Leo R. Chavez
speaker
1,192 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 20 Dec
Leo R. Chavez’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.
Appearances
And as an anthropologist, I came to this idea because, in a sense, what anthropology tries to understand is culture and how we think about things, how we feel, how we have emotions, and where those emotions come from.
And in a sense, a narrative is a way of encapsulating emotions and encapsulating understandings that people have that could be used to motivate them to take particular actions.
And so that's what the Latino threat narrative is.
It's really a motivator for action by people who want to pursue that kind of a line of thought to blame Latinos and immigrants for whatever bad thing in their life they feel is happening.
Right?
And that's why, as an anthropologist, I try to look, well, where does this narrative fit into society?
Why do people want to believe it?
And that forces me to think broader than anthropology.
I just have to start thinking like an economist.
What's inequality?
How has inequality been a persistent fact of American life for the last 50 years, where in the 60s, we were relatively narrow in our inequality, and over the last...
six decades or inequality has just, it's not changed under a Democrat or Republican president.
And so the Latino narrative fits within that context of the last 50 years of people feeling they're getting less and other people are getting more.
The rich are getting richer and the middle class and poor are just, can't maintain, they can't tread water.
And so a narrative like the Latino narrative, as we all know,
is a scapegoat narrative.
It's a way of saying, you know what, particularly for politicians to use it, they say, you know what, it's not our policies that are causing the problem, it's those people.
It's an us-them narrative, right, that allows people to say, you know, they're the problem,
And politicians love that because people aren't looking at the politician and their policies, they're looking at this scapegoat.
And so, I had to ask myself, anthropologists would look at the emotions, the narratives, the kind of cultural aspects,
Showing 181–200 of 1,192 · page 10 of 60
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