they said, ‘Do you want Colombia to turn into Venezuela with this president? You will. And you know he’s a pedophile,'” he continued. “They did the pedophile thing. And then they said, “Don’t vote by mail because your vote will be lost and won’t be counted.’ So they would put all these ads on, and not one of these radio stations contested it.”

Shortly after Florida’s victory was declared for President Trump, Leguizamo declared on Twitter that the state was “dead to me.” Prior to the vote, he even likened Latino Republicans to “roaches for Raid.”