Mimi Swartz paints a portrait of change among Latino/-ina Texans since November 8, 2016, who began to cringe — then change — with the first words out of the mouth of the current occupant of the Oval. The epithets of "rapists" and "murderers" brought cheers from the knuckle-dragging, drooling "base,." but doubt began to grow in the Spanish-surnamed/-speaking gente (people) of Texas. Now, after more than a year of the non-stop racist, xenophobic blathering and intensified by the forced separation of migrant families at the border may bring a November surprise to the current occupant and his minions. If this is (fair & balanced) magical thinking, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
The GOP’s Wobbly Hold On Texas Latinos
By Mimi Swartz
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
Listening to President Trump try to explain away his indefensible policy on family separations the other week — and his latest attempts to get an immigration bill passed ASAP — I couldn’t stop thinking about Cynthia, whom I have known for most of her 35 years. Born in Monterrey, Mexico, she’s a pretty woman with a head of shiny black waves and a broad smile that obscure her killer competence and ambition. She didn’t want me to use her last name because she’s now a bigwig at a Fortune 500 Company that might not want the publicity.
What I can’t stop thinking about, in particular, is how different Cynthia’s life would have been if she had been separated from her mother while trying to cross into Texas in recent weeks instead of arriving undocumented in 1989.
Unlike Mr. Trump’s depictions of Mexican immigrants as violent drug traffickers, Cynthia’s family was like so many I knew growing up in South Texas. The family had struggled financially in Mexico — at one point Cynthia’s mother, Eva, tried to make ends meet by opening a food stand in front of their house, but they continued their slide toward destitution. First, Cynthia’s father, José, left for Houston in December 1989, catching a break because his own mother had crossed over in 1970 and eventually became a United States citizen, so José could stay here legally to care for her.
The rest of the family — Eva, Cynthia and her older sister and infant brother — piled into a car driven by a cousin and came to Houston on a tourist visa and the end of 1989. Then, like so many others, they just stayed here. In other words, the family was already separated and trying to reunite with the help of extended family already living in the United States. Cynthia could have just as easily come with a cousin or an aunt or any other trusted relative who, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, wasn’t really family at all.
For more than a decade, Eva worked as a nanny while her husband was a clerk in one of Houston’s large corporations, and the family disappeared seamlessly into the city’s crazy quilt of diversity. After 16 years of waiting, Eva was granted citizenship in 2015. During those years, the family could never return to Mexico for fear that they wouldn’t be allowed back in the United States. “This is the only country I’ve ever known,” explained Cynthia, who was naturalized just a year ago.
Her parents saved enough to send all their children to Catholic private schools — they feared the racism and low quality of the public schools in their neighborhood would be a deterrent to opportunity. In high school, Cynthia fell in love with engineering and came to accept unquestioningly the American precept that if she studied hard and did well, there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t become an engineer. She was an A student, aced high school calculus, graduated from a public university with an engineering degree and found a job with a multinational company.
After 10 years, Cynthia is not just the only Latina in her division, but also the only woman and the only Latina executive. “We are trying to adapt,” she said of the company. “That’s one of the things I question my boss about.” In the meantime, she drives a shimmering $43,000 Audi A5 Sportback and complains about the millennials who can’t follow instructions at work. She took her mother on a trip to Rome to see the pope on his balcony at the Vatican. It’s all good. “People leave their cultures and their families for years, sometimes they end up losing their identity for a chance,” she said.
Maybe it won’t surprise you that Cynthia is also a Republican. The party’s up-by-your-bootstraps ethos appealed to her, she’s anti-abortion and she hates paying taxes. She’s one of those people Democrats can’t depend on to turn Texas blue.
And she isn’t alone: The Republican Party of George W. Bush understood that people living south of the border wanted to come here to work and that businesses on the other side depended on them for cheap labor. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was one that often made a pathway to economic success for the second generation, like Cynthia.
But that was before Mr. Trump. From the beginning, the talk of a wall and bloodthirsty gangs has sent what could have been a growing voter bloc of the Republican Party into a serious identity crisis — even if they don’t say so in public.
Some, like George Antuna, a co-founder of the Hispanic Republicans of Texas, insist that border crime is real if you consider both sides of the border as one place and that much of what Mr. Trump says — referring to Latino immigrants as “animals” and “bad hombres” — is merely “rhetorical.” Still, Mr. Antuna is putting his efforts into local races: When Hispanic Republicans win in their cities and counties, he said, “that rhetoric on the national level becomes noise. The guy I know as my county judge, he’s not like that.”
Artemio Muniz, a Bush loyalist who started the Federation of Hispanic Republicans in Texas in 2008, is far less cautious and has been banned from the White House for his trouble. “The days of Republican delegates from Texas singing in Spanish and waving cowboy hats at the convention — those days are gone,” he said, along with any chance to bring Latinos into the party anytime soon. “The stereotype, the broad brush used to describe Mexicans is just horrible. It’s offensive. There’s no two ways about it.”
Being offensive doesn’t seem like a winning strategy. Democrats lost to Republicans statewide in the last two presidential elections, but the margins have been shrinking: 16 percent in 2012; only 9 percent in 2012. If Texas isn’t blue, the urban areas certainly are. By 2022, Hispanics will be the majority in Texas. Fifty percent of their vote is in the two largest cities, Dallas and Houston.
Assuming Latinos can and will vote in future elections, the old notion that the fiscal and social conservatives among them will stick with the Republican Party is up for debate. “I’m trying my hardest to change the direction of a bus that’s going off the cliff,” Mr. Muniz explained. It won’t be easy: There were once three Latino Republicans in the Texas Legislature; now that sorry number is down to one.
Voter suppression and gerrymandering aside, Mr. Muniz believes more grass-roots work and encouragement of civic engagement could build the party’s Latino wing, but today’s Republican leadership — in Texas and nationally — can’t even find those places with a map. Mr. Muniz is a Bush-era Republican and knows its smaller South Texas towns and urban neighborhoods where the battles have to be waged. Old-style Republicans — moderate, Bush-era people — have to learn new ways. “This is not Midland, TX, where you jump off a golf cart,” Mr. Muniz said.
As for Cynthia? She was busy when I called the other day, giving a tour of her plant to some vice president of something or other, another white guy she’d have to convince of her competency as a woman and as a Mexican-American. She gave me a long sigh when I asked about President Trump.
“I think the Republican Party is in the middle of a change, just like everything else in the world,” she told me, sounding like the conservative she is. She wasn’t angry, she said, just disappointed. She wants to be a loyal Republican, but she has come to see that the people leading the party these days don’t speak to the ideals that fueled her dreams.
“You have to adapt to change. We have not been able to adapt our Republican beliefs to the world we live in,” she said, and I started to hear just a hint of doubt as she spoke about the party she loves, the one that clearly wants nothing to do with her. “We need the Republicans who made America different. Where are the Lincolns of the world? That’s not them anymore.” # # #
[Mimi Swartz, an executive editor at Texas Monthly, also is a NYT contributing Op-Ed writer. Swartz received a BA (English) from Hampshire College (MA). She is the co-author (with Sherron Watkins) of Power Failure, The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron (2003).]
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