El Gobernador
The question isn’t whether we’ll elect a Hispanic to lead Texas. It’s whom, and from which party, and how quickly jai alai’s loss will be our gain.
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The history of Hispanic politics in Texas has been a long and often sordid one, characterized by every bad political impulse imaginable: segregation, bossism, factionalism, corruption, intimidation, and, on the part of ordinary people, indifference to participation in the political process. Some of the perpetrators have been Anglos—including Texas Rangers—and some have been Hispanics; regardless, the history has been a burden for Hispanics who would seek statewide office, as Democratic gubernatorial nominee Tony Sanchez found out in 2002.
The story begins with Sam Houston’s victory at San Jacinto, which left Mexican landowners north of the Rio Grande stranded in a foreign land. Texas had claimed the Rio Grande as its southern boundary, Mexico had claimed the Nueces as its northern boundary, and the dispute was not resolved until the Mexican War of 1846—1848. No Anglo adventurers had settled in the Nueces Strip, as the area was known, but some had made their way to Laredo and Brownsville. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave the strip to the U.S. It also guaranteed the land titles of Mexican families, but the guarantee was not worth the paper it was printed on. It was only as good as the American courts that were supposed to enforce it, and the law was easily manipulated to favor Anglo claimants. Dispossession occurred on a massive scale.
In such circumstances—a population along the river of about eight thousand people, composed of a few Mexican landed families, a group of ambitious Anglo merchants, and a large number of illiterate Mexican peasants—political control was a prize to be fought over. This was the origin of the patrón system, in which powerful Anglos organized the peasantry into factions that vied for political control. Because the voters were illiterate, their allegiances were identified by ribbons, red and blue, representing their factions, and they were told how to mark their ballots. In Brownsville’s early days, the Reds, led by future King Ranch founder Richard King, usually prevailed. As the great ranches of South Texas were assembled, the Mexican population lived in a virtual feudal system that endured into the last quarter of the twentieth century. The patrón traded money (often taken from the treasuries of local governments he controlled) for votes. He would pay for his followers’ funerals, for their household necessities, even for a college education for a promising child—and he would pay the poll tax on their behalf. The most notorious of the patrones were the Parrs, of Duval County. In 1914, on the eve of a court-ordered audit of county funds, Archie Parr, the first of his line, torched the courthouse to thwart the investigation. Archie’s son George was known as the Duke of Duval; he provided the tainted votes that elected LBJ to the Senate in 1948. The dynasty ended when George shot himself on his ranch in 1975, on the day he was to be taken away to prison.
The Mexican population of Texas in 1900 was small—less than 5 percent of the state’s total. Immigration was a trickle; why would a Mexican want to submit to the discrimination and degradation that awaited him north of the Rio Grande? But two developments occurred that reversed the trend. One was the opening of the Rio Grande Valley to agriculture, which created an immediate demand for cheap labor. For the Mexican peasantry, low wages in Texas were still a major improvement over the subsistence-level life they had left behind. The other was the deteriorating conditions in Mexico that ultimately led to the revolution of 1910. The Mexican population of Texas exploded: 53,000 immigrants in the first decade of the new century, 264,000 in the second, 165,000 in the third. Then, as now, many Anglos reacted with alarm. “Studies published by the University of Texas as early as 1920 warned of immense ethnic and social problems to come,” wrote historian T. R. Fehrenbach in Lone Star, the seminal history of Texas, which was published in 1968. “It was already recognized that the Mexican immigrants were not assimilating, in fact, had no desire to assimilate or adopt Anglo culture. The second generation was not learning English.”
I love Lone Star, but Fehrenbach missed the importance of the third wave of immigrants, which took place in the twenties; it included middle-class business owners who’d fled Mexico when the revolution took a turn to the left. Many of these newcomers had ended up in San Antonio. Among them were Leonides Gonzalez, who ran La Prensa, a national Spanish-language newspaper, and whose son Henry B. Gonzalez served in Congress, and Romulo Munguia, the grandfather of Henry Cisneros. (It was Munguia’s son Ruben who told me how the immigrants of the twenties differed from those who’d come before them.) The first generation had not assimilated—in an interview late in his career, the younger Gonzalez told me that his father always viewed himself as a temporary visitor in America and thought it inappropriate to involve himself in its politics—but their children did.
The first stirrings of activism occurred in January 1938, when 12,000 pecan shellers on the West Side of San Antonio went on strike after shelling company owners cut their Depression-era wages of $2 per week. In March the strike was settled in the workers’ favor, but within three years the owners had replaced workers with machines. The next episode, however, was more successful. An American soldier named Felix Longoria was killed in action in the Philippines in July 1945. Four years later, his remains were sent to his hometown of Three Rivers, where his widow and daughter lived. A memorial service had been scheduled at the town’s only funeral home, but the owner canceled it, saying, “The whites would not like it.” In nearby Corpus Christi, Hector Garcia, a decorated war veteran, had organized the American GI Forum after learning that the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station hospital would not accept Mexican American patients. Garcia wired Senator Lyndon Johnson about the incident in Three Rivers, and Johnson sent a telegram that began, “I deeply regret to learn that the prejudice of some individuals extends even beyond this life.” He arranged for Longoria to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
The radicalism of the sixties did not bypass Hispanic Texas. The flash point came in 1969, when the high school in Crystal City adopted a rule that mandated the homecoming queen be the daughter of graduates. This was a transparent attempt to ensure the election of an Anglo. A graduate student at St. Mary’s University, in San Antonio, named José Angel Gutiérrez organized a boycott and won a compromise. Soon afterward, he formed La Raza Unida party with the idea of using Hispanic votes to break the conservative Democrats’ monopoly of state politics. It almost worked. Ramsey Muñiz, the Raza Unida candidate for governor in 1972, received 214,118 votes, reducing Democrat Dolph Briscoe’s margin over Republican Hank Grover to just under 100,000 votes. By 1974, Gutiérrez and La Raza Unida had control of the Crystal City school board, courthouse, and city council.
What happened next was an old and all-too- familiar story: Factionalism divided Gutiérrez’s supporters, and those whom he had alienated joined with Anglos to challenge him. When a court ruling went against him, costing him his majority on the commissioners’ court, he left town, and the revolution was over. The attitude of local Anglos toward the split within La Raza Unida was reflected by an oft-told racist joke, which was included in texas monthly’s 1977 story on Gutiérrez’s troubles: Two men are catching crabs on a beach. One puts the crabs in a bucket with a lid on it. The other puts them in a bucket without a lid. “Aren’t you worried that the crabs will crawl out?” asks the first man. “These are Mexican crabs,” explains the other man. “They will pull each other down.”
The reverse of factionalism is bossism, and that too has been part of the tradition of Hispanic politics. The far South Texas counties, Cameron and Hidalgo and Starr, have deep histories of boss rule dating back to the late nineteenth century—first by Anglos, more recently by Hispanics. Cameron’s longtime boss James B. Wells has a county named after him. In Hidalgo, a Texas Ranger named Anderson Yancey Baker was accused of murdering a Hispanic rancher and his brother, and Wells, his defense lawyer, argued self-defense and won an acquittal; Baker went on to become the sheriff and political boss of the county. In rural Starr County, the Guerra clan ruled for decades.
The Anglos were replaced in modern times by Hispanics—Pepe Martin in Webb County, Billy Leo in Hidalgo, and, until he was defeated for reelection as county judge in 2006, Gilberto Hinojosa in Cameron. Even Henry B. Gonzalez, the first Hispanic who transcended ethnic politics, let it be known that he would tolerate no challenge in San Antonio. “There is only one politician in this office, and that is me,” he used to say. He could make it stick because he’d become a hero in 1957, when he set a state record for filibustering; he’d spoken for more than 36 consecutive hours against a package of bills designed to bolster segregation in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down racially “separate but equal” public schools. Cisneros once told me that I could walk into any Hispanic-owned business on the West Side of San Antonio and find a picture of Henry B. there. When Cisneros was elected mayor, he found it prudent to write Gonzalez a letter saying, “I will never run against you.”
Even more than Gonzalez, Cisneros rose above ethnic politics. He won 61.8 percent of the vote in defeating an Anglo candidate from the old guard in 1981. Cisneros had everything necessary to become the state’s first Hispanic governor: the vision, the charisma, the inclusive message of the rising tide that lifts all boats, the support of San Antonio’s most prominent citizens, the record of achievement in transforming a sleepy city into the boomtown it has become—everything except the will. I remember a conversation over breakfast during which he put the blade of a knife on a sugar bowl and the handle on the rim of his coffee cup and tapped the center of the implement. “All the pressure is on the bridge,” he told me. “I’m tired of being the bridge”—that is, between the Anglo and Hispanic communities. Although his public admission of an extramarital affair would make it impossible for him to seek higher office, our breakfast conversation convinced me, long before the affair became public, that he was not running for anything; he was running from the destiny others had laid out for him. Such a loss.
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