In a North Hollywood podcast studio last week, Gill Tejada and her co-host Boo Boo trashed liberal slogans like any good Trumper.

Puberty blockers for teenagers. Los Angeles County District Attorney. George Gascon. Gavin Newsom. Homelessness. High taxes. Uncontrolled passage.

The issues were not surprising. The environment and the language… it was.

“My president committed a crime, man!” Tejada shouted at one point to hundreds of live viewers on YouTube and Instagram.

Proudly calling Trump a “junkyard dog” ready to fight for the United States, Boo Boo replied, “He’s the best friend on the block, bro.” “He says, ‘I’m going to smoke you.’”

Welcome “American CholoIt’s a podcast that Tejada has hosted since 2018, which initially focused on stories about gang life and Chicano culture but has now gone full Trump bro.

With his San Fernando Valley Chicano accent, close-cropped hair and “physical,“Playboy” and “idiot” Tejada might seem like a Pendleton-wearing clown to a first-time listener. Culture Clash sketch.

But dismissing him so easily is a mistake he expects liberals to make entirely to their own detriment. Tejada, 49, represents a trend that has Republicans excited and Democrats alarmed as Election Day approaches: Latino men turning to Trump.

Continuous surveys throughout the summer Double-digit gap found between Latino and Latino support for Kamala Harris. The gender gap exists to some degree across racial and ethnic groups, but media outlets have viewed Latino men with suspicion, largely based on the question:

How can they cheer for Trump referring to Mexico? as a place that sends “rapists and drug dealers” To the USA; El Salvador was counted A “shithole” country And Puerto Rico is “dirty”; described many times Venezuelan immigrants as criminals; and keeps promising unleashing “largest deportation” ever if elected?

Geraldo Cadava, Northwestern University history professor who has written extensively about Republican LatinosHe says he’s “cautious about statements about machismo, misogyny, and patriarchy” about Latino men’s support for Trump — although of course there might be some. But I would also like people debating this issue to at least consider more material issues, such as industries where Latinx men are overrepresented, such as construction and law enforcement. “All of their leaders are after Trump.”

The threat is so real that the Harris campaign this month announced a Hombres con Harris initiative that has been ridiculed by progressive and conservative commentators alike as too much, too little, too late to convince men like Tejada.

“A lot of Latinos are going to Trompito Land, idiot,” he told a caller during a podcast taping I attended, using a derogatory term used by Latino haters for the former president that Tejada has re-adopted as an affectionate nickname — Little Trump. Fast, furious, knowledgeable and full of well-timed jokes, his patter was a master class in old-school radio talk.

Podcast co-host Boo Boo can be seen on the camera monitor while taping “American Cholo” in North Hollywood.

(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)

He reviewed the proposals in California on this year’s ballot and focused briefly on: Recommendation 6would ban forced labor in state prisons.

“Inflation has gotten so bad that people in prison are asking for more money,” Tejada said, as Boo Boo laughed. “Has it come to this, America?”

The two, once active in rival North Hollywood gangs, sat at an elegant table built by Tejada’s brothers-in-law. Five cameras set up by Boo Boo recorded their every reaction. Behind them was a screen with the “American Cholo” logo on a microphone supported by an American flag. Above the soundboard was a framed canvas with airbrushed names of dead members of Tejada’s former gang, the North Hollywood Boyz. There was a plaque in front of it that said “I Hustle Every Day.”

“I don’t really like that stupid Trump, but I’m going to vote for him,” Tejada eventually said. He stopped, looked directly at the camera and grinned. “This should be the campaign slogan.”

The “American Cholo” studio is five blocks from where Tejada grew up. Among the memorabilia on the walls: the top of the pool table where he first recorded the podcast, a copy of the Constitution, a rusty sign that once hung on the garden fence. The long-closed Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino Where did he serve?

Pictures of American flags lined the hallway. “They are everywhere, because I am grateful to this country,” he said. “I lived in a Third World country. “A lot of liberals didn’t do that.”

Tejada came to the United States legally from Honduras when he was 6 years old to live with his mother, who was undocumented at the time. He dropped out of high school in his freshman year and cycled in and out of children’s dormitories.

“The last time I saw an old man sitting in his cell, a light bulb went off in my head,” Tejada said. A stocky man with light brown eyes, tattoos of his late brother, and a 170 Freeway sign across his upper chest. “I look around and ask myself, ‘Is this what I want to be?’ I ask. I was 24 years old. I would be released on parole and unemployed. My daughter’s mother was going to jail. That’s why I chose my family; “Best choice I ever made.”

Tejada learned how to lay cement (he now works as a foreman for a concrete company) and tried to influence young people in his neighborhood into the trade.

He showed interest in politics but did not get involved because he thought this country was mostly on the right track under Democratic leaders: “Bill Clinton was a good president. (George W.) Bush Junior was a complete idiot. Obama did a good job.”

He voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because he found Trump offensive: “I thought she would do a great job. She’s so ruthless.”

Then came the summer of 2020. Tejada was working on a project near Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica when a rally was held against the killing of George Floyd. turned into looting of small businesses.

“Law enforcement had a chance to stop them,” he said. “Instead they retreated.”

He saw the damage up close the next day. “And I thought to myself: ‘You can’t go to church and pray to your God, but you can march and destroy 10,000 people…? Are you kidding me?'”

He still didn’t believe in Trump, but he couldn’t support Joe Biden – “Democrats turned left, then made a U-turn into super-wokeness.” That’s why he wrote “American Cholo” as his presidential bid.

The last four years have left Tejada, who has not registered with any political party, completely alienated from the Democratic administration. He thought Boo Boo was “crazy” for supporting Trump in 2016, but now they’re kindred spirits.

“If California were a prison, it would be run by Democrats and look what happened,” said Boo Boo, who declined to reveal his real name and said, “I’m fine.”

“My mom can’t take the subway,” Tejada replied. “My friend’s neighbor was robbed. (LA City Council) is building more temporary housing in North Hollywood. Why aren’t they built in Brentwood or Hancock Park?”

“My stocks have skyrocketed under Trump. “They’re in the dumps now,” added Boo Boo.

“Latino men see that carne asada is $12 instead of $7.99,” Tejada said. “Democrats are having trouble selling this. But you’re all running the show right now, bro. They think we (Latinos) are too stupid to say anything. “And when we say something, they say we are very insensitive.”

Gill Tejada poses for a portrait before taping an episode of the “American Cholo” podcast in North Hollywood.

(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)

I asked my friends if Trump’s escalating rhetoric against Latinos bothered them.

“It’s like having a nagging wife,” Boo Boo said. “It went in one ear and out the other. I hate to say it, but these (world leaders) will say, ‘We want a guy who’s going to deal.’ “They don’t listen in the Biden era, they can’t do it with Kamala, Trump was the gangster who ran the show in the neighborhood.”

“He’s an idiot!” Tejada shouted like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “If I could interview him, I would ask for an apology. But I’m not voting for her to be mine compadreor marrying someone from the family. “I’m voting for him to run this country like a business and get us back into shape.”

Cal State Fullerton Chicano Studies professor Alexandro Jose Gradilla has listened to “American Cholo” and understands where Tejada and Boo Boo are coming from, even though he doesn’t agree with their politics.

He has seen some of his former male students warm to Trump. “They had lower taxes under Trump, and it hurts them to hire people,” said one employee at a trucking company.

These men are not “monsters,” Gradilla said, but they are symptoms of “how every cultural and ethnic group struggles, how we can engage men in civic engagement.”

Too many Latino men “embrace an overly individualized sense of machismo,” the professor said.

“Someone pressed Control-Alt-Delete in their memory, and people say, ‘Of course my grandma was undocumented, but we’re good people now,'” he said. “’These immigrants like that different, they should do ‘He will be deported.’ They give themselves a strange, invisible vaccine: ‘I won’t be the one to suffer. There’s going to be someone else who deserves it.’”

Tejada scoffs at the suggestion that he considers himself superior to other Latinos. He organized backpack giveaways and coached Little League. Although Tejada has interviewed local political candidates such as Nathan Hochman, who is running for Los Angeles County district attorney on a law-and-order platform, “American Cholo” continues to highlight Chicano musicians and artists.

Earlier this year, Tejada even served on the North Hollywood Northeast Neighborhood Council — “until I realized they were going to sit there and argue about buying a microwave for an hour instead of dealing with real city issues.” He resigned six weeks later.

“People tell me that I forget where I come from because of my conservative views,” he said, laughing. “But I never left.”