Why Redistricting Is Important to the Chicano Community in Fort Worth

By Fernando Florez

*Edited and modified by Jesús Manuel Mena Garza for Chicano y Que?

Special to Nuestra Voz de Tarrant County

  

        Shortly after the end of World War II one of my friend's father returned home to Fort Worth after his military service. A few days later he and a friend went to a restaurant downtown. They sat down at a table to order and soon a waiter came over and told them: "We don't serve Mexicans." With his great sense of humor, my friend's father replied to the waiter: "We weren't going to order one" and left the restaurant. Being discriminated against and disrespected in other ways was not uncommon for Chicanos in this and other parts of Texas and the Southwest. But in part because of the military contributions of Chicanos and Tejanos to the United States going as far back as the American Revolutionary War, which have not ever been fully recognized to this day, injustices such as this one were catching the public's eye and the winds of change were already blowing.

        I came to work at General Dynamics here in Fort Worth as an electronics technician/ technical writer after my Army discharge in 1968. There has been some change here since that time, but what is still prevalent is the same attitude that those with the political power in the Rio Grande Valley had when I was growing up: Maintain the status quo by keeping the same people or those of their ilk, who opposed sharing political power with Chicanos, in control. I never thought that was right then nor that it's right now--no matter how it's spinned, it's simply wrong to keep Chicanos or any other group from having their voice heard-- and it's the reason I am involved in redistricting.  

        Redistricting involves drawing electoral districts' boundaries. Because of a long history of discrimination, especially in the South, Texas and the Southwest, and to comply with the Voting Rights Act, boundaries must be drawn in a manner that will protect the voting rights of minorities. Here in Texas, there is redistricting of U. S. Congressional districts and of state Senate and House of Representative districts, by the legislature. (Briefly, in the North Texas area, the legislature has drawn districts that minimize the chances for Chicanos to be elected to office, by diluting the impact of their votes, and some lawsuits are pending.)

        There is other information associated with redistricting that is significant: A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling has gutted part of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and as a result the Texas Voter I.D. law that was passed in the last session of the legislature (when there is no evidence that it was needed) will be implemented. The latter, an anti-minority voter suppression scheme, is being challenged in court by several Chicano groups and the U.S. Justice Department.

        I am focusing my discussion on Fort Worth redistricting, which is what I've been involved in for nearly twenty-five years. I am briefly reviewing what we've done in regards to both Fort Worth City Council and Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD) redistricting the last couple of years and what it looks like for the future as the battles continues.

        Fort Worth City Council redistricting: Fort Worth adopted an 8-1 single-member city council-mayor electoral system in 1977. Prior to that, in a typical election, the top nine votegetters--all of them usually lived in two of the most affluent areas of the city--were elected. They in turn selected the mayor. At that time the population of Fort Worth was approximately half of what it was in the 2010 census count. The Chicano population of Fort Worth was not very high then, but in the 2010 census the total population of the city was 742,765, with 34% of it Chicano; the Anglo-White population was 42, African-American 18% and other 6%. Between the last two census cycles, the only group that showed a percentage increase in population was Chicanos.

        Because Fort Worth prides itself as being a diverse city, we have been trying to convince the city council to change its electoral system to be more inclusive by drawing more than one district in which a Chicano has a chance of being elected.  

        Sure, we know that the Chicano population is somewhat scattered, and that it includes non-citizens in it, but if district lines are drawn properly it can be done. Two strong majority Chicano functional districts can easily be created by converting to a 10-1 electoral system and that was the focus of our redistricting effort early on, right after the 2010 census data came out. But it was an uphill battle from the start because the majority of city council members' main focus was to protect their self-interest, their turf, and the best way to do that was by keeping the same system in place. Any change to the electoral system would have to be first approved by the city council itself, or forced on them by collecting enough signatures on a petition, before it would go to the voters to decide the issue and amend the city's charter. Our petition drive campaign's rallying cry to force the city council to call an election was "Let the People Decide," but we couldn't muster enough public support. Very few people seem to care whether Chicanos have fair representation--except Chicanos.

        After that, we redrew new maps for an 8-1 electoral plan, focusing on creating a second strong functional majority Chicano district, in the city's south side (district 9). After some negotiation, some slight changes were made to the city's map, but not enough. Still left in the district were five precincts west of 8th Avenue; those precincts are 90% plus Anglo-White, Republican, (except Mistletoe Heights, Precinct 1076, which is more liberal and the vote is usually split between Democrats and Republicans in major elections), much more affluent, with a higher educational level and household income (at the middle to upper middle class level), and with higher property values. By contrast those precincts east of 8th Avenue, such as South Hemphill Heights, Worth Heights, and Rosemont, are majority Chicano in population; people there have a much lower educational level and household income and they vote for Democrats in major elections; the two areas have no "Communities of Interest." In other words, these two areas have nothing in common and should not be in the same council district. More affluent people, with more education and higher income, vote at higher rates, and in Fort Worth as a bloc for White-Anglo candidates, overwhelming minority candidates from the rest of the district. The precincts west of 8th Avenue have won every competitive election in District 9 since Fort Worth went to single-member districts in 1977. This is not conjecture, but based on the research we've done. We fought hard for our plans (three of them were submitted for consideration), but, unfortunately, lost that battle. Over our objection, the city adopted their plan on July 24, 2012 and submitted it to the U.S. Department of Justice for pre-clearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

        (In the city's plan, the total population in City Council District 9 was 91,140, with 57.72% of it Chicano. The total Chicano population percentage looks good on paper, but a clearer picture of City Council District 9 emerges after looking at the map more closely: The total estimated citizen population for the district using American Community Survey (ACS) data was 69,060; the estimated citizen population for non-Chicanos was 36,775. The total estimated Citizen Voting Age Population (CVAP) for the district was 46,540; the estimated non-Chicano CVAP was 31,360 and the estimated Chicano CVAP was 15,180. From this data, it can be seen that the Chicano population is young and some of it is non-citizen. Approximately two thirds of its voting age population is non-Chicano. Throw in the polarized, bloc voting west of 8th Avenue in the mix and it's no wonder that every contested election in the district has been won by an Anglo.)

        We objected to the city's plan with the Federal Justice Department, but without going into too much detail here, we knew our chances of prevailing were slim. On October 1, 2012, we and the city's attorney were notified that their plan was pre-cleared.

        So was putting up the fight we did worth it? Without a doubt, absolutely. First, Section 5 of the VRA is mainly about retrogression--not about a population that is increasing, such as Chicanos--and the maps we submitted show that if the city council had adopted one of them we would have created a second Chicano district in the south side. That leads us to Section 2 of the VRA, which places much stricter standards for the city to meet, but the burden of proof is ours. (Again, I couldn't possibly cover all of that in this short space.) As I write this, let’s just say that a lawsuit against the city is a strong possibility. Stay tuned.       

        Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD) redistricting: With respect to FWISD redistricting, we have also been fighting a tough and contentious battle for the same reason as city council redistricting: fair representation, commensurate to the Chicano population. With an approximately 62% Chicano student population in the district (the African-Americans student population was 23.28%, and Anglo-Whites nearly 12% out of approximately 82,000 students in the district during the last school year), we sought a third seat out of nine when the position of school board president elected-at-large was eliminated last year and an additional single-member district was created. Looking at the treatment of minority students historically here in Fort Worth, in other parts of the Texas, in the Deep South and in the Southwest and with the vast majority of school children in the district being Chicano, what was so unreasonable about drawing an additional Chicano majority district? We simply must have a stronger voice on the school board where policy affecting the future of our children is made. We are not racists as some of us have been called, but instead, we tried to right a wrong--having an unequal voice on the school board. After months of battling, a third Chicano leaning district was created and a Chicano was appointed to it; but neither District 8 nor District 9, the two Chicanos leaning districts which were newly redrawn were as strong as they should have been.

        The establishment fought us hard and helping them was our major daily newspaper, which unfairly took their side; we were badmouthed for "seeking more political power," as if that wasn't justified. With the increased xenophobia being directed against Chicanos everywhere we are seeing a higher level of polarized voting. That, and the nitpicking by one of the newspaper's writers and the editorial board over a period of time, and the money pumped into the race by the special interests against him, Juan Rangel, the incumbent, lost the runoff election by 23 votes on June 15, 2013. In my opinion, in District 8 the threat of having to raise large sums of money to mount viable campaigns dissuaded two genuine Chicano candidates from staying in the race for that seat. 

        The establishment is fighting us hard to keep Chicanos off the school board. Today, we have essentially one Chicano on the FWISD Board of Education. But the last chapter in this saga has not been written yet. Again, stay tuned.

-30-

*What changes did Jesús Garza make? He shortened the article by removing several paragraphs detailing segregation and disenfranchisement of the Chicano and Black community. Garza also replaced the word Hispanic or Spanish with Chicano. There was also a map of Fort Worth that was deleted.

The Legacy of 70’s San José Chicano Arts Center Examined at SJSU

Performance, Art and Activism, a panel discussion on the legacy of El Centro Cultural de la Gente, will be held Sept. 25 at 6 pm at San José State University. The event is free and open to the public at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Room 225/229. A reception will follow in the Cultural Heritage Center (Fifth Floor).

In 1973, El Centro Cultural de la Gente came to life in an abandoned storefront near First and San Carlos Streets — where the Federal Building now stands. The cultural center became the epicenter for Chicana and Chicano artistic and political activism during the turbulent 1970s. The panelists will elaborate how “El Centro” informed arts production in San José and beyond.

The panel members include:
Teresa Castellanos - Moderator: Teresa currently serves as the coordinator of Immigrant Relations and Integration Services for Santa Clara County’s Office of Human Relations. She has a 25-year history of working on immigration issues through government, labor and community based organizations such as Justice for Janitors and the Health Workers Union and Catholic Charities.

Mary Jane Solis: Mary Jane has been involved in arts organizations that promote social justice and continues to support Latino art and artists in our community. She is a founding member of MACLA (Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americano) and is the former vice chair of the City of San José Arts Commission where she championed multicultural arts development.

Felipe Rodríguez: Felipe has performed for more than 50 years. Coming from an amazing family of activists and performers, it was natural for Felipe to sing and play his guitar in church, on stage and on the picket line.

Adrian Tepehua Vargas: Active in Silicon Valley’s artistic and cultural movement for over 35 years as a theatre and film director, playwright, actor, musician, and producer. For 10 years he directed San José’s former Teatro de la Gente and was co- founder of El Centro Cultural de la Gente.

Elisa Marina Alvarado: Elisa is the founding member and Artistic Director of the 29-year-old Teatro Visión. She has been active in the Chicano movement for over 40 years as an actress, director and community organizer. Elisa has taught theater for Teatro Visión, San José State University, San Francisco State University and many community organizations.

The panel discussion will take place in conjunction with Jesús Manuel Mena Garza’s exhibition, A Chicano Photographer’s Journey: 1970 to the Present. Garza will give a presentation at 3 pm of his documentary images in the same room.

Location and Time:
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, SJSU
Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2013, Room 225/229, Second Floor
150 East San Fernando Street, San José, CA 95112
6 to 7:30 pm with reception to follow
Free and open to the Public

Sponsored by the MLK Library; SJSU School of Journalism and Mass Communication; the Cesar E. Chavez Community Action Center – SJSU Associated Students; Department of Mexican American Studies; and SJSU’s Chicano/Latino Faculty & Staff Association

The Demographic Dividend

Why the success of Latino faculty and students is critical.
 

Article by Anne-Marie Nuñez and Elizabeth Murakami-Ramalho

Photo by Jesús Manuel Mena Garza

In 2010, Maria Hernandez Ferrier was inaugurated as the first president of the new Texas A&M University campus in San Antonio. To celebrate the inauguration of a Latina college president, one of the few in the nation, a group of Latinas, including many local professors, took part in the formal procession. This group of women received special recognition, both during the ceremony and in the media. The city’s main newspaper, the San Antonio Express News, noted, “About 60 local Latina women who hold doctorates attended the ceremony in full academic regalia to support Ferrier and to show their numbers in the academic community.”

Latina faculty are rarely visible in this way. Only 4 percent of tenured or tenure-track female faculty members in the United States are Latina (78 percent are white, 7 percent are African American, and 7 percent are Asian American), and only 3 percent of female full professors are Latina. The gathering of Latina faculty at Ferrier’s inauguration illustrated the potential for a critical mass of Latinas to come together in one place to support one another in the academy. Dressed in full academic regalia, they represented the possibility of access to privileged positions in the professoriate. Indeed, some wide-eyed passersby who saw them lining up in the procession asked, “So, are you all really professors?” They were proof that Latinas, and Latinos more generally, can and do make it to the academy, despite their generally limited access to higher education opportunities, particularly baccalaureate and postbaccalaureate degrees.

Demographic Transformation
Although Latino enrollment in higher education has increased as the US Latino population has grown (Latinos now outnumber African Americans), more often than not Latinos begin their college education in community colleges or less selective four-year institutions—institutional types with lower persistence and completion rates in general. Moreover, the broader political, economic, and social climate in the United States has become increasingly hostile for Latinos as new policies opposed to immigrant rights, affirmative action, and ethnic studies programs have emerged. After the Arizona legislature passed a law (currently being challenged by the federal government) to broaden the capacity of state personnel to detain and request identification from any person perceived to be an illegal immigrant, several more states, including Alabama, launched initiatives to increase surveillance of immigrants and deny them public services, including K–12 and higher education. Affirmative action policies have been banned in some key states where Latinos are concentrated, leading to drops in application and enrollment rates at flagship and selective public universities.

Even when they are accepted to a university, Latinos are often denied opportunities to connect with their cultural backgrounds and to communicate in Spanish. Ethnic studies programs and courses, including Chicano studies, sometimes struggle for support and legitimacy. Arizona’s legislature has gone so far as to ban the teaching of ethnic studies in K–12 schools. This challenge to ethnic studies has been particularly targeted at Chicano studies, despite evidence that Latino students who participate in these programs actually have higher educational achievement than those who do not and high school graduation rates on par with those of their white counterparts.

Although educational research suggests that dual-language K–12 programs are effective in helping English learner (EL) students—defined as students who do not speak English well enough yet to be considered proficient—to learn languages and to improve in broader content areas such as math, these programs have been effectively prohibited in Arizona, California, and Massachusetts. Even when Latino EL students enter college, they often must enroll in remedial courses and struggle to achieve full literacy and academic success.

It is not surprising, then, that according to a recent Pew Hispanic Center survey, two-thirds of Latinos report that discrimination against Latinos in schools is a major social problem. Latinos mention schools more often than workplaces or other public places as sites of discrimination. A Pew Research Center survey suggests that Americans from all racial and ethnic groups currently believe that Latinos are the group that experiences the most social discrimination. Unfortunately, much research has shown that, as it has for African Americans, such discrimination can negatively affect Latinos’ academic achievement, engagement, and sense of belonging in K–12 and higher education.

Demographic Dividend
Although the number of Latino students in US higher education has increased in recent decades, and Latinos have now surpassed African Americans as the largest minority group in US higher education (currently constituting 22 percent of total enrollment), Latinos as a group still have the lowest educational attainment of any racial or ethnic group. According to Pew Hispanic Center data, only about 13 percent of Latinos age twenty-five and over hold college degrees (compared with 18 percent of African Americans, 31 percent of whites, and 50 percent of Asian Americans). Latinos consequently tend to work in low-skill occupations. Pew data show that only about half as many Latinos (19 percent) as whites (39 percent) are employed in management, science, engineering, law, education, entertainment, the arts, and health care.

This is sobering news, considering that by 2050, Latinos will represent the main source of population growth and are projected to make up 30 percent of the US population. Moreover, Latinos are overrepresented in the youth population: about 17 percent of Latinos, compared with 10 percent of non-Latino whites, are under the age of eighteen. In California and Texas, Latinos represent half of all public K–12 students.

Sociologist Marta Tienda contends that the increasing Latino youth population could offer this country a “demographic dividend,” contributing to future economic productivity as the overall US population ages. President Obama, sensitive to this issue, highlighted the importance of supporting Latinos when he authorized funding for the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics in 2010: “This is not just a Latino problem, this is an American problem.”

Education scholars Patricia Gandara and Frances Contreras, in the title of their 2009 book, coined the term “Latino education crisis.” During the past two decades, they and other pioneering higher education researchers—including Estela Bensimon, Sylvia Hurtado, Amaury Nora, Michael Olivas, Laura Rendon, and Daniel Solorzano—have documented the many barriers to postsecondary educational attainment for Latinos: limited academic preparation, difficulty navigating the college environment, financial concerns, exclusionary college climates. Latino college students tend to come from high schools with few resources to prepare students for college. Many are the first in their families to attend college, so they are sometimes unfamiliar with strategies for managing college responsibilities. Latino students also often are reluctant to take on loans, in part because of the financial and familial responsibilities they already have during college. They are more likely than other students to be employed and to work full time to finance their college education, so they may have less time to devote to their studies.

The broader political climate can also make it difficult for Latino students to find a sense of belonging in their college communities. Vulnerability to stereotypes about Latinos, such as those that are increasingly depicted in the media, can have a negative effect on Latino students’ academic achievement in college as well as their college completion rates.

Improving the Campus Climate
Although Latinos constitute about one in six Americans and more than one-fifth of the undergraduate students enrolled in US higher education, they make up less than 5 percent of the professoriate. Latino college students tend to complete bachelor’s degrees at lower rates than members of other racial and ethnic groups, leading to lower rates of graduate degree enrollment, doctoral degree completion, and faculty employment. Latino faculty will continue to be largely invisible unless universities make concerted efforts to recruit and retain them. At least two decades of research on diversity in higher education indicate that increasing the presence of Latino faculty in higher education is critical to promoting Latino students’ educational attainment. Latino faculty understand the cultural backgrounds of Latino students and can serve as role models for them.

However, increasing the numbers of Latino faculty and students in the academy (as well as members of other historically underrepresented groups) is not enough to ensure their success or build a community. Intentional efforts must also be made to maximize the benefits of diversity. As Daryl Smith notes in her 2009 book Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education: Making It Work, efforts to build a diverse faculty often focus on the recruitment of faculty members from historically underrepresented groups but underemphasize the importance of retaining and promoting them.

The Dual Challenge for Latinas
The research of higher education scholar Caroline Turner and others explores the dual challenges of being women and being Latina in the academy. As Joya Misra, Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, Elissa Holmes, and Stephanie Agiomavritis documented in a recentAcademe article on service work, women often face institutionalized sexism and are expected to take on additional professional responsibilities, such as uncompensated university service, that impede their ability to advance from the junior to the senior faculty ranks. Because of their dual status as women and as members of an underrepresented group, Latinas are more likely to encounter racism, stereotyping, lack of mentoring, tokenism, uneven promotion, and inequitable salaries when entering the academy. Research has documented the stereotypes that Latina faculty often encounter: some are told by colleagues that they are particularly articulate, or that they speak English well, implying that this is atypical, while others have described instances where students, other faculty members, or staff members have assumed that they are service workers or anything but professors.

These experiences send the message that Latinas do not belong in the academy. Moreover, although crossgender and cross-race mentoring can be extremely beneficial, the dearth of senior Latina faculty means that junior faculty are less likely than others to find role models who can give them guidance about how to navigate these specific challenges.

Our Strategy for Supporting Latinas
When we began our first faculty positions in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio, a Hispanic-serving institution whose enrollment is 45 percent Latino, we found that only seven out of fifty-seven, or just 12 percent, of the female professors in our school of education were tenured Latinas. Similarly, while just under one-quarter of undergraduates in Texas’s public institutions are Latino, only 6 percent of tenured faculty members at these same institutions come from Latino backgrounds. Our school’s figures exceed the 2.8 percent national figure for Latina tenured faculty representation among female professors, but it is nonetheless a remarkably low figure, considering the racial and ethnic makeup of our university and our city, the latter of which has a majority (63 percent) Latino population.

Since beginning our faculty positions, we have been part of a group of junior Latina faculty in the school of education called Research for the Education and Advancement of Latinos (REAL). Members of REAL, which was established in 2005, share research interests in broadening opportunities for Latinos at all stages of education. Members come from different disciplines and study topics ranging from early childhood education to higher education. We meet regularly to discuss our experiences and to share strategies for managing our careers and other responsibilities, including how to assemble promotion and tenure files and how to choose service commitments. We also talk about gender roles and balancing familial caretaking responsibilities.

Sometimes we simply meet over lunch to catch up on one another’s personal and professional lives. Other times, we travel to a formal retreat center, a rented house, or a group member’s house to spend a weekend writing and socializing. At a typical retreat, REAL faculty members will scatter around the space, each taking up a room or a corner with her laptop, working on manuscripts until the late afternoon. Retreat evenings are spent socializing.

In addition to this peer mentoring, we have several senior Latina faculty members who are the organization’s madrinas (godmothers). They have helped clarify the requirements and expectations for promotion and tenure at our institution and have offered advice on how to handle our varied duties as faculty members.

As part of this effort, we now have subgroups that pursue common research agendas. The associated research and writing projects have resulted in the publication of peer-reviewed articles on a wide range of topics. For example, one pair in the group has edited a special issue of a journal that addresses P–20 (prekindergarten through graduate school) partnerships, bridging scholarship of two distinct sectors of education that typically are not coordinated. Another pair has advanced scholarship on how K–12 school leaders can target the needs of EL students through initiatives such as dual-language programs. These experiences have allowed us to work across disciplines and connect diverse bodies of scholarship.

We have also collected and analyzed data about our experiences in the group for journal articles and national conferences. Our articles address Latina faculty members’ experiences of belonging and marginalization in the academy, the development of a Chicana perspective on peer mentoring, pedagogical strategies in Hispanic-serving institutions, and other topics.

Our initiative offers a sense of community for Latina scholars. Moreover, several of us have received tenure while being part of this group; the majority of our group now consists of tenured faculty members who have navigated the tenure process together. All but one of our members have stayed at the institution, and the one who left eventually returned, saying she valued the supportive climate of our university and of REAL.

We have been asked many times about how we have built this supportive academic space. We would offer the following advice to faculty members interested in forming organizations like ours:

·         Find a group of like-minded individuals and meet in ways that do not require extensive time commitments (such as brown-bag lunches).

·         Identify lead organizers (having two or three individuals in this role may help distribute the efforts involved).

·         Determine common research goals.

·         Find an institutional home (for REAL, this was the university’s Women’s Studies Institute).

·         Investigate the possibility of internal grant funding (we secured a university grant to conduct our first retreat).

·         Find other creative ways to share or obtain resources to support the organization’s efforts (for example, we have sometimes shared our own homes as retreat spaces or have been given access to retreat spaces by senior faculty madrinas).

·         Get the “buy-in” of senior faculty and administrators.

A Collective Responsibility
In her 2011 keynote speech at the annual meeting of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education, Rachel Moran, dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, described overhearing an elementary school teacher say about her as a young Mexican American child, “Such a bright girl. Too bad there’s no future for her.”

Moran’s success indicates that the future for Latinos in the academy is bright if and when they are afforded the appropriate opportunities. Echoing many other leading scholars and advocates for the educational advancement of Latinos, Moran emphasized the need for political will to advance Latino success in higher education in the face of significant economic, social, and political barriers.

In mobilizing this political will, Latino faculty cannot undertake the tasks of building more inclusive campus climates or promoting Latino postsecondary attainment alone. While we encourage Latino faculty and others from historically underrepresented groups to form support systems such as the one we have described, we recognize that Latinos at most other institutions do not have the significant presence they have at our university.

Efforts at recruiting Latino faculty and students must be coordinated with initiatives to involve college leadership. Because Latino faculty and administrators tend to be underrepresented in leadership roles, high-level administrators from all backgrounds must share the responsibility for creating institutional support systems for Latino faculty and students. As the work of Sylvia Hurtado, Daryl Smith, Caroline Turner, and others demonstrates, maximizing the benefits of a diverse faculty and student body must be a clearly articulated goal aligned with concrete strategies across different units. Institutional leaders can provide a variety of resources to support an active community of scholars of color. Developing and sustaining systems of senior faculty and peer mentoring can help make the promotion and tenure process, as well as the dynamics of institutional culture, more transparent for incoming junior faculty. In addition, as Sylvia Hurtado and Jessica Sharkness noted in their article in the September–October 2008 issue of Academe, implementing a reward system that recognizes faculty members’ service to the broader community can provide affirmation and incentives for this kind of work.

Several Hispanic-serving institutions, including our own, have been successful at graduating large numbers of Latino students, as well as large numbers of Latinos in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Scholars from the University of Southern California’s Center for Urban Education and other institutions currently are conducting research to identify what productive Hispanic-serving institutions are doing to promote Latino education in the sciences. Faculty members and administrators in other institutions can learn from what these institutions are doing to promote degree completion, particularly in the STEM fields.

A senior Latino professor who has been with our institution for more than thirty years recently said to us, “I wish I was going to be around to see what happens as Latinos continue to grow in the population. I won’t be around to see it, but you will. You are lucky that you will be able to.”

While concerns about Latino educational access may not be of interest to everyone in this anti-immigrant climate, the positive economic implications of promoting Latino educational advancement are clear. The Latino educational crisis can be transformed into an opportunity to make an investment in the educational fate of Latinos, which is inextricably tied with the future of this country. The academy can play an important role in this effort.

Anne-Marie Nuñez is assistant professor of higher education at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research explores the individual and institutional factors that affect college access and completion, particularly for students from Latino, first-generation, and migrant backgrounds. Her e-mail address is annemarienunez@utsa.edu.

Elizabeth Murakami-Ramalho is associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research agenda includes successful leadership for Latino populations and urban and international issues in educational leadership. Her e-mail address is elizabeth.murakami@utsa.edu.

Fort Worth Chicano Documentary Photographer Jesús Manuel Mena Garza to Talk About His Work from 1970 to the Present at SJSU

Click photos to enlarge

Texas documentary photographer Jesús Manuel Mena Garza will present an hour-long photo show and lecture, A Chicano Photographer’s Journey: 1970 to the Present, on Sept. 25 at 3 pm at San José State University. The event is free and open to the public at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, Room 225/229.

Midwestern State University Professor Dr. Ann Marie Leimer said, “This new presentation illuminates why Garza pursued his role of critical observer. He explains the various influences in his artistic life and details the process that helped him evolve into a prominent documentary photographer.” Garza’s new work is quite diverse – from intimate portraits of Chicana and Chicano academics to issues of abandonment and loss in Texoma.

Professor Leimer adds, “During the past decades, Garza has extensively published and exhibited several documentary photographic series. His Chicano Photographer series explores important aspects of the American experience, historic events and cultural practices often marginalized by the dominant culture.”

The presentation occurs in conjunction with Garza’s current exhibition at the library. A panel discussion on the 40th Anniversary of El Centro Cultural de la Gente (Garza was a member) will take place in the same room from 6 to 7:30 pm. There will be a reception following in the Cultural Heritage Center (Fifth Floor).

Location and Time:
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, SJSU
Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2013, Room 225/229, Second Floor
150 East San Fernando Street, San José, CA 95112
3 to 4:20 pm with a reception at 7:30 pm
Free and open to the Public

Jesús Garza’s Portrait and Press Kit:
http://www.jmmgarza.com/html/00press_kit.html

Sponsored by the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library; San José State University School of Journalism and Mass Communication; the César E. Chávez Community Action Center – SJSU Associated Students; Department of Mexican American Studies; and SJSU’s Chicano/Latino Faculty & Staff Association.

September 25, 2013 SJSU Photography Show and Lecture

Photos from the 2013 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Conference

Photos taken by Jesús Manuel Mena Garza during the 2013 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) conference in San Antonio, Tejas. Click photos to enlarge. 

The next NACCS conference will be in Salt Lake City April 9 - 12, 2014. Here is a link for more information.

 

Copyright 2013 Jesús Manuel Mena Garza. All rights reserved. 

Jesús Manuel Mena Garza Documentary Photography Exhibition - July 18 to September 29, 2013

Kathryn Blackmer Reyes of San José State University (SJSU) created this poster and curated my show at SJSU. If you happen to be in San José, California go check out my photo exhibition at the SJSU MLK Library.

Click poster to enlarge

Can Obama's Organizing Army Take Texas?

The American Prospect
By Abby Rapoport
 
Progressive Texans just might lead a Democratic revival in the ultimate red state. Here's how.

Shortly before the Battleground Texas tour stopped in Austin’s old AFL-CIO building in early April, the sky opened up. Thunder and lightning raged, parts of the city flooded, and traffic came to a standstill. But Democrats kept arriving, some dripping wet, others clutching umbrellas rarely used in the city, and the meeting room soon filled with about 100 folks, some no doubt drawn by curiosity. Launched in February by two of Team Obama’s hotshot organizers, Battleground Texas was promising to inject into the nation’s biggest Republican stronghold the grassroots field tactics—the volunteer-organizing, the phone-banking and door-knocking, the digital savvy—that won the 2012 presidential election. After years of national Democrats seeing Texas as hopelessly red, what made this fledgling group think it could turn the state blue?

Jenn Brown, Battleground Texas’s executive director, was pleasantly surprised by the turnout. But the 31-year-old California native, who projects the energy and enthusiasm of a camp counselor, knew she had some convincing to do. As one attendee put it, “We’re suffering from battered-spouse syndrome. We believe it is impossible to win.” The situation for Texas Democrats has been as gloomy as the day’s weather. The party hasn’t won a single statewide race since 1996—a 100-campaign losing streak. Republicans dominate the state legislature. Mitt Romney carried the state by more than 1.2 million votes. For nearly two decades, the Texas Democratic Party has been the political equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters’ perennial patsies, the Washington Generals.

But the people leading Battleground Texas are proven winners. Brown headed up Barack Obama’s field operation in Ohio, which turned out 100,000 more African American voters in 2012 than in 2008. Battleground Texas founder and senior advisor Jeremy Bird, a 34-year-old Missouri native, is the wonky wunderkind who, as Obama’s national field director, oversaw the campaign’s state-of-the-art turnout operation. They’ve been joined by young, native Texan organizers such as Christina Gomez, formerly with the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, and Cliff Walker, who ran the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee. Bird and Brown got interested in Texas, they say, during the 2012 campaign. Bird was wowed by the enthusiasm of Texas volunteers, who made 400,000 calls to Florida voters in the last three days before the election. Brown says that wherever she went during the campaign, Obama staffers from Texas would talk excitedly about the potential for organizing the state, given its rapidly changing demographics.

Since their effort launched in February, they’ve seen more encouraging signs. Attendance was strong on Battleground Texas’s 14-city getting-to-know-you tour, which stopped in both Democrat-friendly places like Austin and San Antonio and Republican strongholds like Waco and Lubbock. By mid-April, Battleground Texas already had more Facebook friends—23,000—than the Texas GOP. Its organizers refuse to comment on the group’s funding sources, but the state’s biggest Democratic donor, Steve Mostyn, has agreed to help the group raise its estimated $10 million annual budget. As of April, there were ten paid staffers, more than the state Democratic Party employs, with additional hires on the way.

While Governor Rick Perry laughed off the effort to turn Texas blue as “the biggest pipe dream I have ever heard,” other Republican leaders are giving Battleground Texas free publicity by decrying it as a coven of dangerous outside agitators—“masters of the slimy dark arts of campaigning,” state Republican Party Chair Steve Munisteri wrote in a fundraising letter. Speaking at a lunch in Waco, Attorney General Greg Abbott called the arrival of Team Obama members “a new 
assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons. The threat that we’re getting is the threat from the Obama administration and his political machine.”

For a fledgling effort, Battleground Texas has already become a national media darling, prominently featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Bloomberg News. In February, Bird even had a guest turn on The Colbert Report, where the host described him as “the man behind Obama’s minority outreach-around.” It’s easy to see why there’s so much interest. If Texas were to become a competitive state, the impact on national politics would be enormous. Without the state’s 38 electoral votes, Republicans would find it virtually impossible to win presidential elections with the current national map. Even the threat of losing Texas would influence a presidential contest. If the GOP has to start fighting for votes in such an enormous state—with 20 media markets—it will drain resources the party could devote to other battlegrounds.

No state has greater potential for Democrats. Texas is already “majority-minority,” with Latinos making up 38 percent of the population and African Americans 12 percent. According to the state demographer, the number of Latinos will surpass the number of whites in the next decade; by 2040, 52 percent of the state will be Latino, and 27 percent will be white. Between just 2012 and 2016, about a million additional Latinos in Texas will become eligible to vote. But that’s been the trouble for Democrats: Latinos aren’t voting. Forty-seven percent of eligible Latinos have not even registered. In 2010, when Perry won re-election, the Latino turnout rate was an anemic 16 percent, about half the typical Latino turnout in New Mexico. An analysis by the Houston Chronicle shows that if Latinos voted at the same rate as whites, the state would already be a toss-up.

So while Battleground Texas aims to make inroads with other groups—including white women, who are overwhelmingly Republican in Texas, counter to national trends—driving up the Latino vote is the key to a Democratic turnaround. On paper, it looks straightforward, which is one reason Democrats outside of Texas tend to be more sanguine about a partisan flip than Democrats in the state. They don’t know what the folks in Austin know all too well: that Republicans have continued to gain congressional and legislative seats over the past decade, even as Texas’s Latino population has swelled.

One challenge is scale. Bird and Brown cite Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada as models for turning out Latinos. But none of those states has more than 516,000 Latino citizens total—which is fewer than the number of Latino citizens in Houston’s Harris County alone. “In those little states, you can just throw money and get all kinds of stuff done,” says Antonio Gonzalez, head of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. Not in Texas, where size is only one of the complicating factors.

Another wrinkle: Battleground Texas will have to tangle with a state Republican Party that has been far smarter about connecting with Latinos than the national Republican Party. The tone was set by Karl Rove and George W. Bush, who actively courted Latinos in the 1990s as they set about building the Texas GOP into a dominant force. Battleground Texas will also have to overcome deeply entrenched political disengagement among Latinos and other nonwhites, born in part from years of Democratic neglect.

Even given the rosiest of scenarios, Texas Democrats aren’t likely to elect a governor in 2014 or help to elevate a Democrat into the White House in 2016. But Battleground Texas’s leaders swear they’re committed for the long haul. As Brown said in Austin, “If 2020 is the year we turn this state around, that is OK with me.”

Republican supremacy in Texas is a relatively recent phenomenon. From Reconstruction until the 1960s, Democrats—mostly conservative, exclusively white—ran the state. The party always had a vocal progressive wing, and in the wake of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Latino leaders began to emerge. Most came from San Antonio, which had both a large Latino population and a strong activist tradition. Community organizer Willie C. Velasquez founded the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, which registered thousands of Latinos and filed more than 80 lawsuits to ensure their access to the ballot. In 1974, Ernie Cortés started San Antonio’s Communities Organized for Public Service, which helped Latino neighborhoods push their policy agendas. In 1981, Henry Cisneros was elected mayor, making him only the second Latino mayor in U.S. history.

While other Southern states were trending Republican, Democrats still looked like the party of the future in Texas. Houston, fast becoming one of the nation’s largest and most diverse cities, had elected Democrat Barbara Jordan, the state’s first African American legislator and, later, first African American member of Congress. In 1990, Dan Morales, a state legislator, became the first Latino elected statewide, as attorney general. A year later, Governor Ann Richards appointed Lena Guerrero to the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas industries, making her the first woman and person of color on the commission.

But white conservatives still made up most of the state’s electorate, and they backed Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984—the first time a Republican had carried the state since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. In 1978, Republicans elected their first Texas governor since Reconstruction, Bill Clements, after a bitterly contested Democratic primary divided the party. Suddenly, the GOP didn’t look completely hopeless in Texas, and conservative Anglos began to get accustomed to voting Republican after generations as yellow-dog Democrats. Karl Rove laid out a strategy for taking control of the state, systematically targeting vulnerable Democrats he could either unseat or convince to switch sides. “When there was a straggler in the pack, he would take them in the bushes and cut their throat,” says Cal Jillson, a political scientist and author of Texas Politics: Governing the Lone Star State.

The tipping point came in 1994, when Richards lost her re-election bid to Rove’s candidate, George W. Bush. Democrats still carried most statewide offices that year and maintained a sizable edge in the legislature. But the Republican tide was rising fast. In 1998, against weak opposition, Bush won re-election with 69 percent of the vote—including nearly 40 percent of the Latino vote—and Republicans swept statewide offices. Meanwhile, Democrats lost their most promising Latino candidate for higher office when Cisneros, who’d gone to Washington as President Bill Clinton’s housing secretary, was felled by a scandal involving hush money given to a former mistress. By then, Velasquez and Cortés had left the state as well.

In 2002, Democrats ran what they thought was a “dream team”—wealthy businessman Tony Sanchez for governor and Ron Kirk, an African American who’d been elected mayor in Dallas, for U.S. senator. “We had a really well-funded and sophisticated outreach to Hispanic voters,” says longtime Democratic consultant Glenn Smith, who ran the Sanchez campaign. “The problem was we were doing it all of a sudden in one campaign cycle. That’s just not enough time.” The dream team lost badly, and Republicans took control of the state legislature.

Texas Democrats went into a death spiral. Their bench of potential statewide candidates was empty. National leaders saw no upside to investing in the state and began using it as a cash machine for campaigns outside the state. As the Latino population continued to swell, Democrats failed to launch the type of sustained outreach needed to bring new voters into the system. Latinos still voted for Democrats, usually by about a 2-to-1 margin. But far too few were voting.

Texas Republican leaders wisely avoided the mistakes of their counterparts in California and Arizona, where anti-immigration laws turned Latinos into avid Democrats. As governor and president, Bush spoke Spanish at campaign events, appointed Latinos to key positions, and broke with most Republicans by championing comprehensive immigration reform. His successor as governor, Rick Perry, signed a state version of the DREAM Act into law and spoke out against measures like Arizona’s “papers, please” law. When Republican lawmakers tried to float such bills, Perry and other party leaders quashed their efforts before they became an embarrassment.

“Democrats think that if they just wait and the state becomes more Hispanic, they win,” says the current GOP chair, Munisteri. “That ignores the fact that we are doing Hispanic outreach.” Even as the Tea Party wave of 2010 drove the state legislature further to the right, Texas Republicans launched new efforts to attract nonwhite voters. The party used data analytics and cross-checks to identify conservative Latinos and get them involved; as a result, last year’s state GOP convention had 600 new Latino delegates. At that same convention, delegates changed the party platform to eliminate calls for mass deportation of undocumented Texans. (However, it still advocates rescinding citizenship for those born in the country to noncitizens.) A full-time Republican outreach coordinator now goes on Telemundo and Univision, the two major Spanish-language networks, as a regular commentator. On June 4, Munisteri said the national GOP would even start kicking in to help the state party hire nearly two dozen full-time field organizers and open five new outreach offices around the state.

The party’s efforts have been bolstered by Hispanic Republicans of Texas, a political action committee co-founded by George P. Bush (son of Jeb) and two Republican consultants with strong national connections. Hispanic Republicans recruits, trains, and backs candidates for local, state, and federal offices. The group built a lot of buzz in 2010, when seven Hispanic Republicans were elected to the state legislature and Congress. But in 2012, the results were decidedly mixed. Though Ted Cruz was elected to the U.S. Senate and two new Latinos won state House seats, only two of the winners from 2012 were re-elected, and a coveted congressional race was lost. Bush, who’s 37 and whose mother is Mexican-born, has announced that he will be running statewide in 2014 for Texas land commissioner—a launching pad to bigger things.

The party’s strategy is based on the belief that Latinos in Texas are more conservative than their counterparts in other states—and thus “persuadable” for Republicans without a wholesale change in policies. There’s a large bloc who are swing voters, says George Antuna Jr., who co-founded Hispanic Republicans of Texas with Bush. “Those voters are up for grabs.”

“They’re dreaming,” Jillson counters. With rare exceptions, Latinos have been voting 2 to 1 Democratic in Texas since the days of LBJ. In 2012, an election-eve poll by Latino Decisions found 53 percent of Texas Latinos identifying as Democrats; only 15 percent said they were Republicans. Polling data show why. Particularly on economic issues, Latino voters in Texas line up overwhelmingly with Democratic positions. Young Latinos, who will dominate Texas politics in the near future, are more liberal than their elders. Latino voters’ top priorities, aside from immigration reform, are improving education and health care—two issues that are not exactly strengths for Texas Republicans. In 2011, GOP lawmakers, cheered on by Perry, made the largest cuts in modern Texas history to public schools. Republicans are also responsible for policies that have left one-quarter of Texans—and a far larger slice of Latinos—without health insurance.

For a couple more election cycles, Republicans can continue to win Texas with overwhelming white support—it often reaches 70 percent in statewide races—combined with one-third of the Latino vote. But if enough Latinos start voting, the GOP will have to recalibrate its message while holding on to a right-wing base that has shown little taste for moderation. If anything, the party has moved rightward in recent years. Its most visible Latino champion, Senator Cruz, is a Tea Party stalwart. If Republicans were expecting Cruz, whose ancestry is Cuban American, to boost their Latino vote, it didn’t happen in 2012; he received about 35 percent, one point less than Senator John Cornyn received in 2008. “Republicans like Ted Cruz talk about how Republicans are different in Texas because they have a few Hispanic candidates,” Bird says. “But the first speech Cruz gave in the Senate was about his opposition to Obamacare, which an overwhelming majority of Hispanics support.”

Still, Republicans profess confidence that they’ll keep Texas red—and conservative—for decades to come. If Battleground Texas begins to pose a threat, Munisteri says, national Republicans will pour limitless money and resources into the state to keep from losing the party’s crown jewel. Battleground Texas, he claims, “may end up doing me a favor. We’ll have more resources than they would if they left it alone.” Since the group announced itself, Munisteri says he’s already raised $300,000 by sounding the alarm about a potential takeover by Team Obama. “When Texas begins to look competitive, there’s going to be an avalanche of Republican money coming home to protect the state,” Jillson says. But that would come with a cost: fewer resources for Republicans everywhere else.

How will Battleground Texas mount a challenge to Republican hegemony in the ultimate red state? Slowly but surely, as Jenn Brown told the Austin Democrats. “We know this is a long-term effort,” she said. “We know it will take time.” The initial focus will be to create a massive network of Democratic organizers and volunteers across the state. Imagine, Brown said, what could happen with 250 paid field organizers in Texas, each with five teams of volunteers; they could reach 500,000 potential voters if everyone just knocked on 50 doors.

At this point, the details are hypothetical: A full-scale plan for “getting that started” won’t be rolled out until this summer. But Jeremy Bird offers a few more details. In the next couple of election cycles, Battleground Texas will target “battleground zones”—races that organizers believe could either be winnable or could help Democrats build infrastructure by training new candidates and registering voters. A battleground zone could be a city council race with a promising young Latino candidate in Waco or a state House race in a heavily minority district in Houston. The idea is to seize every viable opportunity to build new Democratic networks around the state, creating new voters along the way.

For the time being, that’ll be done without backing candidates for statewide offices. Texas has a few rising Democratic stars—most notably San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro and his twin, Congressman Joaquin Castro—but running them for major offices too soon and losing risks diminishing their appeal. Democratic strategist James Aldrete says the Battleground Texas approach—build the base rather than expecting miracle results right away—is refreshing. For too long, Aldrete says, Texas Democrats tried the opposite approach: “waiting for the amazing candidate that’s gonna inspire everyone and solve all our problems.” Finally, Texas Democrats are attempting to replicate what has worked elsewhere. “The way I look at it,” Bird says, “Texas is our candidate.”

But Obama-style grassroots politics is brand-new for most Texas Democrats. While the national party was putting an increasing emphasis on door-knocking and turnout over the past decade, the party in Texas was falling behind. Battleground Texas will have to change fundamentally the way Texas Democrats think about politics, reorienting them from a campaign-to-campaign mentality to one of year-round organizing.

The leaders of Battleground Texas say there’s reason for optimism—partly because there is some recent history of grassroots politics working in Texas. During the 2010 midterm elections, Austin Democratic Party Chair Andy Brown selected 21 largely black and Latino precincts where turnout had traditionally been low and pledged to run the type of hardcore turnout campaigns usually reserved for the wealthier, whiter parts of town. With a paid field staff organizing volunteers, the Travis County Democrats knocked on every registered voter’s door in those precincts two or three times and called each one at least twice. The effort paid off: Although 2010 was the worst year in history for Texas Democrats, 18 percent more ballots were cast in Travis County and the number of straight-ticket Democratic voters went up 54 percent. “There was nothing fancy about it,” Brown says. “It was a really well-run field program.”

A similar strategy has also worked wonders in Dallas. In 2006, Democrats in Texas’s oldest Republican stronghold bucked convention by spending as much on phone-banking and door-to-door campaigning as on media ads and mailers. The results were stunning: Democrats swept all 47 local offices, including 40 judgeships that had previously belonged to Republicans.

But elsewhere, Texas Democrats have been slow to learn from Dallas’s example. The party’s most glaring failure has been in Harris County, home to Houston and the nation’s fourth-largest population. Harris County already looks like the Texas of the future; only 33 percent of its residents are white, while 41 percent are Latino, 19 percent are black, and 6 percent are Asian. Houston voters elected the first lesbian mayor of a major city, Democrat Annise Parker, in 2009. But in 2012, President Obama carried the county by a measly 971 votes, and Republicans remain competitive in local races. How is that possible? Because there’s a staggering number of voters who are eligible but unregistered—estimates run between 600,000 and 800,000.

Democrats can’t simply start knocking on doors in neighborhoods that have long been shunned, asking for votes and expecting results. The Latino Decisions election-eve poll showed the depths of Texas Democrats’ dysfunction: Only 25 percent of Texas Latinos had been contacted by a campaign, a political party, or a community organization of any kind—compared with 59 percent in Colorado, 51 percent in Nevada, and 48 percent in New Mexico.

Harris County Democrats and Battleground Texas volunteers will have to start making calls and venturing into minority neighborhoods for the first time in decades. The effort has, at least, belatedly begun. Houston elected a new Democratic chair in 2011, Lane Lewis, who is focusing the party for the first time on Dallas-style field organizing. Lewis estimates that if the party registers 120,000 new nonwhite voters, it will result in 80,000 more people going to the polls. “We’re already block-walking,” Lewis says. “We’ve already had phone banks this year.” But his field team is not just trying to woo new voters; Democratic staffers and volunteers are participating year-round in projects like building a community garden in the tough Independence Heights neighborhood, an effort to show that the party cares about more than winning votes.

If Democrats can galvanize Houston’s nonvoters, they will be well on their way to turning Texas blue. But all those years of ignoring minorities will make it a formidable task. “You’ve got to commit at least ten years,” Antonio Gonzalez says. “It takes at least ten years to undo twenty years of neglect.”

-30-

The End of the Solid South

The American Prospect
By Bob Moser

The region's emerging majority is progressive. Its capitols are more conservative than ever. Something's got to give.

The final rally of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign took place on symbolically charged ground: the rolling fields of Manassas, site of the first major battle of the Civil War. It was the last stop on an election eve spent entirely in the South: Jacksonville, Charlotte, and finally Northern Virginia. In the autumn chill, an estimated 90,000 people spread out across the county fairgrounds and waited for hours to cheer a new president—and a new South.

By this point, Virginians knew Obama well. In February, he had beaten Hillary Clinton 2 to 1 in the state’s Democratic primary, a blow to her floundering bid. After clinching the nomination, he’d kicked off his general-election campaign in rural Virginia and been a frequent visitor since. Bucking conventional wisdom, Obama’s team had invested heavily in three Southern states: not just perennial battleground Florida but also Virginia and North Carolina, which had not voted Democratic for president since 1964 and 1976, respectively. No Democrat—not even Bill Clinton—had made a serious attempt to win North Carolina or Virginia since Ronald Reagan claimed it in 1980. But Obama was gambling on an emerging South—one that is younger than the rest of the country, far more ethnically diverse than the old black-and-white paradigm, and more liberal-leaning than any Southern generation to precede it.

That emerging South was arrayed in the dark hills around Obama as he flashed into the spotlight. On soil where whites once fought to the death for the right to enslave blacks, this throng had gathered to hail the soon-to-be first black man to be elected president. The next day, Obama carried all three of his Southern targets—55 electoral votes for the party. For Southerners, the message was unmistakable: The future has arrived. The Solid South is dead.

When Americans talk about the South, they tend to be talking about the past. When they talk about Southern politics, they tend to be talking about the old, stereotyped “Solid South”—that uniformly conservative, racist, anti-union, snake-handling cluster of former Confederate states that voted en masse for Democrats from the pre–Civil War through civil rights, then switched their allegiance to the former “party of Lincoln” beginning in the 1970s. Once LBJ and the Democrats betrayed the cause of white supremacy and Richard Nixon cooked up the “Southern Strategy,” the region became as solidly Republican as it once was Democratic. End of story.

Southern politics has never been quite so uncomplicated as that. It took decades for Republicans to outnumber Democrats, and Republican control of the region has never matched the Democrats’ former hegemony. The South has been contested ground for 40 years, with the GOP dominating federal elections and gradually cutting into the Democrats’ hold on state and local offices—culminating in 2012, when Arkansas’s legislature became the last to go Republican. (Virginia’s Senate has a partisan split.)

Over the next two decades, it will become clear to even the most clueless Yankee that the Solid South is long gone. The politics of the region’s five most populous states—Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas—will be defined by the emerging majority that gave Obama his winning margins. The under-30 voters in these states are ethnically diverse, they lean heavily Democratic, and they are just beginning to vote. The white population percentage is steadily declining; in Georgia, just 52 percent of those under 18 are white, a number so low it would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

By the 2020s, more than two-thirds of the South’s electoral votes could be up for grabs. (The South is defined here as the 11 states of the former Confederacy.) If all five big states went blue, with their 111 electoral votes, only 49 votes would be left for Republicans. (That’s based on the current electoral-vote count; after the next census, the fast-growing states will have more.) Win or lose, simply making Southern states competitive is a boon to Democrats. If Republicans are forced to spend time and resources to defend Texas and Georgia, they’ll have less for traditional battlegrounds like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Even if Democrats aren’t competitive in those states for another decade, they will benefit from connecting with millions of nonvoters who haven’t heard their message. They are building for a demographic future that Republicans dread: the time when overwhelming white support will no longer be enough to win a statewide election in Texas and Georgia.

Republicans will not give up easily. Their counter-insurgency began soon after Obama’s three Southern victories. It was propitious timing. The Tea Party, a mostly Southern phenomenon, was turning Obamaphobia into a political movement. Big conservative donors, their money freed up by Citizens United and other court decisions, were ready to spend unprecedented amounts on obscure state assembly races and judgeships (to elect those fired-up Tea Partiers, in many cases). Republicans recognized that 2010 might be their last great chance to expand their gains in the South. They made the most of it.

In a bad year for Democrats nationwide, it was a disaster in the South. Two years after North Carolina voted for Obama, both chambers of the general assembly went Republican for the first time in 120 years. In Florida, the Tea Party launched Marco Rubio into the U.S. Senate. The year before, in Virginia’s off-year elections, right-wing Republicans had been elected governor and attorney general. Republicans now controlled all but four legislative chambers in the region.

With those statehouse majorities, the GOP had won the larger prize it sought: control of legislative and congressional redistricting. The party redrew the maps with gusto, giving it favorable districts for the next decade. The trick is watering down the impact of minority voters by moving them from competitive districts into those that are already minority-held. That way, the blacker and browner districts get blacker and browner, and 60 percent Democratic districts become 70 percent Democratic. The white districts, in turn, get whiter—and more Republican. In North Carolina, which ended up with the South’s most egregiously misshapen map, half of the state’s black population of 2.2 million was drawn into one-fifth of its legislative and congressional districts.

Civil-rights and civil-liberties groups argued that Republicans were using race illegally as the primary basis of redistricting. But the courts mostly upheld the maps, and the results were startling. In 2012, Republicans won legislative majorities in every former Confederate state for the first time. (In Virginia, the Senate is evenly split by party, 20-20.) Overall, the South had now elected 222 more Republican legislators than it had in 2008. Georgia’s Democrats made up 47 percent of the statewide vote in 2008 and 2010, but after redistricting they could only elect a maximum of 31 percent of statehouse members. The gerrymandering was just as effective in congressional elections. In Virginia, Obama won by 4 percent statewide, but Republicans captured 10 of 13 seats in the U.S. House.

Southern politics is more fractured than it’s ever been. Obama threw down the gauntlet in 2008, and Republicans answered in 2010 and 2012. The voters are moving left, while the state governments are lurching right. The only safe prediction is that after 150 years of being largely ignored in national elections, the South is about to become the most fiercely contested, and unpredictable, political battleground in America.

It’s been almost four decades since journalist and historian John Egerton famously declared the South “just about over as a separate and distinct place.” He was writing about a newly integrated 1970s South that was suddenly teeming with suburban tracts and office parks, urbanizing so rapidly that it could hardly be recognized. To this day, Americans still think “rural” when they think “Southern.” But there’s nothing very rural about the South anymore. Florida is 91 percent urban, Georgia and Virginia 75 percent, and in probably the biggest surprise, Texas is 85 percent urban.

With the suburbs and office parks came new Southerners. At first it was mostly Northern professionals, who began moving down in the 1950s and 1960s for low taxes, affordable homes, and jobs in banking (Charlotte), energy (Houston and Dallas), technology (the Research Triangle Park and Austin), and government-contract work (Northern Virginia). Many of the “relocated Yankees,” as they were sometimes fondly called, were registered Republicans—but they were more moderate than their Southern partymates, especially on culture-war issues. Those transplants became swing votes, and they haven’t stopped coming.

The demographic big bang didn’t begin in earnest, however, until the 1990s. Large numbers of African Americans had begun moving South in what would become known as the “great remigration.” From the early 20th century until the 1960s, more than seven million blacks fled the Jim Crow South in the Great Migration to pursue a better life, mostly in the industrial North. It was the largest domestic migration in American history. Now hundreds of thousands are returning. Last decade, 75 percent of the growth in America’s black population was in the South. Atlanta and its endless suburbs gained 491,000 African Americans in the past decade, more than any other city. Some are middle-class blacks whose families once relied on government jobs up North that are now disappearing. Some are caring for older relatives left behind in the Great Migration. Some are simply coming home to reunite with their families, finding a region that has undergone seismic changes since the South’s segregated “way of life” finally came to a merciful end.

While blacks were remigrating, Latino populations were expanding rapidly. Birth statistics tell the story: By 2010, 49 percent of newborns in Texas were Latino. Among the big five Southern states, Virginia has the lowest rate at 12 percent. Hundreds of thousands of young Latinos become eligible to vote in the South every year, and that number will be climbing for decades. At least for now, this strongly favors Democrats, who win Latino votes by large margins. Florida used to be the exception, because first-generation (and often second-generation) Cuban Americans were staunch, anti-communist Republicans. But younger Cuban Americans have joined a new immigrant population in Central Florida to help flip the state in the Democrats’ favor.

The key is getting Latinos to the polls—and it’s been a challenge in most Southern states. In 2010, for instance, Latinos were 38 percent of Texas’s population. But just 16 percent of eligible Latinos voted as Republicans won historically big margins in both legislative chambers. The poor turnout is partly a factor of youth. Latinos are, on average, a decade younger than Anglos. Most are not in the habit of voting. If they live in a state like Texas or Georgia, it’s likely that nobody has ever courted their vote.

Once Latinos begin to vote in proportion to their population, the change that they will bring to Southern (and American) politics won’t be limited to a shift in party loyalties. It will be manifested in a new progressivism as well.

Republicans like to talk about how Latinos are “hardworking, religious, family-oriented,” as if those qualities automatically made people conservative. In fact, an exit poll from 2012 showed the opposite: Latino voters are not only more liberal than Republicans; they’re sometimes more liberal than Democrats. On same-sex marriage, 59 percent said yes, against 48 percent of all voters. Should abortion be legal? Sixty-six percent said yes, against 59 percent overall. On economic issues, Latinos’ liberalism tends to be even more pronounced (the same is true for African Americans). Fifty-five percent said last year that they have a negative view of capitalism. They want more spending on public schools. They want universal, public-run health care. They want government to take a strong hand in the economy. Taxes? Raise them, if it means better social services. The same goes for every part of the South’s emerging majority—African Americans, Asian Americans, and under-30 whites who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Given the progressive tilt of the South’s coming majority, it’s no wonder that Scott Keeter, head pollster at the Pew Research Center, calls the region “a ticking time bomb for Republicans.” The Southern GOP is 88 percent white, and the white population is aging. Republicans will buy some time with their friendly legislative districts buffering any losses. They’ll continue to try to make it harder for minorities and young people to vote—and if the Supreme Court strikes down Section Five of the Voting Rights Act this year, it will be easier to suppress votes in the South.

There’s a cost to the time Republicans are buying. The Tea Party legislators who brought Republicans to power in 2010 are moving the party further right on practically every issue—at the same time that voters are tilting back toward the center. That’s creating the kind of situation that unfolded last year in Virginia. Republican lawmakers pushed a bill requiring every woman who requests an abortion to have an invasive sonogram procedure. In an election year, in a battleground state that is trending Democratic, what sense does such sure-to-be-divisive legislation make? None at all, unless you’re in a state—or a region—that is smack in the middle of a demographic revolution that is fueling a political one. It is a confusing business.

In the South’s new battlegrounds, 2020 shapes up as a pivotal year. If Democrats have gathered enough strength by then to send majorities to Richmond, Raleigh, Atlanta, Tallahassee, and/or Austin, they can tear up the Republican maps from 2011 and make it dauntingly difficult for the GOP to regain its majorities. That’s likeliest to happen in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina; Democratic majorities could take longer in Texas and Georgia, where Republicans are more deeply entrenched.

But the politics of the big Southern states are all betwixt and between, as natives like to say. If Republicans can find a way to hold on to their majorities through 2020, they will stay competitive, on the state level at least, for another decade. Ultimately, they won’t be able to keep winning unless they can convince Latinos and African Americans to vote Republican. If they do, Southern Republicans could become a model for the national GOP—the states that figured out how to persuade Latinos to vote Republican.

But it will be no quick or easy matter for the Southern Republican Party—built on a Chamber of Commerce foundation and lifted to victory by evangelical Christians—to find a message that can appeal to the South’s new electorate. How do you build bridges to voters whose views would sound, to your average Southern Republican, socialistic and downright un-American?

More likely, destiny will follow demography. The South’s big states could soon be undergirding a durable national Democratic majority that’s capable of lasting as long as the New Deal consensus. Liberalism would have a chance to flourish anew—not just in state capitols but in Washington, D.C., as well. This would be an emphatic break from history. From Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to Barack Obama’s stimulus and heath-care overhaul, the biggest obstacle has always been Congress’s solid white wall of Southern conservatism. That wall is crumbling. In the future, if you can be progressive and win Texas or Georgia, the American political order will transform in ways we can barely comprehend.

-30-

Tejano History Barely Dodged the SB 1128 Bullet

By José Antonio López

Texas State Republican Senator Dan Patrick seeks to lessen Tejano history's value in college credit.

He is clearly following his unwise, ultimate goal to keep Mexican-descent students from learning about their long-ignored ancestors in Texas. In formulating his Senate Bill 1128 to enact Arizona-style, anti-Mexican culture legislation on this side of the border, the Senator wants students to learn only post-1836 Texas (Anglo) history and not early Texas (Spanish Mexican) history. Because of opposition by groups of concerned Texas citizens, he has decided to temporarily halt the processing of his bill; at least for now.

Senator Patrick’s ideas are the proverbial “slap in the face” insult to Tejanos (Spanish Mexican-descent Texans), most of whose pedigree goes back to the very foundation of Texas. Clearly, the Senator needs some remedial instruction. Before he re-introduces his repulsive bill, he should attend a Mexican American Studies college course right there in Austin. First, he will be gently reminded by the professor that Texas is in New Spain and not New England. Also, he’ll learn that New Spain in the U.S. is over twice as large as New England. Then, he will learn that Texas history does not begin with the 1836 Battle of the Alamo. Most of all, he will learn of the basic set of core values that students study in these classes – faith, family, justice, industriousness, and patriotism. Yes, this is the same core value system that our ancestors put in place in Texas before the arrival of Anglo immigrants from the U.S.

The Senator from District 7 should bring his staff along, as well as the Republican representatives who sponsored the equally repugnant HB 1938. They need the special schooling as much as he does. Among other things, the instructor will be sure to remind them that our rich pre-1836 Spanish Mexican heritage is the main root of Texas history. It is this one element in our long story in Texas and the Southwest that allows us to celebrate our unique “American“culture year-round. That is, not just during Spanish Heritage Month in September, that was designed to recognize Hispanic and Latino “immigrant” groups in the U.S. They will also learn that about 15 to 20 million Mexican-descent U.S. citizens originating in the Southwest are so distinguished from our other sister Hispanic groups. Simply stated, the fact that we (Spanish Mexican-descent Texans and Spanish Mexican-descent citizens of the Southwest) are not immigrants to the U.S. is the part of our history that makes Anglophiles apoplectic, quite simply because they neither understand nor accept it.

Indeed, it’s quite ironic that Republican Governor Rick Perry had the honor of dedicating the Tejano Monument on the grounds of the State Capitol Building last year. (Quick to display his beaming sonrisa (smile) from ear to ear, he appeared to relish this Tejano-flavor moment just as much as anyone else present.) That should have settled the matter once and for all, but it didn’t. Even after the ceremonies were concluded, most Republican elected officials in Austin failed to grasp the Tejano Monument’s significance. They continue to do so at their own peril. My sincere invitation to them is that they visit the Monument during their lunch break. I ask them to especially read the bronze plaques, each telling a chapter of Tejano blood, sweat, and tears.

Additionally, I ask them to notice and join in the myriad on-going events that are initiating what I call a Tejano Renaissance. Infusing bursts of much-needed nitrogen into the Tejano family tree are: the awesome Hispanic Heritage Center of Texas, based in San Antonio, whose impressive goal is to make Tejano people, places, and events part of mainstream Texas history; the annual reenactments at the Spanish Governors Palace recalling the signing of the first Texas Declaration of Independence on April 6, 1813, the yearly commemoration of the August 18, 1813 Battle of Medina, the PBS film, “Texas Before the Alamo,” and the recent reading of Texas House Resolution 709 sponsored by Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, D-Austin, calling to mind the 200th Anniversary of the signing of the first Texas Constitution on April 17, 1813. The list of Tejano events honoring the memory of our ancestors steadily grows every year.

For much too long, pre-1836 Texas history has been dismissed, diminished, and distorted by mainstream Texas historians and others who refuse to accept Tejanos as the founders of Texas. Many Anglos and Northern European-descent folks forget that it was our Tejano ancestors who invited and welcomed their ancestors to Texas. It is for that reason that this has been the topic of several articles that I’ve written for the Rio Grande Guardian. In brief, what all of this means is: “¡Aqui todavia estamos, y no nos vamos! (Here we still are and we’re not going anywhere!)

Curiously, Senator Patrick is attacking the preservation of Tejano history at the same time that the Spanish Mexican population in Texas is growing. In particular, the following statistic should prove a sobering reality to the Senator: Spanish-surnamed students have now surpassed Anglo students in Texas schools. From personal observation as a mentor and lecturer, Mexican-descent students are beautiful, bright, and fearless! Senator Patrick, this is not a good time to keep these future leaders of Texas from learning about the true Spanish Mexican roots of our state.

Hence, I ask Spanish Mexican-descent Texans who vote Republican, “no se olviden de su herencia” (don’t forget your heritage). If you want a shot of inspiration and reminder of what makes us descendants of the first citizens of Texas, you too must visit the Tejano Monument in Austin. You should be just as concerned as those of us in the frontlines daily fighting to preserve the memory of our ancestors. Further, I ask all our many allied Anglo brethren who are Tejano history aficionados to help us keep Sen. Patrick and other bigoted politicians from tinkering with Texas School Board of Education policies. Regardless of your political views, you must contact your elected representatives and tell them so. (Note: although Senator Patrick and his supporters have temporarily withheld their ill-advised bills in committee, that doesn’t mean they have given up their objective to rob the majority of Texas school children of their Tejano inheritance.)

In the final analysis, my advice to Senator Patrick and those who fear Mexican American Studies is as follows. Your intolerance has no place in an increasingly diversifying Texas. So, you have two choices. Either you accept the certain re-browning of Texas and teaching of Tejano history or you move back east of the Sabine River. The truth is no one should be afraid of learning Texas history in a seamless, bi-cultural, big picture perspective. In the words of FDR, a Democrat that Republicans love to hate, Senator Patrick, you have nothing to fear, but fear itself.

José Antonio (Joe) López was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and is a USAF Veteran. He now lives in Universal City, Texas. He is the author of two books: “The Last Knight (Don Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara Uribe, A Texas Hero),” and “Nights of Wailing, Days of Pain (Life in 1920s South Texas).” Lopez is also the founder of the Tejano Learning Center, LLC, and www.tejanosunidos.org, a Web site dedicated to Spanish Mexican people and events in U.S. history that are mostly overlooked in mainstream history books.

-30-