“Que?! Que?!”

Alfonso Aguilar shouts into the mike, gesticulating wildly to no one in particular on a recent Saturday morning. He is taping his radio show, which is recorded in the District and beamed into nine cities, including Houston, Chicago and Miami.

News has broken that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney blames his election loss in part on “gifts” President Obama gave Hispanics and other minorities.

Aguilar — “La Voz de Los Latinos” (the Latino Voice) — is incredulous.

“He thinks Latinos voted for entitlements,” he tells listeners in Spanish. “Mr. Romney, Latinos didn’t vote for President Obama because they liked Obamacare. No, they voted for Obama because of your stance on immigration. In the primary, you moved to the far right.”

Not the kind of talk you’d expect from a committed Republican, a guy who stumped for Romney and whose employer ponied up $400,000 in anti-Obama campaign ads that focused on the administration’s record deportation rates. It’s a set of curiosities not lost on a caller from Los Angeles.

The photos remind him of the Catholic faith that is his foundation and the fat years when conservative Hispanics were on the rise. Days when Ronald Reagan told his ad consultants to target Latinos because they are “already Republican. They just don’t know it.” Reagan won 37 percent of the Hispanic vote in 1984, according to an analysis of exit polls by the Pew Hispanic Center. Twenty years later, George W. Bush — who declared that “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande” — pulled in even more Hispanics, winning 40 percent of their vote.

“Piñata politics”

But the 2012 campaign, Aguilar says, was a return to failed “piñata politics” — salsa-and-chips parties, Norteña music at campaign events and “viva el candidato!” slogans with no compelling policy debate. Romney won over a disappointing 27 percent of Hispanics, the lowest level since 1996.

“Inclusion is when you have people at the table,” Aguilar says, jumping right into his diagnosis of the on-again-off-again relationship between the GOP and the Hispanic electorate. “This time I just don’t think we were being listened to.”

Aguilar is standing in front of his photo wall, slightly disheveled, no gel keeping his hair perfectly in place, sipping a hot drink. “Puerto Ricans love their coffee,” he says. What is he drinking? The freeze-dried coffee brewed in the office. “It’s awful,” he says, but he prefers it to paying top dollar at chain coffeehouses for espresso that “tastes horrible.” He keeps talking, nonstop, for almost 10 more caffeine-fueled minutes before inviting a visitor to a conference room to sit down to continue the conversation.