History Lesson 
Pueblo Nuevo
When I moved to Houston from San Antonio two years ago, I thought I would miss Texas' best city for Latinos. Instead, I found it.
HOUSTON, ALLOW ME TO PROPOSE, is like a martini—an extraordinary thing cast from the mixing of ordinary elements, especially if you agree with Alex López Negrete's assessment. "I see it as a combination of Chicago and Miami. If you shook those two together and put them in the Southwest, that's what it would be."
At eight-fifteen in the morning, the president and chief executive officer of López Negrete Communications is already gulping a Diet Dr Pepper, sitting there impeccably, right leg crossed over left, in black cowboy boots and a gray jacket that matches hair and goatee perfectly. A Houston native raised in Mexico City, the 43-year-old Hispanic-marketing-and-advertising veteran embodies his own summation of the city's burgeoning Latino community: transnational, bilingual, and full of life. "Hay un ambiente that's so cool," he says of the Houston Latino scene, as a black-clad crew scrambles to begin the filming of a Goya Foods commercial featuring two lanky Latino kids on skateboards. "All Latinos have something here. The employees that I've transplanted from Mexico City, from Bogotá, from L.A., from Miami, from Puerto Rico—everyone loves this town."
I have to admit that two years ago, I might have snorted at his assertion, or at least raised a suspecting eyebrow. It was rather reluctantly that I packed my bags and moved to Houston when graduate school called. Like most Texans who haven't spent much time here, I had always dismissed this city as nothing more than a gritty mess of concrete and traffic. Coming here for me had meant leaving San Antonio, the state's Hispanic cultural mecca, where I had settled to get my Texas fix after four years of college on the West Coast.
So when I got to Houston, I sulked for a few days. But once I poked around its neighborhoods, I began discovering, to my surprise, an ethnic mix that made the city come alive. I found myself surrounded by people from around the globe: from Iran, Africa, Vietnam. Even in a place like the Macaroni Grill, I could hear Spanish being spoken in unfamiliar accents.
As a first-generation Mexican American, my entertainment options were just as varied. If I wanted the tejano sound that had become my passion in San Antonio, I would venture into the pulsating clubs of Pasadena, where the bands play loud and people dance the polka with style. If I was in the mood for the Spanish-language pop and rock I'd grown up listening to on the border, I'd hit one of the swanky spots downtown where trendy Mexican and South American transplants congregate to drink scotch. If I was craving "salsa con sentimiento," as one Ecuadorian friend calls it, I could get the soul music on the city's Richmond Strip, but if I preferred salsa in the company of Turkish and Indian grad students and engineers—or if I wanted jazz, blues, or some other type of mainstream music—the city's revitalized downtown was the place to be.
In Houston I could have it all, really: Ethnic identity, Texas flair, and a rich cosmopolitanism suggestive of López Negrete's Chicago-Miami—perhaps, dare I say, suggestive of L.A. If I had been Mexican in Brownsville and Hispanic in San Antonio, Houston taught me to be Latina, with all of its cross-cultural freedom.
It is Houston's best-kept secret: At the turn of the century, Texas' swampiest city is the greatest place for Latinos to be, and that goes beyond entertainment to reasons that range from cultural to economic to plain aspirational. In the past two decades Houston has emerged as a promising place for Latin Americans of all stripes—rich and poor, native and immigrant, Central and South American and even Cuban (remember Orlando Sanchez, who nearly won the mayor's race last November?).
Houston has always been an industrious city where, the myth goes, hard work pays off. That deep belief triggered the city's largest population explosion during the sixties and seventies, when young white professionals from throughout the country flocked here to cash in on an oil boom that saw the stuff going for as much as $35 a barrel. By 1981, Houston was the fourth-largest city in the nation, its population nearly two thirds Anglo. Then the storied collapse: The following year the price of oil plummeted, and the dream was swiftly over.
But another one—this one international, working-class, and Latino—began. Mexicans, to be sure, had been in Houston since the 1800's, building railroads, making textiles, working in oil refineries, and helping enlarge the Ship Channel. They had cobbled together small enclaves on the east and north sides, in places like Magnolia Park and the Heights. But it was in the eighties and nineties, especially after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act passed with provisions for legalization and family reunification, that Latino numbers surged, as migrants streamed into Houston clamoring for jobs. Houston was radically transformed into a city where Latinos, at 37 percent of the population, are the largest ethnic group (followed by Anglos at 31 percent, blacks at 25 percent, and Asians at 7 percent and growing fastest of all). Harris County now has 900,000 Latinos, more than any other county in the nation except Los Angeles.
And the faith in Houston persists. Asked whether it's true that by working hard here one will eventually succeed, 88 percent of Houstonians queried in the 2001 Houston Area Survey agreed. That figure has never dipped below 75 percent since the question was first asked in 1982, even during the oil bust. "It makes a lot of sense, because it's the immigrant's faith," says Stephen Klineberg, the Rice University sociologist who directs the survey. Nationally, Klineberg says, fewer people—roughly 58 to 65 percent—feel the same optimism about America.
There's this story, for instance: Thirty years ago a young Mexican American woman from the tiny South Texas town of Palito Blanco drove her Volkswagen Beetle here after failing to find a job in her city of choice, San Antonio. She has since risen from social worker to lawyer to Houston's second-highest-ranking elected official, now bidding to become the first woman elected to serve—and the first Hispanic, period—on the Harris County Commissioners' Court. "I think in Houston, if you work hard and focus on what you want to do, you will succeed, no matter what race you are," says city controller Sylvia Garcia from her eighth-floor office in city hall. "It truly is our own version of the American dream."
Today Latinos are visible just about everywhere in Houston—inside Loop 610, in the neighborhoods between the loop and Beltway 8, even trickling out to the suburbs. They continue to live in Magnolia Park, but they're also in Galena Park, in Spring Branch, in Gulfton. "Pasadena used to be the home of the KKK," Houston native Tatcho Mindiola, a University of Houston sociologist and the director of the school's Center for Mexican American Studies, says with a smirk. "Now it's all mexicano!"
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