UCLA

This dissertation examines how Latino Republicans make sense of their partisan alignment in a political environment in which such alignment is widely treated as incompatible with Latino and immigrant belonging. Existing scholarship often explains Latino Republicanism as the product of weakened ethnoracial identity or attenuated ties to the immigrant experience, offering insight into movement away from the Democratic Party but less into how Latinos come to align with the contemporary Republican Party. Drawing on (N = 85) in-depth interviews conducted in five majority-Latino counties in South Texas—Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, Willacy, and Zapata—this study examines how participants interpret their political commitments within a polarized party system. Participants describe arriving at Republican affiliation by relating longstanding commitments—especially around religion, family, and national belonging—to perceived differences between the parties. In these accounts, partisan alignment does not appear as a single decision, but as a process through which prior commitments and party identification come to fit together. This alignment is reinforced through participants’ everyday social environments, particularly within religious communities and understandings of American national identity, where Republican affiliation is experienced as fitting and appropriate. At the same time, participants confront claims that their partisan affiliation conflicts with Latino identity. Rather than abandoning those attachments, they describe when and how Latino identity and immigrant experience should matter for political judgment, allowing those ties to remain meaningful without leading them to reconsider their partisan alignment. By examining these patterns, this dissertation shows that Latino Republicanism is not best understood as the loss of identity-based ties, but as part of a broader shift in how people relate their values, identities, and party affiliation in a polarized political environment. Latino Republican alignment, in this sense, reflects how individuals come to see their political commitments as fitting together within their everyday lives.