The Latino Century not only has a lot to say, as its subtitle indicates, about How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy but also about how our democracy is shaping the differing political orientations and identity of Latinos—Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Venezuelans, and so forth. Its author, Mike Madrid, is an intriguing fellow. As a very young man, he began working in Republican politics in California and eventually became political director of the California Republican Party. He was then hired by Lionel Sosa, a Texas-based Mexican-American marketing executive, to help with George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. But with Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Madrid drifted away from the Republican Party. In 2018 he was campaign consultant to the unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign of former Los Angeles mayor, Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa. And in 2019 he joined the Lincoln Project, launched by a handful of Republican political consultants dedicated to defeating Trump’s 2020 bid for reelection.
Critical of both progressives and Trump supporters, Madrid could conceivably play a key role in whatever efforts Democrats muster to overcome their humiliating loss to Trump last November. His book is an account of the recent past and future direction of Latino politics. But it also a political memoir, recounting his path into Republican
