Gustavo Arellano, left, interviews Mike Madrid in Santa Ana. Photo by Greg Andersen. Below: Madrid, center, and Dean Jon Gould, right. at a book signing event on campus are surrounded by UCI Latinx Resource Center staff and students. Photo by Han Parker
School sponsors two book-signing events with Senior Fellow Mike Madrid
The national book tour UC Irvine School of Social Ecology Senior Fellow Mike Madrid has been on all summer finally wound its way back to Southern California with two school-sponsored signing events.
First, on Thursday, Madrid spoke about his new book The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy at a book-signing event in the UCI University Advancement offices. The public was welcome at a similar gathering Saturday at Alta Baja Market in downtown Santa Ana.
Co-presented by the UCI-OC Alliance, which includes local leaders and businesspeople on a mission to advance the university as a Latino/a-thriving institution, the Thursday event included a Q&A moderated by School of Social Ecology Dean Jon Gould as well as Madrid signing copies of The Latino Century that were donated by Newport Beach political consulting firm Todd Priest & Associates (which also provided free books for the Santa Ana crowd).
The author began at the UCI Advancement podium with an overview of the book’s main themes, which the veteran political consultant identified as “the extraordinary transformation our country is going through” and “an examination of who we are, how we’ve gotten to where we have been and where we are going.”
Madrid talked of how the “diploma divide” that has most college-educated voters leaning toward Democratic candidates and those without secondary degrees preferring Republicans has shaken up the country’s power structure, which in the not-too-distant past had the working-class favoring Democrats and the elites voting GOP.
Meanwhile, the “Latinization of America” and “feminization of America” have also influenced voting patterns, according to the co-founder of the anti-Trump political action committee The Lincoln Project. He explained that Latinas now outpace Latinos in obtaining college educations, and most of these women lean more Democratic than their male counterparts.
A cultural view that accepts women as leaders of the household as well as socially has led to more Latinas getting elected to office, says Madrid, noting this is especially true in California, whose legislature includes more Latinas than Latinos. “Even in red Utah, the leaders of both houses of the state legislature are Latinas,” he said.
While a populist and nationalist canard that holds America is a failing nation has taken hold in some mostly white circles, Latino/as overall have more trust in institutions, including church, academia, government, the military and, yes, even the media, contends Madrid, who has found this feeling strongest among those in the age-30-and-under demographic. He finds the timing of this phenomenon critical.
“I don’t think this country is going to survive without a cultural infusion of people who believe in this country,” Madrid warned. “Fortunately, that’s happening every day.”
At the same time, he says first- and second-generation Latinos lean more Democratic than those in the third and fourth generations. During the Q&A with Gould, Madrid argued more must be done to get young Latino families into affordable housing and Latino children into college.
He called it “a sin” that 70% of Latino kids are enrolled in the Medi-Cal “poverty program,” and he called on Hollywood to help foster better self-images by portraying Latino characters as upwardly mobile as opposed to the usual narcos, gangbangers or poor immigrants.
A dramatic moment came near the end of audience questions when a Latina sought advice from Madrid for students like her who sometimes feel as if they don’t belong at an institution and think about discontinuing their education.
“Such a powerful question,” the author replied. “Never forget that you are here for a reason. You belong here, and you are creating and forging a path for the people behind you that will become more commonplace, especially in STEM. OK? You belong here.”
Dean Gould swapped the stage for a seat in the audience outside Alta Baja Market as Gustavo Arellano took over the duties of interviewing his longtime pal/nemesis Madrid. Besides being the husband and unpaid worker bee of the Fourth Street establishment’s owner Delilah Snell, Arellano is a Los Angeles Times columnist and lifelong Orange County cultural observer who rose to fame at his late, great “infernal rag” OC Weekly writing the nationally syndicated ¡Ask a Mexican! column (that was later spun into a book).
The first question the school’s 2022 commencement speaker asked Madrid was about the direction of the Latino vote in the upcoming presidential election. The politico predicted that Donald Trump will receive 35% of the Latino vote, “which is a lot larger than when I started looking at this in the early 1990s. … We can’t say Latinos will be the decisive vote but can’t say we won’t be either.”
Referring to the demographic changes he brought up at the earlier event, Madrid explained the Latino voter of today is more nuanced: “We’re becoming more complex as the country is trying to figure out who the hell we are.”
At Arellano’s prodding, Madrid talked about how his upbringing in the Ventura County community of Moorpark shaped his conservative views, the racism he experienced working with and for Republicans and how Trumpism changed everything.
“I sacrificed my career, put my personal life in jeopardy and the lives and security of my children because of my political beliefs in coming out against Donald Trump. But that doesn’t mean that suddenly I went, ‘Oh, I’ll just go from one side to the other.’ It means my beliefs are as strong as they ever have been and just because the Republican Party has morphed into something unrecognizable to me does not mean that the Democratic Party is necessarily a better policy solution, although it’s the criteria for me that it’s better than dealing with the existential threat of Donald Trump.”
He conceded he had consciously stayed out of Orange County politics until he met Gould, which after much discussion led to Madrid joining the School of Social Ecology as a senior fellow and hosting the recent six-part Red County, Blue County, Orange County podcast that is based on data from the school’s UCI-OC Poll.
What drew Madrid to the school, he said, was the fact that its students, scholars and researchers don’t just study and write about social woes, they go directly to where problems are happening and work collaboratively with those impacted on solutions. “They’re practitioners,” he said.
— Matt Coker
Watch the Sept. 19 and Sept. 21 book talks below or on YouTube.
Photos from the Sept. 21 event are available on Flickr.
