Anna Maria Farias, a Latino Republican operative from Texas, at the Quicken Loans Arena, in Cleveland, on Tuesday. Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New Yorker

A few hours before the Republican Party officially awarded the nomination to Donald J. Trump, several dozen prominent Latino delegates, reporters, and others met, over coffee, to consider their conundrum. Among Latino voters, Trump trails Hillary Clinton by more than sixty points—seventy-six per cent to fourteen per cent, according to a new

The night before, the Convention had opened with a program that featured the mothers of sons killed by undocumented immigrants. At the gathering the next morning, which was organized by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Ruth Guerra, who was the head of Hispanic media relations at the Republican National Committee until last month, when she took a job at a super PAC, was asked if she thought the Convention’s lineup would attract Hispanic support. “Obviously I would have liked to see a program similar to 2012, when we saw great Hispanic speakers,” Guerra said. “It’s fantastic that we're going to hear Ted Cruz—he’s a great leader in our party, he's Hispanic, he's on the Presidential stage, he has so much to offer. But obviously I would want to see more.” Asked if she was “advising people to distance themselves from Trump or at least his rhetoric,” she said that doing so was “campaigning 101. You have to define yourself before your opponent defines you, and each candidate has to run their own race.”

Among the guests was the Mexican ambassador to the United States, Carlos Manuel Sada Solana. He is a seasoned diplomat, who was appointed in April, once the Mexican government understood that Trump might actually get the nomination and that its relationship with the U.S. faced a crisis. He raised his hand. “We are the ones that keep getting bashed every single day,” he said, with a wan smile. “Of course when you are insulted, there is a reaction, and Mexicans have been insulted.” He added, “How are you going to change that rhetoric?”

For an answer, the group turned to Luis Fortuño, a Republican delegate who has served as the governor of Puerto Rico. He wore a pained expression. “Thank you for coming to Cleveland,” he said. “As a Republican, I'm embarrassed by some of the statements that have been made. I'll be honest. And they do not represent the positions of most Republicans, and most Republicans and Americans value tremendously a special relationship with Mexico.” He tried to shift the focus. “However, there's something going on not just in America but in Western Europe as well.” He talked about British voters supporting Brexit and French support for the hard-right candidate Marine Le Pen, but this was a tortured detour around the fact that millions of his fellow-Republicans had signed on with the most anti-Mexican candidate in modern Presidential politics. “I wish I had answers,” he said finally.

In the background of the discussion was an issue that runs deeper than Trump: for all its talk of reaching out, the Republican Party has taken steps that actually appear to be suppressing the Latino vote. The Party has tried to pass stricter voter-ID laws across the country, even though studies have found that fraud is exceedingly rare and the laws have a disproportionate effect on minority turnout. (A recent study found that Latino turnout is 10.8 percentage points lower in states with strict photo-ID laws.) Lori Montenegro, a Telemundo correspondent, questioned whether voter fraud was being hyped by Republicans, saying, “I haven't found evidence that there has been an overwhelming fraud.”

Daniel Garza, who served in the Bush Administration, disagreed. “Well, I come from the Rio Grande Valley," in South Texas. "It happens.”

“That's one place,” Montenegro said.

Maria Hinojosa, the host of “Latino USA,” on NPR, spoke up. “I just want to second Lori in saying that, in twenty-five years, in all of my reporting, I have never found that situation.”

“Come on down to the Rio Grande Valley,” Garza said.

Hinojosa questioned the validity of “setting a national conversation based on one place in the Rio Grande Valley.”

Garza was not budging. “I simply disagree that requiring different forms of ID for you to vote is somehow so hindering, so obstructive, that we are impairing the vote of minority Latinos. Please, that's an insult. We're very capable, we're smart, we're intelligent, we can get an ID, and we can go and vote.”

For some Latino Republicans, the time to attract voters to Trump has passed; the goal now is limiting the damage to other candidates. Anna Maria Farias became a Republican operative in Crystal City, Texas, about forty miles from the Mexican border. “Crystal City is 99.9 per cent Hispanic,” Farias told me. She plans to vote for Trump, but most of her neighbors are Democrats, and it falls to her to remind them that they can vote for local Republicans even if they can’t bear voting for Trump. “The very first thing that you have to do is you have to educate people on how to split the ballot. Because they say, ‘Oh, we always vote straight,’ ” she said.

I asked Farias how she became a Republican. “I grew up in the housing projects in Crystal City, Texas. My mom was a maid, working six and a half days, making tamales on the weekends. I was the high-school valedictorian, so my goal was just, How do I get out of here? How do I get out the housing projects?” She earned a scholarship to Boston University and became a student of William J. Bennett’s, who was a Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan.

Despite the sense of resignation about Trump’s damage to the Party’s image among Latinos, there are some signs that he might do better than the most dire predictions. Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, recently told USA Today that some Trump polls show his Hispanic support as high as the mid-twenties, close to the twenty-seven per cent that Mitt Romney achieved in 2012. Murray said that Trump's "inherent problems with the Hispanic voting bloc are overstated—he's not that far off the mark."

Similarly, Farias, who serves as vice-chair of the Bexar County Republican Party, said that it is a mistake to imagine that Hispanic voters would uniformly see themselves as sharing a position with Black Lives Matter and other new activists around race and ethnicity. “What about my life? Does my life matter? I'm an American citizen,” she said. “Crystal City was all about ‘Brown Lives Matter.’ And I'm like, I'm brown, but I just don't think like you. My values are just as strong as your values, and that's it. All our lives matter, and they need to stop with this.”