Things Youll Never Do Again if You Grew Up in San Antonio
In an interview with Javier Villalobos in early June, Trick Business concern host Stuart Varney presented his guest with a riddle. Villalobos, a Republican, had just won the mayoral election in McAllen, the Texas border boondocks at the stop of the terminal slap-up curve of the Rio Grande. Varney, barely containing his glee, wanted the politician to assist viewers empathize the victory. "Your honor," Varney addressed Villalobos, "you are right on the edge, fourscore-5 per centum of the voters in your county are Hispanic, you lot are a Republican, and you won. Tin you explain that? Because not many Americans await a Hispanic electorate to get for a Republican mayor!"
Villalobos promptly gear up Varney direct. "I think a lot of people know, or should know, that Hispanics more often than not are very conservative." His triumph, he explained, wasn't stunning; he had only met his voters where they were, with a "conservative agenda" of low taxes, limited regime spending, and pro-business concern policies. Satisfied, Varney moved on to other questions familiar to South Texans who make national news. What did Villalobos call back of the border wall? What about "illegal entry" of migrants? This part of the interview should have been routine. But Varney had patently not learned the name of the boondocks where Villalobos had been elected, mistakenly (and repeatedly) referring to McAllen as "McLaren."
The error was par for the course. South Texas lately has go an object of political fascination for pundits, some of whom have not taken the time to understand even the most basic facts about the region. Until recently, officials from McAllen typically found themselves on the national radar only when they welcomed visiting national politicians. Simply Villalobos's win—albeit in a race in which his party amalgamation did not announced alongside his name on the ballot and fewer than 10,000 of the city's 73,000 registered voters went to the polls—was noteworthy for ane reason. It seemed to confirm what Democrats had spent the past vii months denying: they have a deep problem in South Texas—and therefore in statewide races equally well.
Last year, McAllen experienced the biggest shift in party vote share, toward Donald Trump, of any big city in the state save for Laredo, 150 miles to the northwest. In both edge towns, Trump improved on his 2016 results by more than than 23 points. Many predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods in Texas'south major cities, such as San Antonio's Prospect Hill, also experienced double-digit shifts toward the incumbent president, though they ultimately stayed Democratic. Simply no area fled farther into the GOP army camp than South Texas, where 18 percent of the land's Hispanic population lives.
In Starr County, just upriver from McAllen, Republicans increased their turnout past almost 300 percent between 2016 and 2020. While Hillary Clinton won there by sixty points, Joe Biden barely scraped out a five-bespeak victory. In Webb Canton, home of Laredo, Trump cut his 2016 margin of defeat by more than half. And in Zapata County, which didn't even accept a local Republican political party, Trump became the commencement GOP presidential candidate to win since Warren G. Harding was on the ballot a century agone.
This shift has shattered years of political supposition—and perhaps arrogance. Democrats ranging from Barack Obama'south Latino outreach coordinator, Cuauhtémoc Figueroa, to former San Antonio mayor and presidential candidate Julián Castro had long maintained that Hispanic voters would be the party'south conservancy in the Lone Star State. Their logic was syllogistic. In the early 2020s, according to the land demographer'south projections, Texas'due south Hispanic population would accomplish plurality status, constituting around 41 percent of the country'southward total and surpassing non-Hispanic white Texans as its largest demographic grouping. And almost Hispanic Texans—more than than 60 percent in 2016—voted Autonomous.
Banking on an identity-based appeal, Democrats last year trotted out the sort of bilingual messaging in South Texas that has played well among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and Puerto Ricans in New York, focused on a celebration of variety and immigration. Republicans, by dissimilarity, recognized that Hispanic South Texans share many of the same values equally non-Hispanic white voters elsewhere in Texas and swept in with a pitch about defending gun rights, promoting the oil and gas manufacture, restricting abortion, and supporting constabulary enforcement. Republicans proved more persuasive.
Indeed, for decades, the dominant ideologies in Southward Texas accept been the aforementioned every bit in other rural areas and small towns beyond the state—that is, bourgeois. Many Democrats in Southward Texas are ardent supporters of gun rights who spend fall and winter weekends hunting white-tailed deer. On Sundays, churches—more often than not Catholic but also evangelical—bang-up to the brim. In hotels, mud-caked boots line the hallways at night as oil workers travel from job to job. Equally nine-term U.S. congressman Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose district stretches from the banks of the Rio Grande all the way to San Antonio, told me, "Bated from our Mexican heritage, much of South Texas has . . . demographic similarities with some of the more than conservative strongholds and white rural communities in the land."
But so much more just ideology—whether one is bourgeois or moderate or liberal—determines how a person votes. Cultural factors matter besides. While ideology has been strongly predictive of whether white voters opt for Republicans or Democrats since the late eighties, that had not been true of the state's Hispanic voters. David Shor, an iconoclastic information scientist who has polled Due south Texas extensively, explains that most xl percent of American voters are conservative, 40 percent are moderate, and xx pct are liberal. Those numbers don't vary much by race or ethnicity, whereas party loyalty does. And for decade afterward decade, part of being Hispanic in South Texas, just like wrapping tamales on Christmas Eve or listening to Selena at family unit reunions, meant voting Autonomous, even as the political party became less welcoming to those with conservative views. What changed in 2020 is that conservative Hispanic South Texans voted like their not-Hispanic white neighbors. Ideology suddenly became polarizing for the grouping in a mode it never had been before.
Many Hispanic South Texans shared something else with non-Hispanic white rural Texans: their racial identity. Hispanic residents of our state are much more likely to identify equally white than Hispanic residents of cities elsewhere in the country. With roots many generations deep in lands that were annexed from Mexican command to that of the U.S., many also actively turn down being cast as immigrants. In 2020 ignorance of these facts embarrassed country and national Democrats. While Hispanic Due south Texans are proud of their Mexican heritage, many exercise not consider themselves to be "people of color" at all.
All this ways that, despite Democrats' blithe assurances, demography is not destiny. Texas will indeed take a Hispanic plurality presently. However, "Hispanic" describes neither a race nor a political loyalty. When it comes to race, Texas volition remain overwhelmingly white, with more 75 percentage of its residents identifying as such. And if Democrats keep to hemorrhage votes in places similar McAllen and Laredo, Texas could turn fifty-fifty redder.
The GOP has looked at South Texas and seen voters who walk and talk like Republicans. The challenge facing the Democratic party is not just how to win back Hispanic voters. It's how to win back voters with Hispanic names who may not even use that adjective to describe themselves.
For Ross Barrera, ballot night in 2020 was tinged with disappointment. The former chair of the Starr Canton Republican party, he had lost a bid for mayor of Rio Grande Metropolis, a town of about xv,000. With the same diligence and field of study that had driven his rise from raw recruit to colonel over 34 years in the U.Southward. Army, he had run an enthusiastic campaign. He had donned a mask and knocked on doors and, similar whatsoever modern politico, posted regularly on his Facebook page. ("SÍ SE PUEDE: Voten por Barrera" read one mail service, complete with a GIF of a adult female in a baile folclórico dress; in another, he shared an earnest corrido that a local ring had recorded for one of his political allies.) Just when he learned he had lost the race early that dark, it was hardly a surprise: Rio Grande Metropolis has elected Democrats for decades. Around eleven p.m., he fabricated a final post on Facebook before heading to bed: "The fight remains!"
The side by side day, Barrera awoke to an onslaught of calls from reporters across the country. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Pol all had the same question: What just happened? While Biden had carried Starr County—information technology had been chosen for him late the nighttime before—Republicans had increased their turnout there well-nigh threefold, and the canton had shifted more than dramatically toward Trump than whatever other in America.
Starr County is almost entirely Hispanic. Barrera's house overlooks a belt of reeds and alpine grasses along the Rio Grande. Mexico's Ciudad Camargo sits simply a short walk—or swim—away, on the contrary bank. If you picked someone up, spun her around, and placed her on one side of the river or the other, information technology might be hard for her to tell what country she was in. At least half the signs on the U.Southward. side are in Spanish: the jeweler is the "Joyería"; the Aetna insurance office is plastered with posters asking "¿Tienes Medicare?" Those strolling the streets in each town await about the aforementioned. Based on conventional assumptions, Republicans should not do well here.
Then, reporters wanted to hear how they had. Barrera talked through different theories. The Democratic platform calling for the U.S. to wean itself off fossil fuels had scared many voters in an area dominated past the oil and gas industry. (Those fears had been inflamed by misinformation well-nigh Biden'southward stance on fracking and other free energy issues.) Others had been hammered by the economical affect of business concern shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic and had voted for the candidate in favor of fewer restrictions. However more were put off by liberal national Democrats calling for the "defunding" of constabulary enforcement and railing against the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which employs thousands of Hispanic South Texans.
Betwixt calls with reporters, Barrera checked Facebook. Some other, simpler theory for Starr County'due south rightward swing—put frontwards past left-leaning Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley—was dominating annotate sections and posts: the Mexican Americans in Starr County were "trying to be white." "All over social media, they were hating on u.s.a.," Barrera told me.
He had heard the insults before. Mexican immigrants and their descendants in the United States have adopted a litany of terms to accuse some other person of Mexican descent of "trying to be white." There'south "vendido"—which translates literally as "sellout" and means someone who's turned his dorsum on Mexican culture. A "malinchista"—an allusion to Malintzin, an enslaved Aztec woman whom Hernán Cortés brought with him in his conquest of her people's empire—is someone who has betrayed her community. Adrienne Peña-Garza, the Republican party chair of Hidalgo County, which neighbors Starr County, says that people take told her "Tienes el nopal en la frente" ("Y'all accept a cactus on your forehead"), an insult for someone who looks Mexican but denies information technology. Once two women, she says, swung a sledgehammer and cracked open up a coconut in front of the local Republican headquarters. The implication was articulate. "Kokosnoot" is a word for someone who is supposedly chocolate-brown on the exterior but white on the inside. It frustrates Peña-Garza how her conservative stances get interpreted: "National Democrats have washed a fairly good job making it seem like if yous support border security, you must be a self-hater."
To Barrera, accusations of being a traitor feel like barbs. He compares them to a term sometimes used in the Black customs: "Uncle Tom." "They say that I'thousand a self-loathing Mexican person," Barrera told me. He grew up speaking Spanish and is proud of his heritage; he would never deny who he is and where he came from.
Still, the question of who exactly he is is complicated. Barrera doesn't like to utilize the descriptors he's seen used past the media and national Democrats. "Latinos con Biden" signs were a detail allergy; Barrera never calls himself Latino, which he says is "a discussion from Hollywood." Too, he doesn't phone call himself Hispanic, which he considers "too metropolitan." He'd never call himself Mexican, and he has an aversion to the compound "Mexican American." He said, "I'm merely American."
He added, "Around here, nosotros like to say that we're Tejano." Peña-Garza agrees: "I'm Tejana." A term that dates back to when Texas was a region of Mexico known equally Tejas, "Tejano" fully entered the vernacular in the seventies and was often used equally an alternative to anti-assimilationist descriptors that had come into vogue, such as "Chicano." "There's a divergence between 'Mexican American' and 'Tejano,' " Barrera said. "Nosotros didn't cross the border; the border crossed us."
If Tejanos have a slogan, that'southward it. Many of the present-day residents of Starr County merits a lineage back to the time when Mexico was Nueva España and when both banks of the Rio Grande were Mexican territory. While "Tejano" means unlike things to different people, many apply the discussion to telegraph a specific bulletin: their ancestors are the early on Spanish settlers who colonized the province of Tejas for the Castilian Crown. They don't come across themselves as immigrants.
Multiple times, when I asked him "What is your race?" Barrera jumped into detailed, eloquent explanations of Latin American history and sensitive perspectives on the differences among diverse Latin American expat communities in the U.Due south. Eventually, he gave me an reply: "I am a Caucasian, and my government says I am Hispanic," he said. "Because my surname goes dorsum to Hispaniola, to Spain."
What does it mean to be "white"? In his famous investigation How the Irish Became White, historian Noel Ignatiev argues that race isn't a stable biological fact. Rather, whiteness is a social construct, a flexible cloth that at any particular moment tin can exist wrapped around certain groups while excluding others. In the nineteenth century, Irish immigrants to the U.Due south. were of an unmistakable second-grade status and, early on on, were often depicted in newspaper illustrations and cartoons as conflicting, fifty-fifty simian. They supported the politics of the downtrodden, including public investment and social democratic reform. Only as they rose through labor unions, police and fire departments, and public offices and gained economical and political clout, the Irish were increasingly regarded, and depicted in public imagery, every bit white. By the mid-twentieth century, large numbers of them supported anti-immigrant, nativist, and segregationist politicians. In Ignatiev's telling, past becoming co-custodians of the nation'southward racial caste organisation, Irish Americans were able to ascent to the same social position as the country's earlier Anglo-Saxon settlers.
Might Ignatiev's thesis apply, in some ways, to Tejanos in the Rio Grande Valley and lighter-skinned Hispanic Americans more generally? Across South Texas, I met resident after resident who, similar Barrera, struggled to find a simple answer to the question of his or her identity. National Democrats take ofttimes treated Hispanic S Texans every bit sharing the aforementioned characteristics as Chicanos in California or Salvadoran Americans in Maryland. Every bit Sylvia Bruni, chair of the Webb County Democratic party, told me, campaign signs targeting Hispanic voters in South Texas were the aforementioned as those rolled out in Los Angeles, reading "Todos con Biden" ("Everyone With Biden"). "They never found a message specifically for people in South Texas," she said.
Tejano culture is distinctive. As Cynthia Villarreal, a retired high school counselor and lifelong resident of the border boondocks of Zapata, explained to me recently, "My grandfather always told me, 'No soy mexicano. No soy americano. Soy tejano.' "
Villarreal, who has voted blue nearly of her life, was a prominent Democratic organizer in Zapata in 2020. With light-brownish pilus and hazel eyes, she would non expect out of place in Spain. In fact, like many in the Valley, she traces her family history back to the earliest European colonizers (and unlike others with more than counterfeit lineages, she has access to the records from the Spanish Crown to prove information technology). When the Mexican region Tejas became Texas, Villarreal's ancestors became American. This blending of identity, almost ii centuries later, has left her feeling out of place in both countries. "I'm too white to exist Mexican," she joked, "and also Mexican to be white."
One of the difficulties in understanding whiteness in South Texas is the double valence of that word. In Tejano regions, "white" tin mean güero (slang for a calorie-free-skinned or fair-haired person), but information technology can as well mean gringo, WASP, or Anglo—the words Mexican Americans take long used, with varying degrees of disparagement, to describe non-Hispanic white Texans. On the border, more than than just appearance determines a person's social position—citizenship papers do too. Many recent Mexican and Primal American immigrants to Southward Texas come up from Ethnic communities, and the basic rights offered past citizenship often overlap uncomfortably with a racial hierarchy.
In Starr County, 96 percent of demography respondents were Hispanic, and almost 99 percent identified as white. That ways the county isn't just one of the about Hispanic in the country. It'southward also one of the whitest.
Tejanos are more comfortable calling themselves white than are Hispanic Americans elsewhere in the country. On recent censuses, respondents were asked their ethnicity—eastward.1000., Hispanic or Latino—and their race. While many Hispanic Americans apply "Hispanic" to describe both their race and ethnicity, the census differentiates betwixt the two categories; after all, someone who is Hispanic—descended from inhabitants of a Castilian-speaking country—could exist of any race. Latin Americans with Indigenous heritage could mark "American Indian" as their race, and hundreds of thousands of Latinos could bank check "Black." Others could mark "Some Other Race" and peradventure include their family unit's state of origin.
On the 2010 census, 53 per centum of Americans who answered that they were Hispanic or Latino also marked their race as white. Concluding year, in Starr County, where 96 percentage of respondents were Hispanic, almost 99 percent identified as white. On paper, that means the county isn't merely ane of the almost Hispanic in the country. It's also ane of the whitest.
Such results were common across South Texas, where 76 percent of Hispanic residents identify as white, substantially more than than the 62 percentage who practice statewide. In Laredo, 95 per centum of respondents marked Hispanic or Latino—making it the second-most Hispanic city in the country—and 96 percent identified equally white. The numbers expect similar in Brownsville, Zapata, and elsewhere along the Rio Grande—but are markedly different from those in other Hispanic pockets of the state. In Salinas, California, east of Monterey, nigh 80 percent of census respondents selected Hispanic or Latino as their ethnicity, only simply 37 percent said they were white. Santa Ana, in Southern California, is ethnically 77 percent Hispanic or Latino and racially twoscore pct white. (Notably, neither urban center experienced a pronounced rightward shift in the last ballot.)
Some researchers circumspection against reading as well much into the data. Patricia Sánchez, chair of the department of bicultural-bilingual studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, says that when given a express set of options, many Hispanic respondents accede to a racial identification they wouldn't ordinarily use and will select "white" as the all-time choice among a crop of incongruous choices. Sánchez herself identifies every bit mestiza, a term Mexicans apply to refer to someone with mixed Indigenous and European heritage. Her parents, by dissimilarity, always chosen themselves Mexican, but on her nascency certificate their race was marked every bit "white."
Nevertheless, the data does tell us something. When information technology comes to the Hispanic South Texans most likely to identify as white—or least likely to identify as people of color—there's a fascinating generational dynamic. Younger, light-skinned Hispanic locals have grown up amid a sophisticated dialogue nigh race and power. They tend to be more liberal than their parents and grandparents, and many uncertainty whether identifying as people of colour sufficiently acknowledges their privilege. Recently, when Sánchez helped her 19-year-old daughter fill up out college applications, her daughter listed her race as white on a form that included a Hispanic or Latino option. "Mom, I feel actually weird checking off 'Latina/Hispanic' considering I am just so white-looking," she told Sánchez. "I don't feel threatened [by racism]."
Older Hispanic Texans, many of whom survived intense discrimination, did non grow up around the sorts of letters of racial pride familiar to their middle-aged children. Those who came of age in the start half of the 1900s, in particular, can remember a time when "Mexican" was frequently used every bit a slur. The vicious negative connotations led many to avoid the term. They also grew upwardly at a time when assimilation and patriotism went hand in paw. Villarreal, who is in her sixties, told me she feels conflicted well-nigh her identity, just her cousin Xavier, who is 75, was blunter when I interviewed him for Pol last year. "You lot young folks all desire to phone call people Hispanic, Latino, white, chocolate-brown, Black, green, any," he told me. "When nosotros were growing upwardly, nobody was a Hispanic, Latino, Latina, brown, whatsoever of that. Everybody was an American. I'm nonetheless an American here."
Of course, the history of families similar the Villarreals goes back much further than the twentieth century. Fifty-fifty when Texas was function of Mexico, people living in Tejas who could claim to be white were the only ones who enjoyed basic ceremonious rights.
Most two hundred years ago, Javier Wallace's Black ancestors were trafficked into the Mexican region and so known every bit Coahuila y Tejas, somewhere near mod-day Austin. They had come from the American South in chains, enslaved by Anglo-American settlers who were office of the empresario Stephen F. Austin's project to colonize northeastern United mexican states. Today Wallace—who simply earned a PhD in education at the University of Texas at Austin— leads workshops about the ways in which white Latinos benefit from white supremacy. While his mother's roots in Texas are older than the country itself, Wallace also has Latin American heritage—his father is from Panama.
Wallace observes that Mexican Americans in South Texas take been legally classified as white for hundreds of years and have fought for that identification. In colonial United mexican states, race was legally determined, and its attendant rights enforced, through the casta organisation, which delineated a whole host of categories. A famous oil painting from the eighteenth century depicts cartoons of xvi unions: The child of a Spaniard and an "Indian" was a mestizo; the child of a mestizo and a Spaniard was a castizo; the child of a Spaniard and a Black person was a "mulato" (today an offensive term for a mixed-race person). Black Mexicans were at the bottom of the ladder and vulnerable to enslavement. White Mexicans of direct Spanish descent were at the top. This strict hierarchy meant that almost anyone who could pass as Spanish would practise so.
When Tejas became Texas, at the terminate of the Mexican-American War, the casta system gave way to the legalized white supremacy in the U.S. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in Mexico City in 1848, famously established the new edge on the Rio Grande. It also guaranteed that Mexican citizens living on lands newly annexed past the U.S. would be given the full rights of citizens, including the right to own property. In the slave state of Texas, that guarantee dictated their racial classification: onetime Mexican citizens would be considered white.
In the decades that followed, the U.S. census would record all onetime Mexican citizens that way. Thousands of Mexican Americans fought for the Confederacy (including one of my ancestors, who was conscripted into a patrol on the outskirts of Laredo—a source of shame for my family today). After the Civil War, Mexicans, while discriminated against, even so enjoyed certain privileges in the Texas of the Jim Crow era. Langston Hughes, the famed Black poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote that when he traveled through the land past runway in the twenties, he slicked back his hair with pomade to mimic the Mexican manner pop in that day. At the ticket station, Hughes would go to the "Whites Only" waiting room and say "Dame un boleto Pullman a Chicago" ("Requite me a Pullman ticket to Chicago"). Assertive Hughes to be Mexican, officials allowed him to lath the "Whites Simply" section.
In 1930 "Mexican" would appear for the first fourth dimension equally an answer to the census's race question. (There was no ethnicity question.) Hispanic activists, including many veterans of World War I, gathered in Corpus Christi to form the League of United Latin American Citizens to antechamber against the change and to secure ceremonious rights for Mexican Americans. When I talked to Wallace, he slipped into an impression of early on LULAC organizers and other advocacy groups: "We'd rather be the 'other white' than Blackness people. We'll advocate for that." By the 1940 census, "Mexican" had disappeared as a racial category, Hispanic Americans were back to legally self-identifying as white, and LULAC had established itself as ane of the most influential ceremonious rights organizations in the country. (LULAC has evolved from its early on mission of maintaining the social privileges of whiteness and today champions multiculturalism and racial equity.)
Despite their white classification on the census, Mexican Americans did face segregation—both de jure and de facto—in settings ranging from schools to restaurants to workplaces. In addition to the daily humiliation of legal discrimination, hundreds of Mexican Americans were lynched in Texas. In 1910 Antonio Rodríguez, a twenty-yr-one-time Mexican migrant worker, was tied to a tree in Rocksprings, 140 miles west of San Antonio, and burned alive. In 1918 a group of Texas Rangers, U.S. Army cavalry soldiers, and cattle ranchers descended on a Mexican American outpost in Porvenir, 175 miles southeast of El Paso on the Rio Grande. They ripped more than than a dozen men and boys from their beds and executed them on a bluff over the river.
The imminent danger of racist violence that Mexicans faced in Texas for much of the twentieth century encouraged many to distance themselves from Mexican identity. "You have to sympathize that the discussion 'Mexican' was in some ways a slur," Daniel Arreola, a professor emeritus at Arizona Country University and the author of the cultural geography Tejano South Texas, reiterated. Villarreal said that when she attended Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State Academy), in San Marcos, in the seventies, other students advised her to call herself Spanish, not Mexican. Some even urged her to decline any association with Mexican ethnicity and identify every bit American.
My grandmother, whose parents immigrated from Monterrey, in northeastern Mexico, has told me stories about growing up in San Antonio during the Jim Crow era. In the fifties, my grandfather, a Mexican from Laredo with blue optics and peel so fair his friends teasingly chosen him "bolillo" (a blazon of white staff of life), began courting her. Their options for dates were limited: at that time signs hung over many film theaters and restaurants stating "We Serve Whites But, No Mexicans or Spanish." The pair's appearance—my grandma'southward skin is likewise alabaster—usually wasn't enough to insulate them from legally enforced white supremacy.
Except for the times it was. My grandmother's parents ran a factory that made soda bottles. After school she would go to soda fountains, where the drinks oft bubbled in containers her family had fabricated. At her favorite fountain, there were two entrances: ane for white customers, and a shabby side archway for Blackness patrons. My grandmother e'er used the "Whites Only" door.
Terminal year, I asked her what door her cousin Mariano used. Mariano's skin was a deep brownish, and his confront bore the proud cheekbones common to Native peoples of this continent. Were he alive today, few would call him white. But in forties-era Texas, he always used the "Whites Only" entrance. "I gauge even if he wasn't sure he was white," my grandma told me, "he knew he was not Black."
The twelvemonth 2020, in all its foul intensity, unleashed a sort of identity crunch in Southward Texas. For years, in the day-to-mean solar day lives of many Tejanos in places like Laredo and Rio Grande Metropolis, labels merely weren't necessary. Townspeople were, after all, then like. Kids grew up visiting grandparents in Mexico and listening to rancheras. Almost everyone spoke Castilian or was bilingual. At that place was no real need for S Texans to detect words to depict themselves because their neighbors understood, naturally, who they were.
Simply the question of race arrived in South Texas similar a heat wave during the protests against the murder of George Floyd last year. On a sweltering day in tardily May, a group of a hundred demonstrators, most of whom were young Mexican Americans, marched on Laredo's city hall. They carried signs declaring Hispanic-Blackness solidarity ("Tu Lucha Es Mi Lucha: Your Struggle Is My Struggle") and "Black Lives Thing."
As the protest proceeded, Melissa Castro, a 28-year-old English teacher at i of the city'southward public loftier schools, who was non at the rally, posted a picture on Instagram. It was minimalist: a photo with banner text reading "All Lives Matter." The reaction from her friends was firsthand and severe. One adult female, whom Castro had known almost her entire life, sent her a message saying she should take information technology down. That friend launched into a diatribe against the lasting legacy of slavery and the ongoing oppression of Black people. But ultimately, she centered on ane point, repeated multiple times: "You are non white."
When we met for the beginning time in a hotel entrance hall most downtown Laredo, Castro spoke with the lucidity and patience of an educator, slipping betwixt languages, equally many in Laredo do. She joked that if someone from a northern state met her, they'd probably call her Mexican. Merely she was clear she doesn't see herself in that way. She's American.
Castro told her friend the same matter and kept the picture up. That day, the friend blocked Castro on all social media. The two oasis't spoken since. Others I met across the Rio Grande Valley told me similar stories: Barrera, the one-time Starr County Republican chair, said that his babyhood neighbor of a sudden refused to talk to him this fall. "What did I do, señora?" he asked her. "Estás con Trump," she replied.
Race lonely does not determine how an individual votes. But it is impossible to empathise the politics of Texas without reckoning with its racial history. The state was a reliable blue stronghold until the sixties, when Democrats, once the party of the Confederacy and Jim Crow, began to embrace civil rights, alienating some non-Hispanic white voters. By the nineties, virtually of the state had turned red, while S Texas remained a blue fourth dimension capsule, one of the last remnants of a Democratic S. The region was, and is, dominated by a collection of political machines—each part of the so-called patrón system—and in this arrangement, almost everyone, even those who personally identify as Republican, runs for local office as a Democrat.
Concluding fall, every bit some of those traditional ties seemed to fray, Bruni, the Webb County Democratic chair, said she read about Democrats accusing conservatives of "trying to exist white." Bruni is plenty disappointed with her neighbors who voted Republican in 2020. Just she doesn't think they fabricated that selection considering of whatsoever sort of identity crisis. "I'm no sociologist; I have to go by what I know and what I saw in this entrada," Bruni said. "And we [Democrats] made a big fault."
Bruni said that Republican success in South Texas came down to reaching the community on the ground. Republican candidates and volunteers "were knocking on doors; they were having asadas; they were coming together people and talking to them," she said. "And nosotros weren't." Because of the pandemic, Bruni received instructions from the state Autonomous leadership to prioritize outreach via phone calls, texts, and social media. Her team diligently contacted Tejanos remotely. But, she said, Democrats didn't have comprehensive messaging, and the distance that grew between organizers and locals fabricated the party blind to the anxieties growing amid many in the expanse.
Half an hour or so south of Laredo lies the gorgeous small town of San Ygnacio. On bluffs overlooking the light-green banks of the Rio Grande, Spanish-style colonial houses and walls have stood for almost two hundred years. Bruni used to visit regularly. When it came fourth dimension to campaign, she considered San Ygnacio a shoo-in for Biden: the town'due south historic buildings would be threatened by Trump'south wall project. "But what I didn't take into consideration is the fact that that little town depends very, very, very much on the oil and gas manufacture," she said. "And while Democrats were telephone-banking with a bland listing of letters, Republicans were knocking on every single door and telling people that . . . if they don't vote for Trump, they're going to be [jobless and] homeless."
By focusing on ethnicity in their pitch to voters and assuming that demographics alone would conduct the party to victory, Democrats ignored that selfhood in S Texas is also shaped by the geography and economic system of the region. Many jobs at that place depend on the oil and gas industry, ranching and farming, and police force enforcement, including Customs and Edge Protection.
South Texas is affected by poverty and a dearth of opportunity for education and employment. In 2015 the 5 southernmost counties along the border, from Zapata (dwelling house to San Ygnacio) to Cameron (surrounding Brownsville), were the 5 poorest in the state, each with about 35 percent of residents living below the poverty line. Locals take very seriously whatsoever new policies—discouraging fracking, "defunding" the constabulary, or reducing immigration enforcement—that might threaten precious jobs.
Voters' identities are also shaped past the social realities of the region. At Dominicus mass, South Texas priests inveigh against abortion. (Although Bruni is anti-abortion, she felt she had to find a new church afterward the priest at her quondam i chosen Democrats "babe killers" from the pulpit and encouraged the congregation to vote for Trump.)
Castro said Democrats prioritized the wrong sort of pitch, which motivated her to vote for Trump in 2020 though she hadn't in 2016. They tried to appeal to her equally someone who cared only nearly her Mexican heritage or the plight of undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers, she believed, instead of as a voter interested in issues such every bit border security and the economy. "It felt like they were pandering," she said. Other swing voters I interviewed over a period of months stressed similar opinions: their choices were motivated by policing and energy policies, non by pluralistic and humanitarian appeals. Peña-Garza, the Hidalgo County Republican chair, said Hispanic South Texans, who have long been conservative, "have get liberated" to vote on their long-held beliefs. "People have been bullied into voting Democrat. If you lot got involved [in conservative politics], people said, 'I'thou non going to give you this contract; I'm not going to give you this chore.' But I think the bullying has backfired. People are more empowered and courageous."
Peradventure no Democrat has courted Tejano voters more successfully than Henry Cuellar, the Due south Texas congressman who was born and raised in Laredo and whose parents immigrated from United mexican states. Cuellar voted in line with Trump 41 percentage of the fourth dimension, more often than all but iii members of the Democratic caucus, according to assay from the pop statistics blog FiveThirtyEight, and is regarded as one of the virtually bourgeois Democrats in the current House. He supports the oil and gas manufacture and law enforcement. Just even though he has won elections in the region since 1986 and held his seat in the House for ix terms, he says he's faced repudiation from his colleagues for voting in ways judged too conservative for someone representing a district that is almost 80 percent Hispanic.
"When I vote up hither [in D.C.], some of my Hispanic colleagues have told me, 'You've got to be careful about the manner you vote,' " Cuellar said. "I tell them, 'I remember I know my commune, and I think I know it better [than yous practise]. I don't want to tell you how to vote in California, New York, Miami, or wherever. But I'm doing what I think is right, listening to my folks.' "
Cuellar told me he doesn't believe the 2020 election results in South Texas marked a permanent "political realignment." But he does think Democrats need to improve their outreach and messaging in the region. Many voters there see New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, both avowed democratic socialists, as the loudest voices among Democrats and are turned off to the whole political party. Cuellar observed that even though Biden and many other Democrats rejected the calls to "defund the police force" embraced by a few nationally prominent members of the party'due south left fly, those messages seriously injured the political party's image in South Texas. There is some data to support this. Shor, the pollster, believes "defund the constabulary" messaging toll Democrats more votes among bourgeois and moderate Hispanic voters than any other single issue. Hispanic voters with more conservative views on crime and policing, his polling finds, shifted more toward Republicans this twelvemonth than Hispanic voters at large.
While Cuellar won reelection in 2020 past a margin of 58 percent to 39 percent, he lost ground: his Republican opponent gained 23 points compared with the incumbent's summit challenger in 2018. Cuellar told me that his outset step toward winning in 2022 will be fund-raising and spending more aggressively against Republican opponents. Terminal year, after putting upwards millions to narrowly fend off a primary claiming from human-rights lawyer Jessica Cisneros—who was backed past AOC and the Justice Democrats organisation—he spent merely most $150,000 campaigning in the general election.
In 2022 Cuellar volition again confront Cisneros, along with at least one other challenger from the left, community organizer Tannya Benavides. Concluding year, Sanders swept South Texas in the Autonomous presidential primary. Cisneros and Benavides are betting that a leftward pin—they've endorsed single-payer health intendance and railed against an economy rigged in favor of the rich—tin win over Tejanos, at to the lowest degree in the chief. No thing who wins, the victor will know he or she can no longer bank on winning a general election race purely because a "D" appears next to his or her name on the ballot.
There are three main theories on what's driving Tejano voters' shift toward Republicans. One, embraced in part by Cuellar, is that the movement toward Trump, who was uniquely attractive to some Tejano voters, was a fluke. Many down-ballot Democrats won a larger percentage of the vote in South Texas than Biden did. Tejanos I spoke with across the Rio Grande Valley—male person and female—were attracted specifically to Trump's brutish and unapologetic masculinity, his adulthood. He besides had a remarkable ability to attain people who felt left behind in an elite-driven economical system. And he benefited from the conclusion by Democrats to entrada by phone and text rather than in person. For all these reasons, some believe the 2020 results are unlikely to be repeated in 2022.
The other two hypotheses, however, suggest the party faces a more challenging future. According to Shor, the Democratic base of operations has shifted recently in ways that might be pain information technology amidst Hispanic voters across the country. In the past four years, Democrats have cocky-consciously invested heavily in the political priorities of progressive, well-paid, highly educated Americans who live in large cities and suburbs. Often maligned every bit "woke" politics, tacking left socially has helped Democrats attract and energize young white liberals, while at the same time alienating conservative and moderate Hispanic and, to some extent, Black Americans. While the Republican gains in Due south Texas were large enough to flip entire counties, Hispanic neighborhoods across the country—from Eastward San Jose, California, to S Tucson, Arizona—also shifted toward the GOP, even as Democrats maintained comfortable leads in the final totals. The political party historically has needed more than sixty percentage of the Hispanic electorate to win on the national level. If it is losing conservative Hispanic voters, it could be facing an extinction-level event.
The last theory does not portend doom for national Democrats simply is nevertheless dour news for the party's chances of flipping Texas. Even if Hispanic voters across the state largely stay blue, Tejanos, like Cubanos in Miami, may be outliers: "The Rio Grande Valley is just super weird," in Shor's words. Though the language of "trying to be white" is crude and ascribes intent that may or may non exist, it'due south clear that political anxieties were powerful plenty to overcome traditional party allegiances in 2020. And that suggests that Tejano identity is changing. Tejanos, like the Irish Americans before them, may continue to align more than closely with the interests shared by their Anglo neighbors than with those of immigrants and people of color.
Regardless of which theory proves almost prescient, the Texas GOP is enjoying a ripe opportunity to court a large new bloc of voters. On a Sunday this spring, as the borderlands began to experience the first inklings of the stifling heat of summer, Tyler Kraus, the onetime chairman of the Webb Canton Republican political party, drove out to South Laredo to canvass. It was well earlier he'd typically start going door-to-door in a nonelection yr, and even though he wouldn't be campaigning for Trump that day, he wore a ruby-red "Keep America Slap-up" hat and was primed to get ugly looks. Neighborhoods in South Laredo are near 100 percent Hispanic, and their residents are some of the poorest in the metropolis.
The start question Kraus, who is Mexican American on his mother'south side, had for those who opened their doors was "¿Inglés o español?" Then he'd launch into a pitch in the prospective voter'due south preferred language, usually framed around protecting the Second Amendment or opposing abortion. "We're basically trying to tell them that the Republican political party aligns with their values," he told me.
That day, Kraus received hardly any negative feedback; even those uninterested in his pitch were polite when they turned him away. "A lot of people I talk to are several generations removed from their grandparents who moved from United mexican states," he said. "They've formed the mentality of American citizens, and then they don't have the things Trump said [about immigrants] as offensive."
Trump and other Republican elected officials have made repeated pilgrimages to the Rio Grande Valley since the 2020 election. In tardily June, the onetime president toured a portion of the unfinished border wall in Pharr, simply east of McAllen, with state leaders including Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. A solitary elected official from the Valley joined the cadre: Javier Villalobos, the Republican mayor-elect of McAllen who earlier that month had sidestepped Fox Business organisation host Stuart Varney's questions about the edge wall, declaring the matter a federal consequence across his purview.
The morning Trump was set to arrive, a hundred or so of his supporters—a mix of Anglos and Tejanos—gathered as a welcoming party underneath a highway overpass well-nigh the Edinburg aerodrome. Some draped themselves in American flags, while others waved Trump signs. A few even paraded backside paper-thin cutouts of Trump. Shortly later on the former president wrapped a press conference, in which he slammed immigrants as drug traffickers, Barrera shared images of the upshot on his Facebook folio.
A few months before, at his house in Rio Grande Urban center, Barrera had explained to me why many in the Valley didn't observe Trump'due south agitating at the border, or his statements calling Mexicans rapists and criminals, personally insulting. Barrera launched into a diatribe distinguishing himself from those who cross the border illegally; while he has compassion for people fleeing harsh circumstances, he said, some in S Texas call edge crossers "mojaditos"—the Castilian discussion for "wetback" (admitting in its less harsh, diminutive form).
I pressed him: Would not-Hispanic white Texans as easily draw the distinction between him and recent immigrants? Barrera doubled downwards. "I think when people say they don't like Mexicans, it means a Mexican denizen, a Mexican national, someone who crossed illegally," he said. "So, when someone says they don't like Mexicans, I don't think information technology ways me or you."
Jack Herrera is an contained reporter who covers clearing and race.
This article originally appeared in the October 2021 issue ofTexas Monthlywith the headline "Why Democrats Are Losing Tejanos." Subscribe today .
Source: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/democrats-losing-texas-latinos-trump/
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