I woke up on the day after the election hoping to see a definitive result, but instead, one of the first things I saw on Twitter was a video posted by the New York Times of Latinos celebrating on the iconic Calle Ocho in Miami. There were shouts of “Viva Trump,” cars honked in support as they cruised by, and there is always that couple who are incredible dancers and feel the need to flaunt their perfectly coordinated limbs in public. In the week since, Joe Biden was declared the projected president-elect by any credible news outlet, and it has become abundantly clear how little people know and understand about the Latino community. The New York Times, NBC, and almost every other news outlet has done a deep-dive into why Latinos voted for the incumbent president, but its disappointing that none of the aforementioned outlets took the time to find a Latino person to speak on behalf of a misunderstood segment of voters.

So why did Latinos vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump?

Ultimately, the Trump campaign, despite his rhetoric on immigration and talk of a border wall, caged children, “shithole:” countries, understood that Latino voters are not a monolith. This despite Joe Biden himself asserting that fact in a recent interview.

So what is a Latino?

In the most simplistic terms a Latino is someone with cultural ties to Latin America, but what the term fails to account for is the cultural ties of the people of Latin America to the rest of the world. The current president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, is of Palestinian descent, the former president of Peru was Japanese, there are Afro-Latinos, blonde hair blue-eyed Latinos. We come in all shapes and sizes. According to CNN, of the 59 million latinos in the United States, 40 million describe themselves as white, 15 million describe their race as another race, and nearly 3 million describe themselves as a mixture of two or more races.

Add to that diversity the varying geopolitical forces that gathered those people across the United States and you have a much more complicated group of people whose interests and political motivations cannot be limited to immigration policy.

The shared history of the countries that make up Latin America have shaped the politics and culture of Latinos for nearly 600 years. When the europeans began arriving in the Caribbean and venturing throughout Mexico, Central America and South America they imported things like cattle, pork, and small pox. They eradicated entire indigenous populations, and then began a slave trade. In some countries like Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or Brazil, the descendants of African slaves are visible in their population. In El Salvador, the Afro-Salvadorans mixed in with the native and European population to dilute the Afro-Salvadoran population to imperceivable levels.

On New Years Eve 1958, Cuban president and U.S.-backed military dictator General Fulgencio Batista was informing his cabinet that he was leaving. By morning the morning of January 1st 1959, Fidel Castro had completed his socialist revolution and taken control of Cuba as President until he died in 2016. In the following years 200,000 Cubans, mostly of middle and upper class exiled to Florida. That group has grown to a robust community of nearly one million Cuban exiles since 1959. For this group of Latinos and their descendants that make up a large voting demographic particularly in Miami-Dade County, painting a candidate as a socialist is triggering. The Trump campaign understood this and their attempts to paint that picture in the mind of Cuban voters worked.

I was born in El Salvador, my family like thousands of others left El Salvador in the middle of a violent civil war that claimed over 75,000 lives. For some Salvadorans, those who remember the assassination of Archbishop Romero, the threat of religious persecution has been real in their lives and rhetoric around religious freedom would resonate. For the Salvadorans who experienced crime and violence at the hand of MS-13, or were granted asylum because of a real threat to their lives from a drug cartel and are now voting citizens of the United States, talk of enforcing immigration laws and keeping out the crime these Latinos have left behind can be a big motivating factor in a vote for Trump.

You can find stories to justify a vote anywhere on the political spectrum within the history of Latin America and even if you account for the experience of every Latin American immigrant, from every Latin American country, you will still miss the mark. How do you account for the experience of U.S. citizens who identify as Latino but are generations removed from their Latin American origins? The Latins who in the last generation are changing the narrative on education and home economics?

The collection of all these diverse stories for the people from somewhere between the Rio Grande and Patagonia, their descendants, and their future, will not be democratic by default. According to Pew Research, the rate at which Latinos were dropping out of high school is dropping dramatically, college enrolment is up, and are the ethnic group least likely to carry student debt. Part of the issue the Democratic party will continue to have in courting these voters, is in asking them to not only sign on to immigration issues, racial justice, and economic equality, but in all the other things that the Democratic Party is fighting to preserve like abortion rights. Latin America was conquered and colonized in the name of spreading Christianity, and spread it they did. The expression of Christianity in Latin America, whether Catholic or some variation of Protestant is much more aligned with the religious right than it is with a more socially progressive ideology. The simplistic understanding and single issue pandering of the political left towards Latinos its frankly insulting, as is the manipulation of faith and fear to scare some Latinos into a vote for the right, but until the political left understands that Latinos, who make up 16% of the voting population are a reflection of the diversity of America itself and cannot be counted as a single-minded community, our votes will continue to be up for grabs, and in 2020 that meant a vote for Donald J. Trump.