Quinceañeras, Community, and the Power of Being Seen by Bobby Pulido in South Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. 5 de Mayo, 2026

Quinceañeras, Community, and the Power of Being Seen by Bobby Pulido in South Texas

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Feliz 5 de Mayo! Happy 5th of May! 🇲🇽 

A recent piece by Joe Holley appearing in the Washington Post asks a question that has quickly entered public debate: Is the shift in Hispanic voters permanent? It’s an important question—but perhaps not the most generative one.

What we are witnessing in South Texas is not a simple story of partisan movement, but a powerful reminder of how communities respond, adapt, and reassert themselves under changing political conditions. The congressional race between Monica De La Cruz and Bobby Pulido has captured national attention, but its deeper significance lies closer to home—in the everyday lives, relationships, and cultural practices of the Rio Grande Valley.

Yes, the district lines matter. Yes, national narratives matter. But what stands out most in this moment is something far more grounded: the enduring importance of connection. When quinceañeras become campaign stops, it is easy to reduce them to strategy. But that misses the point. These are not just events—they are intergenerational spaces of family, memory, aspiration, and belonging. To show up in those spaces is to recognize a community not as a voting bloc, but as a living, breathing social world.

And a beautiful one at that. 🩷

That kind of presence matters.

It matters especially in a time when policy decisions—particularly around immigration—are being felt in deeply personal ways. Across South Texas, families are navigating uncertainty, economic strain, and fear. Workplaces are disrupted. Schools feel the absence. Churches and community spaces carry a quiet tension. In this context, politics is not abstract. It is lived.

And yet, what also emerges in moments like this is resilience.

South Texas has long been a place where people hold multiple truths at once: pride in hard work and citizenship, deep cultural roots, strong family networks, and an unwavering belief in a better future. As Bobby Pulido himself has put it, many do not see themselves as poor, but as “broke”—a temporary condition tied to aspiration, not defeat. That distinction speaks volumes about how communities understand themselves and their possibilities.

So rather than asking whether voters have permanently “shifted,” we might ask a different question: What does it mean to truly engage a community on its own terms?

The answer, at least in part, is visible in this race. It looks like showing up. Listening. Being present in the spaces that matter. It means recognizing culture not as a prop, but as a foundation. And it means understanding that policy decisions—especially those that impact families and livelihoods—will always shape political response.

South Texas is not a mystery to be solved. It is a community to be understood.

And if this moment tells us anything, it is that when people feel seen, respected, and connected, they respond—not just politically, but collectively. The future of this region will not be determined by a single election cycle or a single narrative. It will be shaped by the ongoing relationship between communities and those who seek to represent them.

That story isn’t about permanence.

It’s about possibility.

Is the shift in Hispanic voters permanent? This Texas race could tell.

A Tejano singer challenges the Republican incumbent in a high-stakes House battle.

Campaign signs for Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas) and Democratic candidate Bobby Pulido
stand in Edinburg, Texas, on Feb. 10. (Eric Gay/AP)

By Joe Holley | April 29, 2026 | Washington Post

Joe Holley is based in Austin and writes about Texas politics.

It’s been a long time since South Texas politics has produced such an unusual and high-stakes congressional race as this year’s battle between a two-term Republican incumbent and her Democratic opponent, a charismatic political neophyte who’s accustomed to being in the public eye. In fact, you might have to go back nearly 80 years to find the campaign equivalent.

That would be the 1948 Democratic primary race for a U.S. Senate seat between a popular governor and a young congressman from the Texas Hill Country. The Democratic primary was the race in those days; Republicans were as rare as a South Texas snowstorm. With Gov. Coke Stevenson seeking to go to Washington, and a hyper-ambitious congressman named Lyndon B. Johnson swooping down from the Texas sky in a helicopter — the “Johnson City Windmill,” the Associated Press dubbed it — the hot race was in the headlines day after day during that long-ago summer.

A bitterly disputed result in the primary runoff kept it in the news for days after the election. Relying on sleight-of-hand shenanigans from a magician’s top hat of campaign dirty tricks, both campaigns searched for uncounted votes around the state. As Robert Caro reported in the second volume of his monumental LBJ biography, “Means of Ascent,” an election official in Jim Wells County — a South Texas ranching area — declared the numeral 7 in the 765 vote tallies of the county’s Box 13 should have been read as a 9 for a total of 965 votes. That tally helped put Johnson over the top — by 87 votes out of nearly a million cast.

No one’s charging dirty tricks this time — unless you consider mid-decade gerrymandering a dirty trick — but the 15th Congressional District contest between Rep. Monica De La Cruz and Democratic challenger Bobby Pulido will serve as a test case to determine whether the shocking 2024 swing of South Texas voters toward President Donald Trump was a fling on the part of fickle Democrats — the vast majority Hispanic — or a paradigm-shifting relationship.

Bobby Pulido, Democratic candidate for Texas’s 15th Congressional District, 

sings at a quinceañera in Edinburg, on March 14. (Gabriel V. Cardenas/AFP/Getty Images)

Although the young LBJ taught for a year in a predominantly Hispanic school in South Texas, it’s probably safe to say that he never made appearances at quinceañeras a staple of his campaign. (A quinceañera is a traditional Latin American celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday.) Pulido, a 53-year-old Tejano singer whose first album went platinum three decades ago, has never run for public office, but when he shows up at a quinceañera on a Saturday night, as he’s wont to do these days, it’s the equivalent of Bad Bunny dropping by.

“The knock against De La Cruz,” said Carlos Sanchez, a retired South Texas journalist and former Hidalgo County official, “is that she’s taking her orders from Washington, and they don’t have an appreciation for the culture.”

Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas) poses for a photo during the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. (Jae C. Hong/AP)

Pulido’s quinceañera campaign was a serendipitous response to a tone-deaf comment from his opponent. After Pulido secured the Democratic nomination in March, De La Cruz posted a video saying that the election “isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera. It’s about who you trust with your family’s future.”

In an interview with the New Yorker, Pulido’s campaign manager, Abel Prado, recounted his immediate response: “Which gringo consultant wrote that?”

Prado had no trouble persuading the candidate to announce that he was happy to stop by quinceañeras in the district. He’s getting thousands of invitations, a campaign spokesperson told me, and is performing at as many as seven in one night. Fifteen-year-olds can’t vote, of course, but their parents and family friends can.

Pulido sings to Melanie Nieto, 15, during her quinceañera on March 14 in Edinburg. (Gabriel V. Cardenas/Getty Images)

Although the national spotlight is on the Latin Grammy Award winner, De La Cruz has one big advantage, aside from incumbency. The district she represents is part of what redistricting expert Richard Murray describes as “a masterfully gerrymandered” map drawn in 2021. It runs northward from the populous Rio Grande Valley, traditionally Democratic, through Republican-rich rural areas into the equally Republican outskirts of San Antonio.

De La Cruz may have owed her 2022 victory to that customized district, but in a rematch two years later with Democrat Michelle Vallejo, she cruised to a 14-point win— this time relying on a huge swing toward Republicans in Hidalgo County.

When Trump pressured Texas Republicans to redistrict yet again last year, in a scheme to pick up five new seats, the partisan makeup of De La Cruz’s district didn’t change much, but it includes residents who weren’t within the boundaries before. They may not be familiar with her, but they do know Pulido.

De La Cruz has another challenge. The Brownsville native, 51, ran in 2024 as a supporter of Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigration. Among Hispanics in South Texas, many of whom are proud of becoming citizens “the right way,” the tough approach resonated.

But then came Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Images of agents brutalizing residents in Minneapolis and elsewhere, combined with accounts of Valley residents being rounded up, have had a disturbing effect on Hispanics throughout South Texas. Many are reluctant to send their kids to school, to drive to work, to venture out to shop or attend church.

Their apprehension has impacted local economies, particularly in agriculture, construction and health care, where they are mainstays. Construction projects are stalled; crops are going untended. “Restaurants are closing, either temporarily or permanently because of raids,” Sanchez told me.

Antonio Gamez Cuéllar, 18, walks out of a detention facility in Raymondville, Texas, on March 9, escorted by his attorneys, Efrén C. Olivares and Carlos M. Garcia, and De La Cruz, on right. (Valerie Gonzalez/AP)

De La Cruz has sought to moderate her position on immigration. She has proposed a new visa category that would allow employers in construction to hire foreign workers. She also introduced legislation that would make it easier to hire seasonal agricultural workers.

Pulido, who majored in political science and considers himself a conservative Democrat, has said the immigration debate in Washington ignores reality in border communities. “I believe we can secure the border without destroying families and our local economy in the process,” the Rio Grande Valley native says on his website.

The issues — whether border security, water or the economy — may be less important than Pulido’s charisma. The son of a farmworker, he seems to be connecting with working-class voters in the 15th.

“We’re very aspirational,” he told the “Latino Vote” podcast. “The people down here do not consider themselves poor. They consider themselves broke. And there’s a big distinction. Because when they’re poor, the image is ‘Well, we want you to help us out.’ But when you’re broke you say, ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to make it.’”

De La Cruz has tried to muddy her opponent’s image by highlighting a New York Post story saying that one of Pulido’s band members was a registered sex offender convicted of indecent contact with an 8-year-old girl. In a statement, Prado said Pulido was not aware of the musician’s criminal history and fired him as soon as he found out.

The De La Cruz campaign also has pointed to misogynistic comments on social media and off-color jokes Pulido has made during his career. So far, the charges don’t seem to be sticking.

If Pulido is victorious — of course, the election is still six months away — he’ll likely ride a blue wave sweeping the nation, including South Texas. Countless quinceañeras may be key, but he won’t need a lucky number 7 miraculously transformed into a 9.

Democrats Still Have a Latinx Blind Spot: Understanding Far-Right Republican Mayra Flores' recent Congressional Victory

This thoughtful piece by Xochitl Gonzalez writing in this week's Atlantic, helps illustrate how race and ethnicity are social constructions. That is, these are historically produced in the context of, and in response to, social, political, economic, and cultural forces, resulting in a high level of complexity in relation to identity that Gonzalez identifies as problematic in the context of South Texas' conservative, far-right Republican Mayra Flores' recent election to Congress. 

Gonzalez raises the question of whether a "Latinx" or "Latino" electorate actually exists—even to the point of suggesting that there may be no "Latino vote," much less a "Latinx vote" in light of not only our diversity as a Latino community writ large, but also by a potentially false centering of it in places like South Texas where the electoral dynamics don't align.

My short answer to this question of whether a "Latino electorate" exists is that it does and it doesn't. 

It does to the extent that being "Latino," "Hispanic," "Latina," or "Latinx" correlates to such things as consumer and political behavior, as well as to language and cultural practices. A shared experience of subordination also promotes a sense of "we-ness."

It doesn't in the sense that ethnicity is also "situational," meaning that how one describes oneself varies by context. In spaces like a college campus or highly diverse urban contexts, it's easy to adopt pan-ethnic labels like "Latino," "Hispanic," "Latina," or "Latinx." It's further encouraged when one is in an ethnically mixed group of "Latinas" or "Latinos," consisting of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans, Salvadoreans, and so on. However fraught (e.g., "Latinx"), pan-ethnic labels are inclusive terms that can easily straddle political party identification and views.

To be sure, pan-ethnic labels and identities can be different from how one regularly identifies or how one experiences or "feels" one's identity, including in instances like South Texas where race and ethnicity may be less salient than say, class, gender, sexual orientation, or generational status (immigrant or non-immigrant)—that can themselves also function intersectionally, or in tandem, while shifting in salience—at different times depending on context.

Many are quick to decry overarching labels and even question their validity, but for those situationally choosing such labels, this can facilitate navigating across diverse contexts and promote inter-ethnic solidarity. Without a doubt, these constructions are so powerful that they do have implications for how our multiple identities get formed and evolve over time.

But what about contexts like South Texas that are more homogeneous—in this case, "Mexican" or "Mexican American?" Clearly, ethnicity is experienced differently. The "other," isn't a white person, but rather an immigrant, foreigner, or outsider who may be viewed either in a competitive manner or with disdain, as Congresswoman Flores' winning rhetoric displays (e.g., read this New York Times piece titled, "The G.O.P.’s ‘Wildest Dream.")

Moreover, when everybody around you in South Texas is "Mexican," including all the candidates running for office, Gonzalez is correct to conclude that given the uniqueness of this context, a "blanket Latinx Outreach Strategy isn’t going to win over the Hispanic voter." Instead, an approach that is more situated in the lived experiences of the community holds much greater promise.

I don't think most South Texans are anti-immigrant, but many can be manipulated to be so with schools that don't teach that we didn't cross the border, but that the border crossed us instead. It's perhaps more probable that it's mostly not taught. Errors of omission in curriculum and pedagogy leave wide, gaping holes in knowledge and interpretation. And this is exactly what we're seeing—a filling in of that conceptual gap with a pernicious and harmful ideology.

For those with ill will, it's so convenient. The anti-immigrant, white supremacist trope of the "invading immigrant" who is "taking our jobs" maps onto fears about the economy, giving folks in South Texas and beyond a false sense of entitlement that translates into the scapegoating of so-called "immigrants" whose ancestors inhabited this continent before there ever was a border or a place called "Texas" or the "United States." 

This leaves the question of how to address Congresswoman Myra Flores' conservative views toward immigrants and immigration—especially considering that she herself is a Mexican immigrant? Clearly, she was either not educated or miseducated about the history of the border and her own people in San Benito High School that she attended upon migrating across the border to the U.S. What happened—or what didn't happen—when she thereafter went to South Texas College? Probably the exact same thing since our higher education institutions are also assimilationist and Eurocentric. 

It's amazing that any of us hold on to our languages and cultural integrity. And yet many of us do. In defense of our own humanity, we resist in the service of social justice.

This is not at all an insult but rather a statement of the status quo of our assimilationist education system that does not want us as Mexicans or Latinos to hold onto our identities. However, if we do manage to do so, the "next best thing" is for us to think negatively about them, where we unknowingly internalize and accept as truth the dominant views held toward minority (or minoritized) people, ourselves included.

All told, it's positive to have an expansive, open view of race and ethnicity precisely because this fosters an awareness of, and appreciation for, difference that welcomes curiosity, acceptance, and peaceful relationships. How can we be open to others if we are not first open to our own identities and selves?

Yes, Democrats absolutely do have a "Latinx Blind Spot." The first step in fixing this is to acknowledge how they, too, have been complicit in the creation of a system—especially an educational system—that engineered this from the get-go. This is exactly why we struggle for Ethnic Studies, including Mexican American Studies, alongside culturally relevant and sustaining curriculum and pedagogy in our schools. 

We have a human right to our ethnicity. All people do. 

Without such grounding, vacuums in identity exist that can and do get exploited—in this case, by the Republican party that's winning big on an ongoing political project of invisiblizing and eviscerating Latino culture and identity. Not that this project is ever fully realized, but rather that we are always positioned in vexed relation to the dominant culture that's pushing this. In short, this is actually not a "minority people's problem," but rather, a "white people's problem."

This project has definitely been a force in our history as Latina/o/x peoples, making many in our community vulnerable to rhetoric and ideologies that betray their origins and resonate with their fears—when there really is nothing to fear at all except fear itself, as John F. Kennedy once said.

Let's support the teaching of Ethnic Studies in our schools. Let's also continue challenging the attack on Critical Race Theory and our teaching of the truths of history. Let's widen the circle of citizenship so that all can benefit from the wealth and riches of our communities and country. 

Let's also vote this extremist Republican leadership out of power—and get reconciled to one another and the planet so that our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren not only heal from the historic trauma of assimilation, but most importantly, love themselves. This will help them to also love the socially constructed "other," nurturing ways of knowing and being in the world where no one is scapegoated, "othered," or treated as "less than." 

Love is the answer. It always has been and will always be. It begins with us loving ourselves so that instead of hostility and division, we can engineer peace and prosperity.

Sí se puede! Yes we can! 

-Angela Valenzuela

#EthnicStudiesNow

Democrats Still Have a Latinx Blind Spot

The victory of the ultraconservative congresswoman Mayra Flores in South Texas shows what Democratic campaigns are doing wrong.

By Xochitl Gonzalez | July 12, 2022 | The Atlantic

Congresswoman Mayra Flores of Texas, with her family, after being sworn into Congress. (Brandon Bell / Getty)

Several years ago, shortly before the 2016 elections, I was having a drink with an acquaintance of mine, another Latino Brown alumni, who we’ll call Mando Gonzalez. Other than our last names and our Brown degrees, Mando and I don’t have much in common, but we hit it off at an alumni function and went on to get the occasional drink or coffee when we find ourselves in the same city. When the conversation turned to the election and how much Hillary Clinton needed the Latino vote, Mando said something that I found nearly blasphemous at the time, but that I’ve pondered since. I paraphrase, but he said: “There is no Latino vote; Latino identity is an invention of academia.”

His point, as he further explained, was that Latino-ness is something your kids “catch” when they go to college, like feminism. And not just any kind of college, but a predominantly white institution. Had Mando, the son of Mexican immigrants who was reared in a Spanish-speaking Los Angeles household, gone to, say, UCLA—a school with a 21 percent Hispanic population (about 6,600 students), and whose Chicano-studies program is nearly 20 years old—he would have likely emerged with a different worldview. Surrounded by so many other Hispanics of similar backgrounds, he argued, he likely would have just considered himself Mexican American. Mando felt that having the rarified experience of being part of a pan-ethnic Hispanic minority at a predominantly white institution is what gave the term Latino emotional and intellectual resonance. (To help paint a picture, Brown—by no means an outlier among the Ivies—boasts a 10 percent Latino enrollment rate, which is about 1,000 students. This number includes students from every Latino ethnic and geographic background that the U.S. has to offer.)

I found myself thinking of Mando this weekend while reading the recent New York Times coverage of Mayra Flores, the newly elected, ultraconservative congresswoman in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. I was wringing my hands the whole time, yet I was also utterly unsurprised. I wasn’t surprised that Flores and other conservative Latinas’ success in running for office has largely been fueled by the power of Latina political organizing—something the Hillary Clinton campaign tried to tap into as well. I also wasn’t surprised that Flores’s simple slogan, “God, Family, Country,” was persuasive; it clearly reflects the values of a certain slice of her predominantly Mexican American, pro-law-enforcement region of South Texas.

But here’s what had me wringing my hands: I could very easily see that slogan having appeal in pockets of Florida, Arizona, Central California, and even parts of New York. As we watch this Hispanic drift toward the GOP, I wonder: What, exactly, are Democrats offering “Latinx” voters? (Indeed, that very language is somewhat polarizing, as just 3 percent of the Hispanic population uses the term, but that’s a newsletter for another day.) What, beyond the blanket and possibly patronizing presumption that Latino voters all see themselves as people of color and therefore are voting against their own interests by voting Republican, is being offered up? Or, to return to Mando’s take, how do you make a compelling case for voting around Latinx identity politics when only a micro-segment of the population feels an emotional tether to that identity? In a community like Flores’s, which is overwhelmingly not just Hispanic, but Mexican American, what aspect of a pan-ethnic identity do voters there connect with? Do they connect with such an identity at all?

Personally, getting to college and finding a Latino community was a salve for me. I am of mixed Puerto Rican and Mexican American heritage; I spent my school years in Brooklyn and the summers in Northern California with my paternal grandmother. No single identity felt fully correct, and at that time it didn’t matter, because in the streets of Brooklyn, you were just “Spanish.” When I got to college, the term Latino, which spoke to my own pan-ethnic identity, felt like a comfortable identity to embrace. (I preferred it to Hispanic, which, in my opinion, put the colonizer in the center of our experience.) Away from my family and home and with such a small group of us on this largely white campus, the Latino community became my family. I learned how to cumbia from my Colombian friends, perfected my bachata with my Dominican ones, and developed a familiarity and affection for the cultures of many other ethnicities and experiences that comprise what we think of as Latinx in the United States. (While I tend to use the terms interchangeably, I personally prefer Latin, Latine, or Latinx, in a sign of respect for my gender-nonbinary brothers and sisters out there, although I also understand the resistance.)

My experience is rare. Going away to college is what gave me access to Latine diversity, yet only about 16 percent of Latinos have college degrees. (Again, a gap that merits its own post.) Within that group, students are overwhelmingly attending local community colleges, state schools, and regional private, often religious, institutions, with majority minority or Latinx populations. Couple that with the sheer fact that nearly 72 percent of Americans live near where they were born and raised; that number includes Hispanic Americans, who traditionally have gravitated to certain regions and areas based on ethnicity. What we can extrapolate is that most Hispanic Americans are living a highly specific, regional experience of their identity. Even among college-educated Hispanics, the pan-ethnic experience that made Latino identity into more than just a demographic term for me is not a universal one.

Maybe Mando was right. Yes, part of the Democrats’ problem with the Latino vote is their laziness in failing to look at the regional cultures and concerns of the Hispanic electorate and tailoring their messages to that (or their refusal to even use the terminology most Hispanics prefer). But I believe it’s also, as David Shor has pointed out, a blind spot that Democratic campaigns have developed, in which they over-index the worldview and experiences of the college graduate. As Shor’s theory was paraphrased in Politico:

Although young people as a whole turn out to vote at a lower rate than the general population, the aforementioned type of young person is actually overrepresented within the core of the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. According to Shor, the problem with this permanent class of young staffers is that they tend to hold views that are both more liberal and more ideologically motivated than the views of the coveted median voter, and yet they yield a significant amount of influence over the party’s messaging and policy decisions. As a result, Democrats end up spending a lot of time talking about issues that matter to college-educated liberals but not to the multiracial bloc of moderate voters that the party needs to win over to secure governing majorities in Washington.

In my experience volunteering in politics, this holds true for the young Latinx movers and shakers seeking to make a mark in politics as well. A quick search of “emerging leaders” celebrated by the Biden administration last Hispanic Heritage Month reveals a talented bunch of young staffers, all of whom, as expected, have four-year degrees, many from elite, predominantly white institutions, where I would imagine they, like me, found some comfort in their pan-ethnic Latino communities. But their reality is not reflective of the reality of Mayra Flores’s constituents, many of whose families have lived in the Rio Grande Valley since before it was Texas, and the majority of whom are Mexican American.

When every candidate on the ballot is Mexican American, what matters to voters is not an allegiance based on identity, but which candidates’ values (God, family, country) are aligned with their own. I don’t know what the midterms will hold, and I can’t even wrap my head around the 2024 presidential race, but what I can tell you is that any candidate who comes out with a blanket Latinx Outreach Strategy isn’t going to win over the Hispanic voter.

 

Trump Didn’t Win the Latino Vote in Texas. He Won the Tejano Vote.

Great piece here that provides perspective on the "Tejano" —i.e., Texas Mexican—vote in Texas, particularly for counties located along the Rio Grande border with Mexico. What additionally merits mention is that unlike the democratic party, the republican-led, Libre Initiative, that offered services to the Tejano community was an important factor that undergirded their endorsement of the Trump administration.  

As you can read from the article below, it will also be very important for the Biden-Harris administration to incorporate the economic needs of South Texas as we move, as we must, with reducing our carbon footprint. 

And not viewing or treating all Latinas/os as a monolith as elaborated herein, is essential.  Moreover, as covered by Tiffany Cross on MSNBC, white female voter turnout desperately needs to be put in perspective.  

To wit, white women overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump and how this is an electoral pattern that is not only many decades-old, but also more consequential to the turnout than the so-called "Latino-male vote," with white women actively maintaining, through their vote, our white supremacist status quo. An important exception is with white, college-educated females.

Much to chew on here.

-Angela Valenzuela

Trump Didn’t Win the Latino Vote in Texas. He Won the Tejano Vote.

Understanding the difference will be key to Democrats moving past their faltering, one-size-fits-all approach to Hispanics.

Jack Herrera is an independent immigration reporter, an Ida B. Wells Fellow with Type Investigations and an elections correspondent at Prism. Follow him @jackherrerx.

Photos by Tamir Kalifa for Politico Magazine

ZAPATA, Texas — Of all the results from the November 3 election, few drew as much attention from national political observers as what happened in a quiet county on the banks of the Rio Grande River. Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Zapata County’s vote in a hundred years. But it wasn’t its turn from a deep-blue history that seemed to be the source of such fascination but rather that, according to the census, more than 94 percent of Zapata’s population is Hispanic or Latino.

Zapata (population less than 15,000) was the only county in South Texas that flipped red, but it was by no means an anomaly: To the north, in more than 95-percent Hispanic Webb County, Republicans doubled their turnout. To the south, Starr County, which is more than 96-percent Hispanic, experienced the single biggest tilt right of any place in the country; Republicans gained by 55 percentage points compared with 2016. The results across a region that most politicos ignored in their preelection forecasts ended up helping to dash any hopes Democrats had of taking Texas.

To many outsiders, these results were confounding: How could Trump, one of the most virulently anti-immigrant leaders, make inroads with so many Latinos, and along the Mexican border no less?

An American flag and a Trump 2020 flag fly on private property in Zapata, Tex., on Nov. 11, 2020.

In Zapata, however, these questions have been met with mild chuckles to outright frustration. The shift, residents and scholars of the region say, shouldn’t be surprising if, instead of thinking in terms of ethnic identity, you consider the economic and cultural issues that are specific to the people who live there. Although the vast majority of people in these counties mark “Hispanic or Latino” on paper, very few long-term residents have ever used the word “Latino” to describe themselves. Ascribing Trump’s success in South Texas to his campaign winning more of “the Latino vote” makes the same mistake as the Democrats did in this election: Treating Latinos as a monolith.

Ross Barrera, a retired U.S. Army colonel and chair of the Starr County Republican Party, put it this way: “It’s the national media that uses ‘Latino.’ It bundles us up with Florida, Doral, Miami. But those places are different than South Texas, and South Texas is different than Los Angeles. Here, people don’t say we’re Mexican American. We say we’re Tejanos.”

Ross Barrera, photographed at his home in Rio Grande City, Tex., on Nov. 12, 2020.

Though not everyone in the Rio Grande Valley self-identifies as Tejano, the descriptor captures a distinct Latino community—culturally and politically—cultivated over centuries of both Mexican and Texan influences and geographic isolation. Nearly everyone speaks Spanish, but many regard themselves as red-blooded Americans above anything else. And exceedingly few identify as people of color. (Even while 94 percent of Zapata residents count their ethnicity as Hispanic/Latino on the census, 98 percent of the population marks their race as white.) Their Hispanicness is almost beside the point to their daily lives.

In the end, Trump’s success in peeling off Latino votes in South Texas had everything to do with not talking to them as Latinos. His campaign spoke to them as Tejanos, who may be traditionally Democratic but have a set of specific concerns—among them, the oil and gas industry, gun rights and even abortion—amenable to the Republican Party’s positions, and it resonated. To be sure, it didn’t work with all of Texas’ Latinos; Trump still lost that vote by more than double digits statewide, and Joe Biden won more of the nationwide Latino vote than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. But Trump proved that seeing specific communities as persuadable voters and offering targeted messaging to match—fear of socialism in Miami-Dade’s Venezuelan and Cuban communities, for example—can be more effective than a blanket campaign that treats people as census categories. And in the end, it was enough to keep Florida and Texas in his column. If the Democratic Party’s 2020 postmortem for Texas—indeed, for the whole nation—goes only as far as to try to increase their appeal to “Latinos” as an undifferentiated bloc, they’re going to experience even harsher losses in the next election.

In the past two weeks, national newspapers have put forward more than one theory about why Zapata, and the surrounding counties, experienced a red tide. According to the New York Times, Zapata’s vote can be explained by the area’s dependence on the oil and gas industry—and it’s true, many natural gas workers worry about unemployment under a Biden administration. The Wall Street Journal summed up their own hypothesis in a word: the economy. Pre-pandemic, many in Zapata say they attributed job growth to Trump, and many remain wary of new economic shutdowns under a Democratic administration.

What this coverage makes less clear are the ways in which the modern Republican platform appeals holistically to many people in South Texas. Few Trump supporters in Zapata think of themselves as single-issue voters, and while Biden-Harris signs are as prevalent as Trump ones, the region’s culture is, in many ways, conservative—despite being one of the most reliably Democratic up to now.

The roots of the region’s blue history go back to when, in the first half of the 20th century, Democrats controlled political life in Texas. Historians say it’s hardly an exaggeration to say there were only two parties in the state: Democrats and conservative Democrats. Like much of the South, Democratic dominance began to change when the national party began to embrace racial integration, beginning with President Harry Truman’s desegregation of the military. However, the Democratic Party machine was powerful enough that Republicans were still fended off for decades.

Today, the Rio Grande Valley is many ways a legacy, a last holdout, of a once blue Texas. There of course have always been discrete political preferences that can explain why certain individuals vote Democratic. But there’s also just the basic fact that for generations most people have been born into Democratic homes and voted year after year in local elections where the only party on the ballot was the Democratic Party. Not to mention, 2020 is the first year Texas didn’t have one-punch voting, where you could walk into the polling booth and opt simply to vote the straight-party line. (Even some Democrats in South Texas have lamented the lack of political diversity. In 2006, Aaron Peña, the Democratic state representative for the district just to the south of Starr County wrote on a now-defunct blog about “the sad legacy of South Texas boss or strongman politics which relied heavily on patrón-managed turnout rather than the advocacy of ideas.” Peña, now working for the state land office, has since switched parties.)

Trump’s success in the Rio Grande Valley, says Daniel Arreola, a cultural geographer and author of Tejano South Texas, “peels back the onion on how really conservative that Tejano ranch and small-town rural population is.”

Scenes from South Texas: A very Catholic region, at top a student has graduation photos taken at the Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto in Rio Grande City. Border Patrol agents, of which many in this area are Hispanic, are seen (middle left) patrolling the Rio Grande River between Laredo, Tex., and Nuevo Laredo, Mex.

From the brush of Laredo across more than 200 miles to the lush delta of Brownsville, there’s a legacy of a frontier culture that lives on. A place like Zapata is oil country. On weekends, the town empties out as people head into the ranchland to hunt, and nearly everyone is proudly gun-toting and God-fearing. In the deeply Catholic county, support for abortion is practically nonexistent, while support for law enforcement, the military and even Border Patrol is rock-solid.

For Sergio Garcia-Rios, a professor of government and Latino studies at Cornell and the polling director for Univision, that people in the border region are more culturally conservative makes sense. “What bothers me,” he says, “is that people understand that about the white vote. Campaigns don’t have the same discourse in rural Pennsylvania as they do in Philadelphia.” He adds: “It’s a racialized oversimplification, one that holds that, if it’s Latinos, they should all look and act the same. … I think they hoped that Latinos would all be, you know, offended by Trump.”

In some ways, by pursuing the coveted “Latino vote” nationally, the Biden campaign created a massive blind spot for itself in South Texas, where criticizing Trump’s immigration regime and championing diversity just does not play well among a Hispanic population where many neither see themselves as immigrant or diverse.

Take Cynthia Villarreal, a lifelong Democrat and lifelong Zapata resident. She, like many along the Texas border, holds that her family history begins with the Spaniards’ colonial regime along the Rio Grande.

“We like to say here that we didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us,” Villarreal says, as she adjusts her face mask and slips in and out of English and Spanish. It’s a sentiment one hears frequently, from Republicans and Democrats, across the region. It’s also that very history that explains why Tejanos don’t fit easily into racial boxes.

“I’m too white to be Mexican, and I’m too Mexican to be white,” Villarreal says with a laugh. “No soy Mexicana, ni gringa. Soy Tejana.”

In 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe ceded all Mexican land north of the Rio Grande to the U.S. As part of the conditions of surrender, Mexico extracted a guarantee from the U.S.: All Mexican nationals who remained on the land would be offered U.S. citizenship, with full civil rights. In the U.S., with Texas still a slave state, the second part of that agreement had a specific consequence: Mexicans would be considered white. If only it were that simple.

Tejanos were conscripted to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War but were also forced into racially segregated platoons in World War I and World War II. In 1930, “Mexican” appeared as a race option on the census. But by 1940, it was gone again. After a Supreme Court decision in 1935 ruled that three Mexican immigrants were not white, the Mexican government pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt to remove “Mexican” from the census and again record all Mexican-descended people as white. In 2020, the census treats Hispanic as an option to select before asking one’s race, though election exit polls often don’t distinguish between white Latino voters and non-white Latino voters, instead drawing the demographic lines around non-Latino white voters versus Latino voters of all races. For Tejanos, especially older ones, all the labeling can be tiring.

“You young folks all want to call people Hispanic, Latino, white, brown, Black, green, whatever,” says Cynthia’s uncle Xavier. “When we were growing up, nobody was a Hispanic, Latino, Latina, brown, any of that. Everybody was an American. I’m still an American here.”

Arreola says that while the exact origin of the term Tejano dates back to before the U.S. conquered the area that was once called Tejas, the prevalence of Texan Mexican Americans using that identifier as a rejection of others being put on them—“I’m not Mexican, I’m Tejano”—began in the mid-20th century, as South Texans tried to distance themselves from more recent Mexican immigrants across the country as well as from Hispanic activists who were beginning to embrace Chicano identity. And there is certainly a coherent culture for it to describe: Tejanos have their own recognizable way of speaking Spanish and Spanglish (“me duele la head” or “pass me la escoba,” for example), their own cuisine (Tex-Mex is not simply Americanized Mexican food, as commonly misperceived) and their own regional music style (most popularized by Selena).

Even descendants of more recent Mexican immigrants who’ve assimilated into Tejano culture tend to mythologize a non-immigrant identity for themselves, Arreola says. In 19th- and 20th-century Texas, he explained, being called Mexican “had such a stain to it, and I think that the legacy of that is, in some ways, alive and well in the subconscious of some Tejanos in the [Rio Grande] Valley.”

“I see myself just as an American,” says Yvonne Trappe, another lifelong resident of Zapata but an ardent Trump supporter. “Growing up, I never knew that Hispanics were another race, that we were brown. Everybody just put white—not that it matters. Our culture is one thing, but we were just Americans.”

“Growing up, I never knew that Hispanics were another race, that we were brown.”

 Yvonne Trappe

Trappe says her grandparents were born in a small Mexican town south of the border but had deeds to land on the American side of the river, where her parents, she, her kids and her grandchildren all grew up. “The Mexican culture here is strong. My grandfather had a beautiful culture, and we were taught our culture—our first language, everyone’s first language, is Spanish.”

While many Trump supporters in South Texas, like Trappe, have Mexican roots and say they can understand how the president’s crude and derogatory language might seem divisive to some, few of them hear the president talking about them when he makes comments about Mexicans.

“I think when people say they don’t like Mexicans, to me it means a Mexican citizen, or a Mexican national, who has crossed illegally,” says Barrera, the Starr County Republicans chair. “And then again, not all Mexicans look alike. So when they say they don’t like Mexicans, I don’t think it means me. … It means a Mexican national who has broken the law.”

In Trappe’s view: “Today, the people coming over are not the kind of people who came before, like the braceros, who came to work, to educate their children, to better themselves. No, the people coming now are looking for handouts.”

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Whether Tejanos will continue to shift rightward depends on whom you ask. Cynthia Villarreal is confident Zapata will turn blue again. She supports Democrats because, among other reasons, she strongly believes they will be better for her and her family on the economy and help people who have fallen down get back on their feet with dignity. But in many ways, she’s not unlike her neighbors who voted for Trump. She’s pro-law enforcement (among her brothers and other men in her family, there have been an FBI agent, a CIA agent and multiple sheriffs); pro-Second Amendment (“My brothers and I are all dead shots; we could shoot by the time we were 8.”); and fiercely anti-abortion. Villarreal thinks that if Democrats had been better at reaching people in Zapata and South Texas, more would have come to share her view rather than one fed to them by the GOP. “Biden is not coming for your guns,” she says, “and he’s personally pro-life.”

Chuck Rocha, who managed the Bernie Sanders campaign’s Latino outreach earlier this year, thinks South Texans’ votes are winnable—because he won them. Sanders, who ran to Biden’s left, got the highest vote share in most counties in the Rio Grande Valley region in the primary election. Rocha says it was because his campaign talked to South Texans about their issues, not just their identities. And Tejanos proved far more receptive to a pitch about a rigged economic system and health care than to generic appeals to their Hispanic heritage.

Rocha believes that when it comes to campaigning for Latino votes, it’s all about knowing your audience. The Tejanos in the Rio Grande Valley “who wear a cowboy hat and belt buckle and drive their pickup trucks” aren’t the same as the “woke Latinos” in Dallas, he says.

A Zapata resident who fought in Vietnam waits with his granddaughter for the start of a Veterans Day parade on Nov. 11, 2020.

Democrats certainly feel passionate about winning back Zapata. After the national election was called for Biden, Villarreal organized an impromptu “Ridin’ for Biden” car rally. She says she expected about a dozen cars, but more than 80 showed up, by her count.

“People are still Democrats down here,” Villarreal believes. “Even if they voted for Trump.”

That may be true, at least on a technicality. In Zapata today, remarkably, there is no formal Republican Party. Everyone elected to city government is a Democrat. And even lifelong Republicans like Trappe say that, on paper, they’re registered as Democrats—so that they can vote in primaries, since there were no Republicans in town to vote for. But some younger Trump supporters think 2020 could, or at least should, be the beginning of a local political reckoning.

“Everything has been better under Trump,” says Leroy Cruz, while working at the car-detailing business he runs out of his garage. A Trump flag flies on a pole nearby.

Leroy Cruz (bottom) and his garage (top) decorated with Trump flags, in Zapata, Tex., on Nov. 11, 2020.

“The oilfield is back up. There are more jobs, more work than ever,” says Cruz. “And yeah, I like [Trump’s] attitude. I like the way he talks.”

Cruz says he feels that, in recent years, people have begun to shake off the cultural assumption that to live in Zapata means one must vote Democratic. “I think people are starting to wake up and realize that the Democrats aren’t good.”

There is no singular reason why Trump did so well in South Texas, but certainly key to the increase in Republican turnout was the GOP’s willingness to engage the border region as its own political environment, rather than just an extension of the so-called Latino community.

In the meantime, as “Trump Trains”—caravans of pickup trucks flying MAGA flags—drove through cities all along the Rio Grande, Republicans told oil and gas workers that a “Green New Deal” would destroy their livelihood, told hunters that Democrats wanted to take their guns, and said Democrats would allow late-term abortion. In the final debate, when Biden said he would like to see the country transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy over time, Trump asked, “Will you remember that, Texas?”

Eventually, Bruní said the state party sent her something to campaign with: blue posters, with the words “Todos con Biden.”