Tejas y California

The article from this past Sunday’s New York Times magazine on Julian Castro, the young Latino mayor of San Antonio, brought back memories.  I’m from San Antonio, and I remember calling home from college to get the results of Henry Cisneros’s historic candidacy for San Antonio mayor in 1981.  The focus on a new young Latino mayor of my hometown also caused me to revisit some thoughts I wrote down for Loyola’s alumni magazine ten years ago.  At the time I observed (from my vantage point of someone born in Texas and then living in California) that the two states’ Republican parties had very different success rates with Latino voters.  I speculated that this was due in large part to the different cultures of the two states.  To state briefly, Latinos in Texas were ingrained in Texas society and its larger cultural mythology in ways that were not the case in California.  This in turn made the Texas GOP much less antagonistic to Latinos, and, at the same time, made possible the rise of moderate Latinos with broad-based support, such as Cisneros and now Castro. 

Ten years of history since that article has borne out some of my thoughts.  A Texan, George W. Bush, enjoyed the greatest success any Republican presidential candidate has had with Latinos.  He also pushed the least punitive immigration reform measures acceptable by at least some of his party.  Correspondingly, Latino leaders such as Castro issue middle-of-the-road condemnations of the Arizona immigration law (around 5:15 of this video) that could have come from Texas governor Rick Perry.  The California party, by contrast, has continued to struggle with among Latinos.  Part of this is the hangover from the immigration wars of the 90s.  But part of it reflects the fact that some prominent California Republicans continue to fight those wars .

I think these developments bode better for Texas Latinos (such as Castro) than for Texas Republicans (such as Perry).  Despite their moderation on immigration, Texas Republicans will continue to be pushed to the right, as Perry was during his recent gubernatorial primary campaign.  But the larger political space allowed Latino politicians in Texas (as compared with their California counterparts) will allow moderates like Castro to continue to rise.  I don’t know whether Julian Castro will become the first Latino President, as the Times article speculates.  But I’m more confident that whoever that person is, he will be from Texas .