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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.

Appearances

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New Books in Communications · Leo R. Chavez, "The Latino Threat: How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation" (Stanford UP, 2025) · 20 Dec 2025 podcast

So I figured I had to write another book.

And this book was going to be focused on rhetoric.

And a lot of it was about Donald Trump and how he was able to use the Latino threat narrative so effectively through his using rhetoric in aspects of rhetoric and strategically aspects of rhetoric to get people to buy his line.

And so I spent a lot of time talking about why he was effective.

Not just saying, oh, Donald Trump's a bad guy, but my question was, why was he effective when it's so clearly these are not true and people know they aren't true?

How is he effective?

And so I figured I had to rewrite the book, really, in the sense I really rewrote it with this new idea and focus in mind because I felt I owed...

people who like my book a chance to see me, in a sense, now taking it and using it to try and understand the current situation rather than just leaving it out there from 13 years ago and let people try and figure it out themselves.

And Stanford bought the idea and said, yeah, let's try it.

Let's do it and see if people like it.

And I think it worked out great.

It's a little longer than the original because I added some things to it that weren't in the original, obviously, and I got rid of some things.

But I added a whole new section because when Donald Trump first came into play in 2015 or so for his first run, I asked myself, you know, this rhetoric is really awful.

And, you know, people say sticks and stones will break your bones and words will never hurt you.

But I said, is that true?

I mean, this this thing he's saying about Mexicans and Latinos is just so God awful.

And so I got together with a psychologist friend of mine at UCI, and I said, I want to do a study.

You're the psychologist.

Help me set up a laboratory where I bring Mexican origin students in, blind, no idea what's going on, divide them into different groups, and show them positive rhetoric, negative rhetoric, and then neutral rhetoric as a control.

And let's do a psychological experiment.

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