Latinos In Texas Offer Mixed Bush Review

He won 49 percent of the state's minority in 1998, but they say his policies have done little to help families.

EL PASO, Texas—EL PASO, Texas The scene from the 1998 race for governor hardly suggested a typical Republican tableau.

There in Segundo Barrio, one of the oldest and poorest neighborhoods in this isolated border city, Texas Gov. George W. Bush had come to eat Mexican sweetbread and campaign in Spanish accented with a Texas twang.

Bush was venturing into one of the last Democratic strongholds in Texas, an overwhelmingly Latino city that no Republican candidate for governor had ever won.

But when Bush was re-elected by a landslide, he also by one estimate won nearly half the Latino vote statewide.

He even won El Paso.

It seemed like political magic; he had found votes in places Republicans usually dared not tread.

“It opened eyes among Republicans across the country,” said Kenneth Carr, chairman of the city’s Republican Party.

As he campaigns for president as “a different kind of Republican,” Bush is now sprinkling his Spanish from Iowa to California, courting Latino voters nationwide much as he did in Texas.

In speeches, he often mentions the 1998 race as evidence of his commitment to inclusiveness and proof that his policies offer benefits that are colorblind.

In Texas, Bush’s record shows that he has embraced his state’s growing Latino-American population, pointedly rejecting the hostility shown by some members of his party on issues like immigration and bilingual education.

However, Latinos in Texas remain more likely to be poor, unemployed and without health insurance ingrained problems that predate Bush but that his critics say he has done too little to address.

“George W. Bush’s rhetoric is more moderate,” said Dolores Briones, the El Paso County judge, a Democrat and the county’s highest elected official, “but the reality for our families has not changed.”

Even today, there is debate in Texas about how well Bush did with Latinos in 1998.

He won 69 percent of the overall vote, and he has claimed winning 49 percent of the Latino vote, based on an initial exit poll.

But that figure is remarkably high for a Republican, and later exit polls and academic studies suggest his actual total might have been closer to 33 percent, still high for a Republican but not as impressive.

“They use the 50 percent, and that’s just false,” said Rodolfo de la Garza, head of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Texas, who has studied the race.

He cautioned against using the 1998 race as a gauge of Bush’s potential appeal because turnout was low and the challenger was weak.

There is no question that Latinos have emerged as the nation’s fastest-growing minority group since Bush took office in 1995.

Demographic studies in Texas predict that Latinos, mostly Mexican-Americans, will surpass Anglos and become the largest ethnic group by 2030.

In Houston, the Texas’ largest city, Hispanics are expected to gain majority status by the end of this decade.

Nationally, the political response to this new wave of immigration at times has been hostile.

Republicans in Congress fought to kill bilingual education and pushed for laws establishing English as the country’s official language.

Pat Buchanan, running for president in 1996, threatened to build a wall along the border.

And, most notably, former California Gov. Pete Wilson became a symbol of intolerance to many Latinos in 1994 by championing Proposition 187, a controversial referendum that denied most government benefits to illegal immigrants and their children.

Bush established a different tone. His first political appointee was Tony Garza, a Mexican-American, whom Bush named secretary of state.

In his first piece of state business, Bush met with the governors of five Mexican states near the border.

He opposed Proposition 187 and supported English Plus, a modified version of bilingual education.

His position on Proposition 187 was mostly moot Texas did not provide nearly the same amount of benefits to undocumented immigrants as California did but it established him as a friendly face in a hostile party.

He courted Mexico, supporting the Clinton administration’s bailout of the peso when congressional Republicans criticized the plan.

In 1996, when a quirk in the federal welfare overhaul left many legal immigrants without food stamps, Bush made an emergency expenditure to provide aid to the elderly and disabled until federal officials corrected the problem.

Bush also courted Latinos on a personal level.

He spoke Spanish often, if not always fluently, and talked of shared cultures, a point underscored by his own traditional Christmas menu, which included tamales and enchiladas.

“With the Mexican-American community, we appreciate that his feelings are heartfelt,” said Garza, now a member of the Texas Railroad Commission, whose chief responsibility is regulating the oil and gas industry.

“You don’t get finger pointing from George W. Bush.”

The contrast between Bush and other national Republicans was stark, but, in many ways, he was following the path taken by other Texas governors.

Texas and Mexico have long shared cultural, historic and economic ties that have made the two interdependent.

When the Mexican peso was devalued in the mid-1990s, the ripple effect was felt all along the Texas border.

In El Paso, 80 stores closed.

The advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which opened trade between Mexico and the United States, has only deepened the mutual self-interest.

State statistics show that more than 228,000 jobs in Texas are now linked to NAFTA.

“No governor in Texas has ever done what Pete Wilson did,” said de la Garza, the University of Texas government professor.

And Bush, he said, has also used his personal charm to establish himself as a “buena gent,” or good guy.

“Above all, he has managed symbols wonderfully, and that’s not a trivial issue.

“He has demonstrated cultural respect.”



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