Latino Americans: No Longer a Minority

To begin with, it is no longer a group that promises to grow rapidly, but one that by 2022 was estimated at 63.6 million people

Interpretations and analyses aside, 2024 can be seen as the moment when the U.S. Latino minority began to make its influence felt.

The impact is not only social, with numbers that already exceed 15% of the U.S. population and a power that easily exceeds 10% of the U.S. economy, but also cultural, and in a political framework that has been magnified because it was evident in both parties. That the political strength of Latinos is still below what it could be and that it is a fractured group of people is true, but it is also a fact that they marked their presence among Democrats and Republicans.

To begin with, it is no longer a group that promises to grow rapidly, but one that by 2022 was estimated at 63.6 million people, with 37.5 million of voting age, and is in full expansion, so much so that in 20 years they are expected to make up almost a third of Americans, surpassed only by what will be by then the largest minority in the country, white Anglo-Saxons.

An estimated 17.5 million Latinos voted in 2024, of which just over 40% voted for Republican Donald Trump, or about 5 million Hispanics.

Considering that Trump obtained 77 million votes in total, it would be possible to say in absolute terms that the increase in the vote from 74 million in 2020 was due to Latinos, especially of Cuban, Venezuelan and Central American origin. By any analysis, those 3 million votes are what gave him his best performance with minorities, Latino and African American.

More than 50% of Hispanics, especially of Mexican and Puerto Rican origins, supported Democrat Kamala Harris, which in absolute terms reflected a drop in Latino preferences, highlighting what can be considered their loyalty to the Democrats.

Now, the issue for both Republicans and Democrats is what they will offer Latinos to keep them on their side and increase their respective votes in the future — because little by little, the parties will have to offer them more participation, as individuals or as a group.

It is true that Cubans, Venezuelans and Central Americans may have a different vision than Mexicans, who make up the majority of the Latino and Puerto Rican bloc — especially in international political views, where antagonism toward the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela combines well with the old Republican anti-communism.

To top it all off, a report from the University of California-Los Angeles noted that the amount of gross domestic product from Latino Americans is $3.68 trillion, a figure larger than that of any Latin American economy and almost as much as the GDPs of Brazil and Mexico combined. Perhaps it is time for Americans and Latin Americans, especially Mexico, to stop looking at Latino Americans as a minority group.