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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Rafael Anchía has no connection with this tradition. He was born and raised in Miami, where his parents settled when his father’s playing days were over. He had never been to Texas before he received an academic scholarship to attend Southern Methodist University. Could his lack of a Texas pedigree prove to be a detriment to political advancement? Perhaps. Before 1891, no Texas governor was native born. However, since James Hogg took office that year, only six governors have not been native born, and of these, only one, George W. Bush, has been elected since 1941. It is possible, however, that Anchía’s comparatively recent arrival could turn out to be an asset. The patrón system is gone now, but the long history of political corruption survives in the collective memory. Innuendo helped ruin Tony Sanchez. Dan Morales, twice elected attorney general in the nineties, turned out to be a crook. So did Benny Reyes, a well-known Houston politico. A current FBI investigation in El Paso has netted three local officials so far. Anchía comes from an entirely different culture. “Anchía” is not even a New World surname; my online search found only six listings under that name in the entire state. The patrón system is not his burden, nor is the crab bucket. If he were to decide to run for governor, he would start with a clean slate.
Rafael’s earliest memories are of being crammed into a small house in Miami, living with relatives and sleeping on a sofa in a crowded room. His grandfather Justino Michelena, the Spanish Civil War mapmaker, had been hired by the Colt firearms company to embellish hunting rifles with engravings for the firm’s wealthiest customers, but the northeastern towns where he worked were too cold and too isolated, and he moved to Miami. Justino too had played jai alai, which was how he happened to be at the picnic where Rafael’s parents met. Rafael’s mother, Edurne, has been a teacher for almost thirty years. After high school, she went to Miami-Dade Community College and earned a four-year degree from Florida International University. She became a U.S. citizen, and Julio became a legal permanent resident when he married her. He worked as a jai alai instructor, teaching amateurs the game. Eventually they moved into a southwest Miami neighborhood inhabited by a polyglot of Hispanic nationalities. Rafael learned Spanish first—“I was exposed to all dialects,” he says—but his mother was concerned he wasn’t getting enough English. She put him in front of a television set, and he learned the language from Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, and The Electric Company. He went to the same high school as Jose Canseco but remembers Jose’s brother, Ozzie, as the big star, until he hurt his arm.
At age four, Rafael took up jai alai. His father was the ballmaker at a school for professionals in Dania, and by the time he was in high school, he had joined a program for promising players. He had his life planned out: He had already submitted an application to the University of Florida. He would attend school and play professionally in nearby Ocala. He was good enough to be one of two front-court players selected to represent the United States at the 1986 world championship in Vitoria, Spain, and his long-term goal was to represent the U.S. in the 1992 Olympics, in Barcelona, at which jai alai would be an exhibition sport.
Before he could put his plans in motion, he heard about a college fair to be held at the Miami Expo Center. He invited his father to go. Rafael was checking out the booths when he heard his father shout, “¡Rafael! ¡Ven aquí!” He arrived to find Julio animatedly engaged in a conversation in Spanish with a representative from SMU. “Write down your SAT scores and your grades,” she said. “We want you to apply.” Sometime later, a dean from SMU telephoned and asked to speak to Julio. “We want your son to come to SMU,” he said. “We have a scholarship for him.” “No worry,” said Julio. “He’s coming.” Rafael wasn’t so sure. He wanted to play jai alai. He dreamed of playing in the Olympics. “Son, jai alai is a dying sport,” Julio told him. “Don’t you end up like me.”
And so Rafael found himself getting off an airplane with his mother at DFW and looking out at the flat Texas prairie. The first thing he noticed was that the laborers at the airport were Hispanic. The same was true at SMU. The custodial employees were Hispanic. The yardmen were Hispanic. It was a shock. “I came from a city where Latinos were prominent at every echelon in the social structure,” Rafael told me. “Latinos ran the town.” He turned to his mother and said, “Aquí los latinos están pisados.” Here the Latinos are stepped on.
His roommate provided another shock. Rafael arrived toting a cheap plastic suitcase and a duffle bag. The roommate looked like, well, a typical SMU student. When he saw Rafael, he exclaimed, “Oh, man, thank God! When I saw your name, I thought you were going to be some kind of Iranian.” He wanted to know what Rafael’s father did. “He makes jai alai balls,” Rafael said. And the roommate’s father? He owned a small oil company.
Anchía graduated from SMU in 1990 with a 3.7 GPA and a triple major (anthropology, Latin American studies, and Spanish with a concentration in literature). That is not all he took away from campus. “I learned Southern values,” he told me, “and I learned what wealthy people valued.” He went to law school at Tulane University, in New Orleans, where, he says, “I came out of my shell.” It’s not clear if he is all the way out, even now. He is more wonk than hail-fellow-well-met, given to talking about “the kindergarten cohort” and “feeling actualized by public service.” There is a reserve about him that, even before I knew his family history, struck me as distinctly European.
After law school, he returned to Dallas as an associate with Winstead Sechrest & Minick (now Winstead PC), one of Texas’s largest firms. There he worked with David Dean and Rider Scott, both of whom had served in the governor’s office under Bill Clements, and Chris Semos, a former Democratic legislator who had once represented the north Oak Cliff area that is part of Anchía’s district today. Their practice involved helping counties along Interstate 35 get funding to improve the choked artery. Scott was the technician, Dean the strategist, Semos the dealmaker. The idea was to get all the county judges to join in a letter of understanding that would prod the Texas Department of Transportation into action. For the first time, Anchía came into contact with courthouse politicians. He didn’t know quite what to make of it all. “I knew nothing about nothing,” he says. “I didn’t know where half of the places I was going were. I wasn’t political at all. I was just a baby lawyer trying to figure it out.” He knew this much: “On my first day out of law school, I was making more than my parents combined made in a year.”
“The mark of a truly educated man is to be moved deeply by statistics.” This observation by the British dramatist George Bernard Shaw appears in one of Steve Murdock’s PowerPoint presentations about the demographic future of Texas. All I can say is that I hope you’re truly educated, because what follows is a lot of statistics that all add up to the same thing: Texas is destined to be a Hispanic state, and sooner than you think.
Much of the future of the state is a mystery. Population is not—and politics follows population. Murdock, who was the state demographer before President Bush appointed him to head the U.S. Census Bureau last year, has calculated what Texas will look like over the next four decades, based on the natural increase in population and domestic and foreign immigration. The black population is relatively stable, and “other” is fairly small, so the germane numbers (which I am going to round off) are for Anglos and Hispanics. The trend is inexorable. In the eighties, the Anglo population grew by 34 percent, the Hispanic population by 49 percent. In the nineties, the figures were 20 percent and 60 percent. In the first five years of this decade, they were 13 percent and 68 percent. The Anglo population is growing at about one fifth the rate of the Hispanic population. Anglo Texans were a majority (53 percent) of the state in 2000; by 2006, they were not (48 percent, twelve points higher than Hispanics). Even if federal immigration policy succeeds in reducing net migration to half the rate of the nineties, Murdock projects that the Hispanic percentage of the state’s population will surpass the Anglo percentage, barely, by 2020. If immigration rates remain at the current level, Hispanics will constitute 46 percent of the state’s population by 2020, Anglos 38 percent. In numbers of people, that comes out to just fewer than 14 million Hispanics and a little more than 11 million Anglos.
The explosive Hispanic population growth is remaking Texas into a state that is poorer and less educated. Median household income for the 2000 census was $47,162 for Anglos, $29,873 for Hispanics. Texas ranked thirtieth among all states in median household income. By 2005, it had dropped to thirty-ninth. In the percentage of the population 25 years of age or older who are high school graduates, Texas ranked dead last in 2004, down from forty-fifth in 2000.
The statistic that counts the most in politics, though, is numbers of votes, and Hispanics’ numbers in Texas remain far below those of Anglos. In general elections, the lowest voter turnouts in the state, below 20 percent, occur in border counties that are overwhelmingly Hispanic. The same problem exists in the Hispanic neighborhoods in the big cities. In 2006, in a Houston state House district with a large Hispanic majority population, an Anglo, Kevin Bailey, won the Democratic primary with just 906 votes; his Hispanic opponent polled fewer than 400—this in a district with just over 133,000 people. Mike Baselice, the Republican pollster, has said for years that the trend line shows a consistent but slow increase in the statewide Hispanic vote of around one half of 1 percent per election cycle.
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