MCALLEN, Tex. — After a light round of conchas and empanadas in a modest home decorated in her campaign’s bright pink and yellow posters, congressional candidate Michelle Vallejo talked to a room mostly filled with educators about issues facing their community, like low wages and health-care access.
“We are a beautiful community, pero nos hace falta mucho — we’re missing a lot of things. And that’s what we should be fighting for … what our families need,” said Vallejo, wearing her signature gold hoops and fanny pack.
Just three miles away, the liberal Democrat’s challenger Monica De La Cruz took the stage at the Young Republicans of Hidalgo County convention. Like Vallejo, De La Cruz is also the descendant of Mexican immigrants. She, too, grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, along the U.S.-Mexico border. And she voted Democratic for most of her adult life.
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“Democrats have been in control of this region for over a hundred years. And you know, they’ve taken our vote for granted. They disrespected nuestra cultura. These policies have hurt our people and our community,” she said to raucous applause from an audience clad in suits and high heels.
Despite their similarities, Vallejo and De La Cruz have embarked on starkly different political paths, which have culminated in a South Texas showdown that serves as a stand-in for their parties’ national clash over Latino voters. No matter who it is, the next congresswoman for Texas’s 15th District will represent a sharp break from the region’s past in both ideology and gender.
For the first time, the district that has often been represented by whom people here describe as “South Texas Democrats” — Democrats with conservative stances on issues like abortion and guns — will be represented either by a party liberal or a Trump-backed Republican, the ascendant factions of the opposing sides. It will also be the first time a woman represents the district, after a race in which two Latina candidates have woven Mexican American culture into mainstream party platforms.
Since the 2020 presidential election, when the GOP made significant inroads in this part of South Texas, both parties have been fighting for ownership — or the perception of ownership — over the Hispanic vote here. The outcome in this 81 percent Hispanic district could serve as a national symbol for whether the rightward shift of the nearly-homogenous communities of South Texas was a Trump-era aberration or the start of a longer-term political trend.
The race “might very well show what we haven’t been able to see until now: that Latinos are very complex, and parties are now adapting to that complexity. It’s going to be a big signal to the rest of the country,” said Sergio Garcia-Rios, associate director of research at the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.
The district lacks an incumbent because under Texas’s Republican-run redistricting process, Texas-15 grew redder and more competitive, shifting from one Trump lost by 2 points to one he would have won by nearly 3 points. In response, Democratic incumbent Vicente Gonzalez switched to a redrawn and bluer adjacent district.
Texas-15 is described by many here as a “fajita,” snaking its way northward from the more urban border through rural parts of the Rio Grande Valley and ending just past Seguin, a city northeast of San Antonio.
“The message there for Republicans is going to be, Latinos are within reach, you just have to reach out to them.” Garcia-Rios said. “And Democrats need to also wake up and say wait, we are letting go of this demographic, and we need them. I think it’s going to be a waking call for Democrats and motivation for Republicans to keep … reaching out to Latinos.”
De La Cruz, 47, is running a Trump-backed campaign that leans heavily on national Republican rhetoric, positioning herself as the protector of Latino culture against Democrats. She often campaigns with two other Republican Latinas who are challenging Democrats in competitive South Texas border districts.
“We are the party that tells Hispanics: respetamos tu idioma. We recognize Hispanics as the people who have given the world the likes of Tito Puente, Luis Miguel and our beloved Selena,” she said at the local young Republicans convention. “South Texas is certainly not woke, but we are awake.”
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Her speeches often praise God and the late Tejana singer Selena while bashing the term “Latinx” favored by some liberals. De La Cruz ran in the district in 2020 before it was redrawn and came within 3 percentage points of Gonzalez. She emphasizes enhanced border security, approves of Texas’s ban on abortion without exceptions for rape or incest and joined the ranks of Republicans who questioned the legitimacy of mail-in votes.
Vallejo, 31, was the favored candidate of LUPE Votes, the campaign arm of the labor rights nonprofit La Union del Pueblo Entero. She won a 6-way primary by 35 votes over a male, veteran, moderate challenger who fit the traditional mold of representatives here. A co-owner of her family’s flea market, Vallejo has pushed for raising the minimum wage and Medicare-for-all as solutions to the region’s high poverty and low insured rates. She also wants to provide a path to citizenship for law-abiding undocumented immigrants and smooth the processing of asylum seekers at the border.
Endorsed by liberal Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), she is unequivocal about her support for abortion rights but frequently talks about the need to understand antiabortion neighbors — often referencing the difficult conversation she had on the topic with her own abuela.
“Overall people have felt like we need a big change,” Vallejo said. “What’s at stake here is, is South Texas representing itself for who it is?”
‘Daniel in the lion’s den’
It was in 2016, when Trump was elected, that De La Cruz and others like her turned away from Democrats.
“It was not socially acceptable to say you were Republican,” she said. “It wasn’t something we talked about down here. And many of us stayed quiet. With that being said, I often felt like Daniel in the lion’s den saying, ‘I must be quiet because I’m not allowed to have a voice.’ But I felt the Holy Spirit in me tell me ‘This is your time Monica, this is what I want you to do.’ ”
In the Rio Grande Valley, Democrats have not only dominated federal offices but also often occupied local seats. Last year, however, the district’s largest, predominantly Hispanic city, McAllen, elected its first GOP mayor in two dozen years. Some locals and experts credit the Republican Party’s rise on cases of local corruption involving Democratic officials through the years; others say the defund the police movement and other positions adopted by liberals prompted the shift.
“The Democratic Party had just moved so far to the left that it no longer aligned with my personal values but even more important, with South Texas values,” De La Cruz said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Share this articleShareStill, the Republican gains are a matter of degree; Latinos, even those in South Texas, still mostly favored Democrats in 2020. A Pew Research Center survey released this month showed that nationally, registered Latinos say the would vote for or are leaning to vote for a Democrat to Congress over a Republican by 25 percentage points.
De La Cruz was raised by a single mother in Brownsville, an eastern border city. She heralds her family’s immigration story but distinguishes her grandmother’s legal migration from Mexico from the journeys of those who cross the border. A number of her television ads show her standing or walking by the border wall.
“For those who live at the border it is not very difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the crisis we’re seeing,” she said in a mailer to supporters. “For those of us who call this area of the United States home, it is impossible to avoid this brewing disaster.”
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She has refused to debate Vallejo, demurring when questioned on the issue on a press call by mentioning that the candidates “shared a stage” earlier this year. (It was a January dinner event featuring more than a dozen female candidates).
But De La Cruz’s emphasis on faith and her cultural background captured the attention of Marlén Chávez. At a Republican prayer breakfast, tears rolled down Chávez’s cheeks as De La Cruz spoke. She dabbed them with a soft napkin.
“She’s basically describing me,” said Chávez, a former Democrat who home-schools her three boys. “It’s my background. I was born and raised here, I’m a Mexican American. Hispanic. Went to college here … That completely represented me.”
A ‘South Texas progressive’
When Vallejo was 4 years old, her mother developed the symptoms of what was later diagnosed as multiple sclerosis: bruises on her body, intense fatigue and overwhelming bouts of pain.
Suddenly, her family was faced with the challenges of affording her mom’s medications while taking time away from work at Pulga Los Portales — the flea market her family owns — to travel to doctors’ appointments. Often, her family would cross the border to Mexico, where medications are cheaper than in the United States.
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During those years, Vallejo said, it wasn’t uncommon for the pulga to host a barbecue fundraiser for a fellow neighbor whose family was suffering from similar issues — access to and money for the health care of their loved ones.
“There need to be big systemic changes and policy changes in order for our lives to improve,” Vallejo said. “And I know growing up my mom needed so much more than she had access to.”
Her mother died of the disease at age 46. Vallejo was 19.
The need she saw in her community, she said, is why she advocates for Medicare-for-all, a single payer, government-run health care program that would cover all Americans.
Vallejo said her campaign has been boosted by voters’ worries about abortion rights, but she faces some setbacks. Vallejo got a later start to her campaign than her opponent, having to battle her way through a close primary, a runoff and a recount before she could begin competing in the general election, while De La Cruz soared from her 2020 campaign to her 2022 one.
Republicans also have outspent Democrats on ads in the district by millions of dollars since September. The Democratic House Majority PAC cut planned ads in the nearby city of Corpus Christi while continuing to funnel resources to incumbents in tough races in other tight border district races; state Democrats have scrambled to make up the difference.
Standing outside a barbecue truck on a recent evening, Mia Diaz-Aleman, a local merchandiser who supports Vallejo, said what residents don’t understand is that Vallejo is not just any liberal candidate — she’s “a South Texas progressive.”
To her, that means “we have some conservative views but we also have some progressive views, in the sense that we are out there for each other, like Medicare-for-all and education for all, in the sense of environmental justice, immigration … but behind us we are pro-Second Amendment, we are pro small business,” she said.
Diaz-Aleman said it hurts her to see the division the fierce campaigning has caused in their community.
“Now we’re hoping for a bright, bright future,” she said. “Hopefully we can all come together, become more cohesive and get our region where we believe it should be.”
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