Racial Presidentialities: Narratives of Latinxs in the 2016 Campaign

The 2016 presidential nomination saw significant discussions about Latinx communities and Latinx identities.¹ Such concerns, of course, are not new in electoral politics or campaign discourse.² However, the 2016 campaign provided an especially potent and varied sampling of political discourses about Latinx communities and Latinx identities, from discussions of the GOP’s so-called “Hispanic problem” and political prognostication about the so-called “Latino vote” to Donald Trump’s promises to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In this essay, I consider how some of these electoral discourses are reflective of and shape what I call “racial presidentialities.” In their book The Prime-Time Presidency, Trevor Parry-Giles and Shawn Parry-Giles define presidentiality as “a discourse that demarcates the cultural and ideological meaning of the presidency for the general public.”³ In another book, Constructing Clinton, they write that rhetorics of presidentiality “define, in part, the American community by offering a vision of this central and vital office.”⁴ Rhetorics of presidentiality use the president and the office of the presidency as referents or signs, constructing broader ideologies about national identity and national culture. The presidentiality concept indexes the ways in which popular understandings of the presidency condense and construct national identities, myths, and ideologies.

With the term racial presidentialities I refer to a particular thread in broader rhetorics of presidentiality: those political and cultural discourses that use the presidency and/or particular presidents or presidential candidates to construct broader meanings about racial politics and the role of race in U.S. national identity.⁵ This term takes inspiration not only from the work on presidentiality that I cited above but also from the excellent and wide-ranging scholarship in our field on President Obama and the way that discourses around his campaign and presidency reflect and shape understandings of racial politics and U.S. American identity.⁶

Discourses about Latinx communities and the Latinx vote in the presidential nomination campaign are examples of racial presidentialities because they use the office of the presidency and particular candidates to express and shape ideologies and norms about Latinx identity, the role of Latinxs in the national community, and U.S. racial politics. As racial presidentialities, these discourses use the presidency to reflect and construct understandings of Latinx identity and normative national identity and culture. They tell us about the way our political culture positions Latinxs within the national imaginary and about understandings of race and national identity in the post-Obama era.

In particular, this essay will consider two recurrent narratives about Latinx communities and Latinxs, primarily from the primary season, as examples of racial presidentialities.⁷ The first narrative is all about Latinxs as a highly prized political and demographic constituency and a crucial ethnic voting bloc. The second narrative is all about Latinxs as threats, criminal invaders, and/or interlopers. I argue that these two narratives about Latinxs in the 2016 campaign actually work as two sides of the same coin. Despite their differences, they share similar logics that homogenize and essentialize Latinxs and fetishize difference. I conclude that these narratives reflect problematic understandings of race and ethnicity in the national imaginary. This suggests that, in spite of the election of the nation’s first black president, presidentiality is still tied to what Mary Stuckey called the “norms of whiteness” of the presidency and of normative national identity.⁸

Two Narratives

Both political communication scholars and rhetorical critics have examined political campaign discourse targeted at Latinx voters. Although such out-reach stems as far back as the middle of the twentieth century, it has intensified in the latter half of the twentieth century with the growth of the Latinx community.⁹ Studies of such campaign discourse have focused primarily on the strategies by which the political parties seek to create identification with Latinx voters. Collectively they show that identification with Latinx voters has been sought through implicit and explicit appeals to so-called Latinx values and superficial Latinx cultural markers (such as the Spanish language, religion, or “hard work”) as well...