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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Why don’t Hispanics vote in greater numbers? The most obvious answer is that as many as half of them are not eligible because they are not citizens. The difference between the Hispanic immigrants and the European immigrants, Henry Cisneros once told me, is the difference between a river and an ocean. The European immigrants couldn’t easily go back. The Hispanic immigrants can. Thus, like Leonides Gonzalez, they see themselves as visitors. Many are here just to work and send money back to Mexico. Another reason is that, because of high birth rates, a greater proportion of the Hispanic population, compared with Anglos, is too young to vote. Anchía told me that kindergarten enrollment in Dallas public schools is 70 percent Hispanic. A third reason is something that Ruben Munguia, who was active in local San Antonio politics until his death, in 2003, told me: Mexican immigrants come from a country, and a political culture, in which the government never did anything for the people; it only did things to the people. But until Hispanic voter participation increases—if, for instance, outrage over immigration issues triumphs over inertia—any change in Texas politics will be gradual.
“I never thought about running for office, not even in my fraternity,” Anchía told me. An aide was driving us through his legislative district on a blustery December day that would bring a hard, chilling rain. The district is one of those odd zigzag creations of the Voting Rights Act, designed to provide a safe (in this case, 71 percent) Hispanic seat. The outline resembles a barbell standing on end, the population weighted at the top and bottom. It begins in the affluent Kessler Park area of Oak Cliff and runs north on either side of Interstate 35, past a landscape of rail yards, small businesses, warehouses, and a DART rapid-transit line that is under construction. To the west, across the Trinity River, are the barrio neighborhoods of La Bajada and Los Altos, denoting lower and higher ground near the river. Here the one-story dwellings are small and old, with frame constructions and long-faded paint jobs. Most are renter occupied, as are 64.3 percent of the homes in the district. But this may soon be prime real estate, Anchía told me. As we approached the river again, we could see the skyscrapers of downtown and the Hilton Anatole hotel, just a few hundred yards to the east, and the site of a planned bridge, part of the recently authorized Trinity River Corridor Project, which will surely bring gentrification. I wondered how the new residents will react to the bronze statue of nineteenth-century Mexican president Benito Juárez, which is prominently displayed in a neighborhood park.
Over lunch at a diner, we talked about his entry into politics. This was the first time I had seen him in an informal situation. His appearance is subtly old-world. A staffer told me that other Hispanics, upon encountering him for the first time, think he might be Cuban. His black hair is cut just long enough, maybe an inch, to comb to one side, and his eyes have a hint of gold that can make them seem ablaze when he speaks with intensity. He is short, about five foot eight, and friends who play sports with him but have never heard of jai alai say that he is built like a soccer player, with muscular calves. Until recently, he played volleyball, and fellow players say he was incredibly quick; the ball must have looked to him as if it were moving in slow motion compared with the speed of the jai alai ball.
He had always been interested in public service—“It’s because my mother is a teacher,” he said—and he was honored for his pro bono work as a lawyer. But his only political experience was block walking for Congressman Martin Frost in 1996. Then, in 2000, the Dallas Independent School District board member for the area in which Anchía lived opted not to run for reelection. The incumbent didn’t like the candidates who were vying to replace him, so he encouraged Anchía to run. So did then-councilwoman Laura Miller, then-mayor Ron Kirk, and the vice president of the education program at the chamber of commerce, as well as people he had met through the Leadership Dallas program.
“My first reaction was ‘No way,’” he said. “A lot of people had been chewed up by the school district. I wasn’t a political junkie. I was like any thirty-two-year-old; running for office didn’t appeal to me that much.” It especially did not appeal to his wife, Marissa, whom he had met when she applied for a job with David Dean and Rider Scott. (“She was drop-dead gorgeous,” Anchía told me.) Her father had been the longtime county judge in Hebbronville, the seat of Jim Hogg County, deep in the South Texas brush country. She knew the sacrifices the families of politicians had to make; his low salary in a poor county had almost bankrupted the family.
On election night, Anchía led a five-person race with 49.87 percent of the vote. But there had been a glitch in the printing of the ballots, and Anchía was able to ask for a recount. The new tally gave him 50.52 percent. He was officially in politics. Soon he was advocating for the passage of a new bond issue for a district in which one out of every four kids went to school in a portable. The exercise in coalition building necessary to win support for the mammoth proposal was his true education in politics. “There was less logrolling than you would expect,” he told me. “We hired an engineering firm to do an independent needs assessment and let that drive the decision of what should be in the package. It came back at $1.8 billion. We settled on $1.375. People said the voters wouldn’t invest in kids that aren’t theirs and don’t look like theirs, but we proved them wrong. People don’t give the electorate enough credit. They will do the right thing if you do enough confidence building.” The bond issue passed with 80 percent of the vote.
We resumed our drive north through the district. Along the freeway there was little commercial development and no residential housing. Beyond Parkland Hospital, which sits just outside the district, the lines widened to take in Love Field and the neighborhoods on either side. We drove through one that was next to the airfield. The houses were old, but they were brick; the residents were Hispanic. Next came apartment complexes, one after another. “These were designed for singles,” Anchía told me. “Now they are entirely Hispanic. Every elementary school we pass is at least ninety percent Hispanic.” One bore the name of the late Leonides Cigarroa, a prominent Laredo surgeon. At Interstate 635, we left Dallas and crossed into Farmers Branch. This is the top of the district, an aging suburb that became famous when it sought to prohibit landlords from renting to illegal aliens. Anchía pointed out a restaurant in a strip shopping center called Cuquita’s. “That was ground zero for the opponents of the ordinance,” he said. “The owner is a Republican woman who is fed up with the stance of her party.” Beyond Farmers Branch lay Carrollton, another suburb. “Do you know how to tell that Hispanics live in these houses?” Anchía asked me. I didn’t. “It’s the Ford F-150’s in the driveway,” he said.
I asked Anchía how he decided to run for the Legislature. “In December 2003 Steve Wolens [the legislator who had represented the district for 22 years and also happens to be Laura Miller’s husband] called to say that he would not seek reelection. ‘You’re running,’ he said.” Anchía filed for the seat. Another candidate, a longtime Hispanic pol, entered the race at the last minute but was disqualified for not residing in the district, and in November 2004 Anchía was elected without opposition.
Before another session came around, Anchía had to decide whether to run for mayor. In July 2006, moments after his second daughter was born, his cell phone rang. It was Ron Kirk. “Laura isn’t running,” Kirk said. He wanted Anchía to succeed her. “The timing wasn’t right for the family,” Anchía told me. “I didn’t feel that my work in the Legislature was done. I was going to have to ask a law firm to pay me to be mayor. What if things went badly for me? What if things went badly for the firm?” Then he added, “Timing is everything. I may not get another shot.”
The date Rafael Anchía has circled in the calendar of his mind for evaluating his political future is 2012. “It’s the year after redistricting, and we’ll know after the election whether we have a Democratic majority, or a bipartisan coalition, that makes it possible to get things done,” he told me. He has thought a lot about education. “What I saw on the school board was young girls [dropping out] in middle school to take care of younger siblings or enter the workforce. I think we’re too focused on engineering and mathematics. We need more emphasis on trades. The jobs we’re creating do not require engineering and mathematics. We need to have a dual track. Do we need the four-by-four curriculum?” (Students have been required to take four core courses—English, math, science, and social studies—for all four years of high school, but Anchía, along with three Republicans, passed a bill that allows students to replace one of the eight required math and science courses with a career course.) “Kids who do graduate have to go to vocational-technical school for ten thousand dollars or more. They have to borrow that money. Those schools are filling a vacuum. [Former DISD superintendent] Mike Moses used to say, ‘Kids aren’t buying what we’re selling.’”
It is much easier to buy what Anchía is selling: the future. One track that could lead him to the governorship in 2018 would be chairman of a major policy committee such as Public Education and then mayor of Dallas. Some political savants regard mayor as a dead-end job, but Cisneros used it to build a statewide constituency, and Bill White, in Houston, appears to be trying to do the same. The choice Anchía will have to make at some point is law or politics, and it will not be an easy one. But he gave an indication of where his heart lies when he told me, “I’d like to be a major committee chairman with a chance to do some things. But if we take control and run the House the same way it has been run, I’ll be disappointed in us. I would not want to be part of a majority like that.”
In our 2007 Best and Worst Legislators story, we wrote of Anchía, “If the Legislature were a stock market, he’d be Google. Recommendation: Buy.” That’s truer than ever. And the price is going up.
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