But later, as I reported on the consequences of Mr. Trump’s border shutdown in 2020, my father embraced Trumpism. When we spoke on the phone, he sought to enlighten me: I was the “fake news.” He knew that I’d just finished writing an investigative biography of Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser at the time, and that I’d been reporting on Mr. Trump’s immigration policies for years. But he never asked me questions about any of it, and whenever I tried to share anything, he would interrupt me to say that I was brainwashed. I’d grown up listening to him tell my mother, an M.D., that modern medicine was nonsense, using a dismissive expletive. When I began to set boundaries, telling him that I loved him but that I wasn’t interested in lectures about my line of work, he seemed to lose interest in speaking with me.
This Christmas Eve, or Nochebuena, I ate dinner at my Mexican grandmother’s house, as I do every year. One of my cousins strode in wearing a MAGA cap. He fist-bumped my father and they stood outside, speaking with an air of secrecy and superiority. It occurred to me, for not the first time, that if I hadn’t pursued my father all these years, offering empathy and curiosity to his often unbelievable stories, we’d be estranged. Our relationship had always been one-sided. My role was to listen and learn; if ever I offered a thought, he became angry or dismissive. Since the moment I’d asked him to respect me, to hear me, our relationship had deteriorated.
During the Biden administration, I wrote repeatedly about the importance of seeking connection across political differences, of not giving up on our red-pilled relatives. But now I felt deflated. Was it really my responsibility to bridge the gap with my father as we rushed headlong into the administration of a man who has threatened journalists with jail time? Some of Mr. Trump’s most powerful allies have publicly ridiculed me and threatened legal action against me. Was it really I who had forsaken my MAGA relatives or they who had forsaken me?
I left my grandmother’s Nochebuena celebration early. My head was spinning. I found myself replaying one of the few memories I had of my father showing up for me: When my car had broken down at night in Tijuana as I was reporting, I called him for help, and he came, drunk-driving on his motorcycle, to fix my engine. Deep down, my father loved me — right?
I wanted so badly to find the words to unite us, and by extension, all U.S. Latinos. But our unity had always been a fiction. In our desperation to be seen and heard, many of us had embraced a palatable theater of Latinidad. One that ignored our contradictions. One that pretended to be translatable. Even now, leading voices in our community are trying to fit Latinos into a box, such as by explaining our rightward shift by repeating tropes about our family values.
