Texas Latino men — documented and not — are hopeful for Donald Trump. Here's why.
As they waited on a curb along the Interstate 35 Frontage Road in South Austin on Wednesday morning, their backs to a gulch and their attention toward the cars entering and exiting the parking lot of a Home Depot, the day laborers could agree on a few things.
Work, for the past while, has been sluggish. And prices — for gas, groceries and rent — harsh.
The dozens of men were mostly undocumented immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Haiti. They dressed in the long sleeves, jeans, sunglasses and baseball caps required for the concrete, flooring, plumbing or carpentry work that the day might hold.
A pastel blue Chevy SUV stopped before them and the men crowded. The driver offered $40 for five hours of work. Pickup truck required.
Some of the men shrugged, a few others grunted, and most walked away. Two took down the driver's phone number.
"Before COVID, we were setting the prices," said Danilo Rodríguez, 42, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who has lived in Austin for two decades. "Now they (the drivers) are setting them."
Rodríguez didn't have a vote in Tuesday's elections, but like several of the day laborers who spoke to the American-Statesman, he was optimistic about the results of the presidential race. A Donald Trump victory, Rodríguez said, seemed to be the country's best shot at an economic boom to recover from the downturn he has felt since the start of the pandemic. The Republican former president's return to the White House appeared to be Rodríguez's best chance at a sense of economic stability, which inflation has corroded — and worth the potentially increased risk of deportation. This time around, or at least on the morning when results were still novel, a Trump presidency had the scent of opportunity.
"More investment. If things get moving, that creates work," Rodríguez said in Spanish about what he expected. Besides, "Trump wants to deport those who do bad things. ... I haven't broken any laws."
Trump performed well in Tuesday's election among several groups of Hispanic voters who have traditionally voted for Democrats, including the small town, working-class Tejanos, Chicanos and Mexican residents of Texas' borderlands and with Latino men more broadly. For many blue-collar Latino immigrant men in Austin, the decision in the presidential election appeared rational: a frustrating economy and a perceived separation between the president-elect's rhetoric and future policy had made a vote for Trump intriguing. The alternative, to these men, appeared to be a more definitive malaise.
Such trends show in some election analysis. Pre-election polls by the University of Texas suggested that 61% of Hispanic Texans had unfavorable views of the country's current path. Forty-nine percent of them, a plurality, viewed Trump as a better handler of the nation's economy than Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. On election night, an Edison Research exit poll conducted for the Washington Post suggested that Trump won the majority of Latino voters in Texas , including almost two-thirds of Hispanic men, a catastrophic swing against Democrats. If such predictions are correct, the results are a historic victory for Republicans.
As Rodríguez sees it, his preference for Trump is most tied to his weakening checkbook, though other disagreements with Democratic messaging strengthened his distaste for the Harris ticket. As an evangelical Christian, he was alarmed by what he heard is increasing nonbinary gender education in schools and an emphasis on access to abortions.
In the end, a maxim defined his general displeasure with the current establishment: "Those with power haven't noticed the difficulties of those without power," Rodríguez said as his peers nodded along to his statements.
Víctor Rodríguez, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in Austin and worked as a day laborer for the past eight years, expressed similar frustrations over the economy. Work, he said, has decreased from a near constant to no more than two jobs a week in the past years.
"Right now the situation is dire. Right now you just make enough to survive," Víctor Rodríguez said in Spanish.
But he's unconvinced by the rosy picture those around him had acquired of Trump's leadership and the indictments they made against President Joe Biden's administration.
"The wars came. The pandemic came. The migrant crisis came" when Biden took office, the 61-year-old said in Spanish. Trump "got a cakewalk. ... Hopefully something happens under this man to see how he acts. Promising isn't anything."
Several men, including the two Rodríguezes (no relation), said scarcity of work and the growing competition can make the day laborers resentful of each other. Since Trump was first elected, the number of immigrant men who wait for work in the Home Depot parking lot has grown and diversified. What was mostly Mexican and Central American immigrants now include Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans. It makes both of the men open to Trump's calls to reduce the number of crossings at the border.
On the other side of the parking lot, 82-year-old Rito Recendez pushed his orange platform cart with the cement bags and a 15-foot two-by-four that he planned to use to build a storage shed in his backyard. The retired farm laborer and hotel worker immigrated from the Mexican state of Zacatecas 50 years ago and first voted in 2020 after becoming a naturalized citizen. That time, Recendez chose Biden, a preference that seemed to represent change and normalcy, he explained.
This time around, Recendez planned to vote for Harris, though he changed his mind "about a month" before Election Day after repeated appeals from his grandson, who planned to vote for Trump and argued the now president-elect could improve costs and slow immigration. The former undocumented immigrant said he believed too many recent immigrants were using welfare programs, a change from when he immigrated to the U.S.
Trump's promises, he said, eventually outweighed the unease he gets from Trump's comments, which he identified as a racist. He began to chuckle as he listed out Trump's insults.
"We know they're not true," Recendez said. "He bothers me a bit but we already know him."
