Burnt Orange Report

La Raza in Texas

By Byron LaMasters

This week, the National Council of La Raza is hosting its national convention in Austin, Texas. There's been a lot of news from around the state on the convention and its implications for the future of Texas politics.

The Austin American Statesman credits the work done by former Mayor Gus Garcia. Garcia was the first and only Hispanic mayor of the city of Austin.

Credit a persuasive sales pitch by then-Mayor Gus Garcia for bringing the National Council of La Raza conference back to Texas.

The conference has never been to Austin.

"It has some good facilities. It's strategically located. And they have a Latino mayor who was very aggressive about wanting us to be there," said La Raza President Raul Yzaguirre.

Estimated attendance of 17,000 to 20,000 would put the National Council of La Raza gathering near the top of Austin Convention Center conferences.

"South by Southwest has these kinds of numbers, but they do it over two weeks," said Robert Hodge, convention center director.

The Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau estimates out-of-town registrants will pour $3.8 million into the local economy.

"What I told NCLR is that Austin is fast becoming a Latino town," Garcia said. "The growth in the Latino population is very significant in the last 10-15 years, and the state is also becoming very Latino."

Latinos make up 30 percent of the Austin population and 32 percent of the Texas population, according to Census 2000 data.

Garcia, who retired last month as mayor, is the only Hispanic to have held the office. When he took the job, he said bridging the cultural and socioeconomic divide between whites and minorities was a goal.

"When we (Garcia and his wife, Marina) came here in 1960, we were denied housing," Garcia said. "That's something you don't hear about nowadays. HUD did a study and found out that Austin still has discrimination in housing. It's much more subtle now; it's insurance, financing — that kind of stuff. Still, we have those things, but we deal with them openly.

"Austin has made strides. We're not the perfect city. That's what I told NCLR. It's an emerging city. We've got a ways to go."

Garcia is absolutely correct when he writes that Texas is "becoming very Latino". Austin is the largest non-majority Hispanic Texas city to have elected a Latino mayor (if that makes sense), but more cities are sure to follow very soon. Still, the Hispanic growth in Texas has been explosive, especially in the urban areas and the Rio Grande valley. Austin, Dallas and Houston will all be majority Latino within several decades at most. The Hispanic growth in Texas in not limited to the urban areas and the valley, however. Yesterday, the Dallas Morning News ran a feature story on Perryton, Texas, a small town of about 8000 people in the upper panhandle. The town is projected to be 70% Hispanic by 2040. Other towns in rural Texas have seen rapid Hispanic growth as well.

In many ways, Perryton – a town of 8,000 where the telephone book lists almost as many Hernándezes as Smiths – serves as a contemporary lesson of how a rural community on the cusp of change moves to educate, train, integrate and empower Hispanics who have become crucial to its economic survival.

They never have had a seat at the decision-making tables in this town, but that may soon change. In a generation, demographers expect that Hispanics in Perryton, where most people in the 900-square-mile Ochiltree County live, will outnumber the now-white majority by at least 3-to-1.

"The perception of stereotypes about diversification is that it's a large-city issue, but it's not," said Steve Murdoch, the state's chief demographer.

"It's occurring all over the state and the growth [of Hispanics in Perryton] is at even greater proportion than would be true for the state as a whole. That is a pattern that most people are not aware of."

Hispanics have increased their numbers throughout the state, from metropolitan areas to rural communities in East Texas. The number of Hispanics in the Panhandle also has increased, but residents of Perryton have pushed hard to manage growth, deal with a demographic shift that is inevitable and avoid an influx of narcotics trafficking and gang-related problems that have surfaced in nearby communities.

"Many of them [old-timers] say that if we get a Wal-Mart or a slaughterhouse, we'll end up with blacks or Vietnamese like they have in other towns. What's the big deal about that?" said Lupe Ceniceros, an entrepreneur and the only Hispanic on the board of the Perryton Chamber of Commerce. "We want Perryton to grow. We don't want it to die."

Many longtime residents in the 350-square-block town are quick to point out that Perryton is not racist, that anyone willing to work up a sweat can succeed. Town leaders, they say, are planning for the emerging demographic reality.

[...]

Demographers say dramatic change in how Perryton does things will occur when the children of immigrants can vote and hold office.

In Perryton, Hispanics mostly are employed in the lower levels of the oil and ranching industries. Between the 1950s and 1990s, those industries – when they were doing well – kept the town and county prosperous.

When the price of oil, wheat or cattle tumbled, so did money in the public coffers. By the early 1990s, amid cheapening oil, city and county officials knew they needed a shot in the arm. Perryton residents accepted Texas Farm, a mammoth indoor Japanese hog farm that added nearly $100 million to the county's tax base.

I'd recommend reading the whole article. It really touches on some of the issues that rural Texas is facing. Many Texas rural communities are having to decide whether to accept change, as Perryton did when it brought in its hog farm, leading inevitably to a rise in Hispanic immigrants, or see their economies and populations slowly decline.

The Austin American Statesman has provided good coverage of the La Raza convention. Today, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Gov. Howard Dean spoke at the convention, and I can imagine that they had slightly different messages, to say the least:

Former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean spoke to a morning crowd, touting his platform of immigration-policy reform, affirmative action and a balanced budget.

"Most of the issues important for the Latino community are important for the entire community," Dean said.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, also addressed the crowd, saying President Bush's tax cuts and his education initiative, No Child Left Behind, will increase accountability of public schools. That in turn will help Latino students, she said.

Charles has a pretty good recap of the the convention up until today.