by Gail Collins
But wait. That’s what Barack Obama’s health care reform was all about. And in Congress, Texas was overwhelmingly unenthusiastic. Rationing!
PART FOUR
WHERE
WE’RE GOING
12
We’ve Seen the Future,
and It’s Texas
“A bunch of drunks and crooks
and slaveholding imperialists”
Lionel Sosa, the man who’s credited with showing Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush how to woo the Hispanic vote, is sitting in a very nice café in San Antonio, mulling over the Alamo.
“History is always told by the winner,” he says. “Mexicans were the bad guys and Texans were the heroes. That’s the way everyone learned it.”
Sosa was born in San Antonio on the Hispanic west side of town, and for years he has been trying to get hold of a copy of the book on Texas history he read in the eighth grade in 1952. “Texas History in Pictures—it was done comic-book style,” he says, nibbling at his mussels in white wine sauce. “I know I didn’t imagine it because it made such an impression on me. The Mexicans all looked like bad banditos.”
A soft-spoken marketer who spent the early 2012 presidential primary season trying to sell Hispanic voters on Newt Gingrich, Sosa lives in a world that is mainly made up of Democrats, and he is good at making his point without raising hackles. When it comes to the Alamo, others are less diplomatic. “They used to take us there when we were schoolchildren,” the activist Rosie Castro told the New York Times. “They told us how glorious that battle was. When I grew up I learned that the ‘heroes’ of the Alamo were a bunch of drunks and crooks and slaveholding imperialists who conquered land that didn’t belong to them. But as a little girl I got the message—we were losers. I can truly say that I hate that place and everything it stands for.”
I haven’t mentioned that Rosie Castro is the mayor’s mother. San Antonio is a really interesting city.
“TO THIS DAY I don’t know if my grandmother came here legally or illegally,” says Joaquín Castro, a state representative from San Antonio. His twin brother, Julián, is the mayor. They are in their mid-thirties, graduates of Stanford and Harvard Law School, sons of a single mother whose own mother came from Mexico as an orphan and only made it to the fourth grade. “She was a babysitter, cook,” Castro says of his grandmother. “She never owned a car, never owned a house.” But she raised a daughter who made it through college, became a leader of La Raza Unida, the Mexican American civil rights party, had an affair with another community organizer, and gave birth to two wildly overachieving sons.
The brothers—who look so much alike there is at least one verifiable instance in which they switched places to accommodate a tight schedule of appearances—went to public schools. Joaquín says he started his educational career at Edgewood, which was so poor it became the test case over which several generations of litigation on the funding of Texas education has been fought. “When I went to Stanford I had only been out of San Antonio half a dozen times,” he recalled.
State Representative Castro was sitting in a bare-bones office in his district on this particular day, amid the computers and coffee cups, while his youthful aides plotted a possible congressional race. His brother the mayor, who everybody is talking about as perhaps the first Hispanic governor of Texas, was out of town on business. “The year before we went,” he said, recalling his college career, “my mom made less than $20,000, and she’s sending two sons to university. My dad bought us the cheapest plane tickets he could find. We stopped twice.” When he went to register for classes, Joaquín didn’t know how to work the computers because the ones at his high school had been too basic to include a mouse: “I couldn’t move the cursor with the keyboard, so I picked up the mouse and started moving the balls with my hand.” Nearly two decades later, he’s still obsessing about a friend he made at Stanford who turned out to have taken twelve Advanced Placement classes. (“I think I took two out of the three AP classes at my high school. He’d taken twelve. The guy had twelve.”)
But things worked out. Really, really well, in fact.
San Antonio, the seventh largest city in the United States, is already majority Hispanic, moving toward two-thirds. It’s a good example of how varied the portrait of Mexican American Texas can be. While a great many of the Latino residents are poor and undereducated, there are also rich refugees from the violence in Mexico, tootling happily around their gated communities under the watchful eye of security patrols, and plenty of middle-class professionals. Many of them, like the Castros, had grandparents who fled Mexico during the long-running revolution of 1910. Sosa’s parents were also among those émigrés. “As a consequence, they didn’t have a good image of Mexico,” said Sosa. “But they said, never forget your history. Never, never lose your language.”
The language thing is a little delicate. “The city I’ve lived in that has the highest proportion of Hispanic residents who don’t speak Spanish is San Antonio,” says Steve Murdock, the demographer and Rice professor. That should be a comfort to people who are afraid that Mexican Americans won’t assimilate as easily as immigrants whose homeland was an ocean away. But it’s problematic for young people who have to celebrate their ethnic pride in English, particularly for those who work in fields where they need to interact with an older generation that expects to be communicated with in Spanish. Like . . . politicians. “I understand it better than I speak it,” said Joaquín Castro. His brother the mayor is preparing for whatever campaigns his future holds by improving his conversational skills. As the New York Times reported, “Rosie Castro’s son is now being taught Spanish by a woman named Marta Bronstein.”
“These folks don’t want a wall”
The Castro story is not all that different, in many ways, from that of Barack Obama. (If the president’s mother had wound up in San Antonio instead of Hawaii, her story would undoubtedly have involved a few picket lines at the Alamo.) And it’s hard to find any part of America that doesn’t boast of a humble-roots-to-Harvard political success story. But trust Texas to have twins. Anything worth doing is worth doing large.
It’s going to take a whole lot more than the Castro brothers, however, to get Texas into the future. Before long, this is going to be a majority Hispanic state, and there’s no way the political or business leadership reflects that fact. “There’s a lot of nodding heads, ‘Yeah, it’s happening.’ But people don’t understand the impact,” said Robert Sanborn, the children’s advocate from Houston. “Maybe it’s just human nature that we think things are always going to be the same as they are now.”
Texas is already a majority minority state—whites compose less than 50 percent of the population. But there’s a second shift coming, in which Hispanics will be the majority all by themselves. Steve Murdock, the Rice University professor, says it will happen by 2030; some Latinos think it will be much sooner. So there are two Texases—the cowboy/oil baron/Rick Perry version that the rest of the country instinctively envisions, even when we know better, and the demographic one, which is mainly young and Latino.
“We live in a bipolar state,” says Castro.
Racial tolerance has not historically been one of Texas’s strong suits, but the surging number of Hispanics does not seem to have made the average Anglo Texan particularly crazy. (Mexican Americans have often been discriminated against, but they have also generally been regarded as white by the establishment. The Texas legislature actually passed a resolution saying so in the 1940s.) While Tea Party wall-builders are amply represented in the Texas Republican Party, the general tenor in the state is nothing like the anti-immigrant paranoia elsewhere along the border. “I’ve spoken several times in Arizona and each time I feel like I’m going back about twenty years in Texas,” says Murdock. “I don’t think Texas is anything like Arizona.”
During one of the first Republican presidential debates, when Rick Perry was trying to make his name as a wild man of the Republican right, the Texas governor ran into fire for h
is support of a Texas law granting in-state college tuition to high school graduates who were undocumented immigrants. Perry blinked, looking a little surprised as the rest of the pack laced into him for condoning illegal behavior and possibly “amnesty.” He had, after all, just been doing what he usually does, which is to follow the money. The Texas business community, worried about the shortage of college graduates in the workforce, was behind the in-state tuition plan, which passed the legislature by near-unanimous votes in both chambers. Dick Armey ran into the same problem with some of his Tea Party rivals, who pointed out that he had called the whole wall-building strategy “just stupid.”
“Unlike Arizona, we’ve had this big border area that’s been pretty well populated since the nineteenth century,” said former lieutenant governor Bill Hobby. “Those folks don’t want a wall. The farther you are from the border, the more you want a wall.”
During the 2011 state legislative session, a ton of Tea Party-inspired bills on the subject of immigration were introduced, including a much-publicized proposal by the famous Representative Debbie Riddle which would have made hiring an “unauthorized alien” punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000—with an exception for cleaning women and gardeners. There was a bill to deny undocumented residents access to state colleges and universities, a bill making English the official state language, and another by Riddle to require state agencies to report how much it costs them to provide services for the undocumented. But only one got very far—a proposal to outlaw “sanctuary cities” in which police are prohibited into inquiring into the immigration status of arrestees. Perry—generally so weirdly moderate on immigration issues that actually mattered—declared resurrecting it to be a matter so critical that he put it on the agenda as an emergency matter for the legislature’s special budget session. It died in a house-senate squabble, leading Tea Party groups to call for a second special session just for the sanctuary city bill.
Even Rick Perry wasn’t that crazy.
“Illegal immigration is a big problem,” wrote Rick Casey in the Houston Chronicle as the governor and the Republican legislators were blaming each other for the bill’s demise. “Sanctuary cities are not, as is indicated by the fact that Perry couldn’t name one in Texas.”
What Perry did get, which was far more important to his fellow Republicans, was the toughest law on voter identification in the nation, prohibiting anyone from getting access to a ballot unless he or she had either a driver’s license or a very limited number of other types of government-issued photo IDs. (A license to carry a concealed gun was good enough for the law’s backers. A university student ID wasn’t.)
“Voter fraud is a problem,” wrote Casey, “but mostly through mail ballots that don’t require IDs to be shown.”
Voter identification laws are almost always Republican initiatives, since the people most likely to be confused or frightened away from the polls tend to be poorer, and Democratic. “It’s a calculated effort to diminish Hispanic turnout,” said Joaquín Castro. “They say 90 percent of people have ID cards. But you’re trying to shave off the 8 to 10 percent who don’t.”
Texas’s low cost of living and doing business is directly related to its huge supply of cheap labor, much of it Hispanic. Cynical minds might suggest that the state’s political and business establishment celebrates its growing population of Hispanic workers; but as to the growing population of Hispanic voters . . . not so much.
“They know the demographics”
Lionel Sosa got his real start from the first-Republican-senator-since-Reconstruction, John Tower. “John Tower called me out of the blue,” Sosa recounts. “He said, ‘Lionel, I’m going to be in town for a couple of days. Take me to the beer joints on the west side of town. I want to talk to some guys.’ ” Sosa made sure he had a really good list of the Hispanic working-class drinking places, but in touring the neighborhoods with Tower, “I discovered all kinds of Mexican bars I never knew.” Tower was a familiar face in many of them. He must have enjoyed the evening, because he hired Sosa to work on getting him the Mexican American vote. Tower won a sliver of a majority over Democratic congressman Robert Krueger in 1978, and Sosa was more than rewarded for his efforts: “In three months I had Coors Beer, Bacardi, Coca-Cola. My little ad agency quadrupled and it totally changed my life.” Then Tower called again and said, “Lionel, there’s a fundraiser in Dallas. I want you to come and meet somebody.”
That was how Sosa met Ronald Reagan, who told him that “Latinos are Republicans. They just don’t know it yet.” As Sosa remembers it, Reagan asked him what values his parents taught him, and when Sosa replied, “Hard work, faith in God, and love of family,” Reagan said that was the GOP all the way. “Figure out how to tie me to those values,” he directed.
Now, Democrats might point out that they tend to believe in hard work, faith in God, and love of family, too. Plus health care, generous aid to education, and affirmative action to make sure minorities can get into good colleges. But you work with what you’ve got.
The relationship between the Republican Party and Texas Hispanics peaked in 1994, when George W. Bush won the governorship with 49 percent of the Hispanic vote. “He went out and asked for the vote. Nobody else has come close,” said Sosa. The relationship foundered on the shoals of Tea Party cries for border walls or, in the case of former presidential candidate Herman Cain, a border moat full of alligators. The Republican majority in Congress helped seal the deal with its opposition to the Dream Act, which would allow young people who were brought here as undocumented children to qualify for citizenship by serving in the military or attending college. It’s a variation on the bill that Rick Perry thought was so natural to sign for Texas—until he tried running for national office.
These days in Texas, the growing Hispanic population tends Democratic, and it’s pretty much the only hope the Democrats can look to. The party is now on its back, as flat as a flounder, and yearning for the time when the majority Latino population will send it back into power. How could their star not be rising? The state is already majority minority. Its population is much younger than the national average, and young people tend to vote Democrat. The cities are growing and the conservative rural towns are shrinking. The suburbs are strongly Republican, but the newest suburban arrivals are likely to be Hispanic, too. “You got a lot of hysteria among my colleagues,” State Senator Ellis said cheerfully of the Republicans. “They know the demographics.”
But for the Democrats, the big problem is that Hispanic Texans who are registered voters are even less likely to go to the polls than registered Anglos—who are not exactly beating a path to the ballot box. And no matter how the sponsors parse it, those voter ID bills are intended to make sure that continues to be the case.
So far, despite its huge Hispanic population, Texas has only elected one Latino to statewide office—Dan Morales of San Antonio, who was the attorney general back in the 1990s. This is a story Democrats don’t talk about all that often. In 2002 Morales ran for governor, losing the primary to Tony Sanchez, a Laredo businessman. Then he was indicted on twelve counts of tax and mail fraud, conspiracy, and lying on the loan application for his house. He eventually pled guilty to mail fraud and filing a false tax return.
Tony Sanchez doesn’t come up in Democratic conversations all that often either. He turned out to combine the Democrats’ fondest dreams (Mexican American/really, really rich) with the party’s worst nightmares (terrible, terrible candidate). But Henry Cisneros always does. “I believe if Henry Cisneros had run in the early nineties, the trajectory of Texas politics would have changed,” said Joaquín Castro. “We haven’t had a popular Hispanic run for governor or senator, ever. If Henry had run back then it really would have changed things.”
Cisneros was mayor of San Antonio from 1981 to 1989, the first Hispanic to run a major American city. He was smart and issue-oriented and very rooted in his community—to this day, his principal residence is a modest house on the west side th
at his grandfather once owned. People believed he would be governor. Or senator. Or vice president, in which case, inevitably, the first Hispanic in the Oval Office. “Ann Richards came to me and said, ‘I won’t run for governor if you run,’ ” Cisneros says now. “But I said no, I have personal things to deal with . . . It’s yours.”
He quit politics and went into the asset-management business, and although he put in a tour as Bill Clinton’s secretary of housing and urban development, Cisneros never ran for office again. Part of the personal things he had to deal with was the illness of his son, who was born with a serious heart defect. But the big, whopping personal thing was Cisneros’s stupendously messy affair with his chief fundraiser, which became public and the source of a family crisis and several long-running though ultimately meaningless federal investigations.
“It should have been Henry,” said Lionel Sosa, talking about when Texas would get its first Hispanic governor. “Henry cares for the community more than anybody I know. But he screwed up.”
Julián Castro is sometimes referred to as the great Hispanic hope who “won’t screw up.” But the question of when Mexican Americans will get their natural share of top offices is not just a matter of finding the right candidates. It also involves the Anglos who still make up a majority of the state’s voting population and the politicians who currently run the state in Austin. How much do they want to let Latinos have the biggest prizes? After the 2010 census, Texas was awarded four new congressional districts thanks to its enormous—and largely Hispanic—population growth. The Republican-dominated legislature promptly drew the new districts in a way that made only one ripe for minority takeover. The whole issue sparked a raft of court cases, but the message was pretty clear. The Hispanic community “went forward in good faith,” said Steve Murdock. “And I think they feel like they got nothing.”
