Here’s one argument for it.
The lack of Latinos on the City Council undermines the legitimacy of Houston’s government, experts say, and is something that a prominent Hispanic organization is pushing to change with a lawsuit and ballot proposition.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the largest Hispanic civil rights organizations in the country, is tackling what they characterize as a gross underrepresentation of Latinos in one of the most diverse cities in the U.S. by proposing that the five at-large positions on council elected citywide be replaced with four seats in heavily Hispanic districts.
Currently, just one Hispanic — Robert Gallegos — holds a seat on the 16-member body. By contrast, 45 percent of Houston residents are Hispanic.
“The most serious threat to the legitimacy of Houston city government is this idea that you can have half of the population of the city represented by 6 percent of the council,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University. “Imagine if we flipped things around and there’s only one African American on the Houston City Council, or there’s only one Anglo, or there’s only one woman … It would be seen as a national travesty of democracy; it would be the subject of constant outcry.”
The city is expected to look at redistricting prior to its 2023 election, and could redraw the 11 districts if they are deemed unbalanced at that point. But LULAC said replacing at-large seats with more single-district seats would reduce barriers that undercut Latino representation.
“If we had parity, half of this council would be Latino,” said local LULAC leader Sergio Lira, co-chair of a new Houston taskforce created under the direction of the organization’s national President, Domingo García, who launched the effort in a meeting with local leaders last week.
García, a lawyer with offices statewide, said the effort includes a push to bring a charter amendment with the proposition to citizens to vote on and to file a lawsuit against the city.
Houston has the worst Hispanic representation in city councils among all Texas cities with populations over 500,000, all of which have eliminated at-large positions in their governments, according to census and government data.
“Houston is the outlier in Texas when it comes to Latino representation and is the only large city with at-large seats,” García said.
Those cities — San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, and El Paso — all have councils that look much more similar to their cities’ Hispanic populations. Dallas, which is 42 percent Hispanic, has the next-lowest Hispanic representation on council with 29 percent Hispanics.
It’s tough to get elected to Houston’s at-large seats, García said.
“They are very difficult for Latinos to win because of the amount of money, coalitions and logistics it takes to win,” he said. “It’s like running for mayor.”
There’s a lot to say here, and I’ll try to get to the main points, but let me start by saying it’s a little more complex than what Garcia and Lira are arguing. There are multiple districts that have are at least plurality Latino – H, J, F, and A. H, currently held by CM Karla Cisneros, had reliably elected Latinos before Cisneros and likely will again; none of the others have elected Latinos. There is of course a big difference between “population”, “voting-age population” and “citizen voting-age population”, and that’s before we take into account voter registration and who generally turns out to vote in our odd-year elections, where 20% turnout is on the higher end. We could elect more Latinos with the map we have now, at least in theory. It very much hasn’t worked out that way in practice, and I doubt you’d find anyone who would argue that the current map is conducive to having more than two Latinos get elected from the current districts.
It’s also true that Latinos have been shut out from the At Large seats since the days of Orlando Sanchez and Gracie Saenz twenty years ago. We also haven’t had a lot of strong Latino contenders for At Large seats lately. In 2015, no Latinos ran for At Large #3 or #5, and the only one in At Large #1 was perennial candidate James Partsch-Galvan. There were Latinos in all the At Large races in 2019, but none of them raised any money. That’s what Garcia and Lira are saying, and others have said it before them, but it just doesn’t take as much money to run a credible At Large campaign as it does to run for Mayor. Mayoral candidates need well over a million bucks, but the big money candidates for At Large raise in the $200-400K range. Not nothing, but not a huge pile of money either. It’s a bit of a vicious circle – people who might want to run are discouraged because it’s hard for them to raise money and the recent record of citywide Latino candidates is brutal, which leads to a paucity of such candidates for anyone to support.
I can’t leave this point without bringing up, once again, the 2007 At Large #5 runoff, in which Jolanda Jones defeated Joe Trevino in a race where about 25K total votes were cast. Jones had run citywide before (in At Large #3) and was better known, and the other runoffs on the ballot were City Council District D and HISD District II, both of which favored Jones’ candidacy. Trevino was a longshot no matter how you looked at it, but still. This was the clearest shot to get a Latino elected citywide, and he got bupkus in terms of financial support, including from the folks who had been threatening to sue to force City Council redistricting prior to the 2010 Census. Public support of campaigns and candidates is a complicated and nuanced thing that is more often solicited than given, I get that. I’m just saying, none of the folks who were lamenting the lack of Latino representation on Houston City Council were moved to write Joe Trevino a $100 check. Make of that what you will.
(There was also the Michael Kubosh-Roy Morales runoff of 2013. The politics of that one are different, for obvious reasons. I went back and looked, and Roy Morales actually raised about $50K for that runoff, which isn’t too shabby. There were only a couple of Latino names among his donors, though. Again, make of that what you will.)
Moving on. I have generally been supportive of having the hybrid district/At Large Council that we have. At least if you have a sub-par Council person in your district, you still have five At Large members you can turn to for support if you need it, and I think there’s value in having people who need to have a broader perspective. That said, I’d bet that most of the At Large members we have had over the past 20 or so years have come from a limited geographical distribution – this was very much the problem with Austin’s at large system, where nearly everyone on their Council came from the same part of town – and let’s just say that some of our At Large members are better than others and leave it at that. All in all, I don’t think it would be a great loss to change to an all-district system, and I would be inclined to support it if and when it comes to a vote. I’d like to see the proposal first – there are, as we well know, good and not-so-good ways to draw maps – but as a concept, I support it.
Knowing it is a long shot, LULAC decided to initiate a drive to collect 20,000 signatures in February in favor of their proposition, as the early voting for the state primaries begins. The number is the minimum needed to force the inclusion of a charter amendment in the ballot, bypassing the approval of City Council, which would only decide when it should be put for a citizens’ vote.
LULAC is simultaneously preparing a lawsuit it plans to file in court by March to eliminate all at-large positions in favor of single districts.
We’ll see how that goes. Petition drives have been pretty successful in recent years, even if they don’t always get their referenda on the next available ballot. There are already two items scheduled for the ballot in 2023, and with an open seat Mayoral race that will make it a very busy cycle. An item like this could get a bit lost in the noise, or it could be a big issue, as surely the various Mayoral candidates will need to weigh in on it. I’ll be very interested to see how the petition drive and the litigation go.
In a strong mayor system of government, the structure of the council is a secondary consideration. Still, I think the benefits of having 5 at large members whose focus is for the benefit of the whole community outweighs having additional district members. There is indeed a big difference between , Hispanic total population numbers which include children and non-citizens, and the adult voting age population of Hispanic citizens. I suspect evidence would show that Hispanic voters have crossed over in large numbers to vote for black and Anglo candidates in some of these districts, and as you point out many of the losing Hispanic candidates have been non-serious (James Partsch-Galvan) or ran poor campaigns.
Mark Jones loves to use the term “Anglo,” because he has no idea that “White” people are not Anglo. I, myself, look White to many people, but true White people can recognize that I am not one of them.
I, of course, don’t give a fig if at large council members are eliminated, but it is an absurd statement that “half of the population is represented by six percent of the council.” Only a Latino person can represent other Latinos? and all Latinos are the same? Such nonsense. Since there are a large number of residents under age 40, should the council have an equivalent percentage? And an corresponding percentage of senior citizens? And what about by religion? and by sexual orientation?
When I was in school, Latin people considered themselves “white,” until intellectuals such as Mark Jones came around and started creating divisiveness, telling us that we are all competing factions rather than a group of individuals who are collectively Americans. It’s time to stop the hate.
I’m interested to know where the at-larges actually live. Still mostly Montrose and outside of the city?
Why not keep the at-large seats and add 5 districts?
Jason, not quite a true statement, unless one must add Anglo-Saxon.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anglo-Saxon
What is a Latino, Jason, what country does he or she come from?
Mainstream, if they wanted to they could draw at least three districts where a person with a Spanish surname would get elected. Who loses, the white liberals, the blacks?
Suggest you read the following;
https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2021/11/01/houston-redistricting-city-council
FYI, they should keep the at-large
Jason,
You are right. I am white and I can recognize that you aren’t just white.
You are much more than that…kind of like a super white…what would that be called…”white supremacist”?!
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Frederick, have you been huffing spray cans? Where do you get that white supremacist nonsense?
Manny, thanks for the link, it does, at the end of the article mention the great king, Canute, who ordered the tide to stop rising, much like Joe Biden “crushing virus,” until he determined that there is no federal solution. Trump could’ve told him that.
Anyway I found this definition of Anglo in the Cambridge Dictionary online:
a white person in the US who is not from a Latin American country.
So only Latin Americans are not Anglo. People from Spain and Portugal are Anglo. That is kind of crazy.
Jason, technically Spain, France, and Italy, are Latin countries. Latin language.
Manny, you are right, you nailed it–they are Latin countries, but they are not Latin American countries. According to the Cambridge Dictionary those people are really Anglo. Perhaps stealth Anglo, wolves in sheep clothing.
HIS PANICS AND HIS LATINS
Manny (and Mark Jones):
How is Anglish not also Latin via the Normans? Not to mention all that Latin lingo in the Anglo-American common law jurisprudence? And then the science writers of yestermillennium, like Sir Isaac Newton, renowned British banknote-worthy author of “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” [sic].
Another challenge: How about the Roma (& leaving aside the Sinti), the Romans, and the Romanians? All Anglos or Nonanglos or Latins or what? How do we pigeonhole and mark them on the census [sic] tallies? And what about the ‘his’ and ‘cis’ when considering geography?
Then there are the contemporary inhabitants of Hispanolia: West Indies, ergo Asians? Or aboriginees, native Meso-American, slave-or-conquista-descendants, or just plain generic aliens when encountered in the US?
And about the Luso-peoples: Take Brazilians of various degrees of pigmentation. Are they compadres? Bona-fide members of “la Raza”? What if their “native” tongue is German?
Bottom line: It’s a geo-lingo-semantic mess, isn’t it? Not to mention all the mutt, mongrel, and mestizo issus. Nota bene [sic]: Slipped in an Oxford (UK) comma there. Would that usage be un-American, or only when listing colours, such as red, white, and blue?
—
CIS = on the side closer to Rome (more recently also an acronym for Commonwealth of Independent States, successor states to the former constitutent socialist republics of the defunct USSR)
TRANS = on the other side (as in Transylvania = beyond the forest; transalpine = beyond the Alps as seen from the Center of Civilization)
ENGLISH = native tongue of Anglistan, currently in use as global lingua franca [sic].
ANGLISH = post-colonial American version with certain standardized adulterations in spelling. Note: Re-definition proposed by policywonqueria in analogy to ‘Amerikanisch’, a unique term for the American version of English in German. The extant defintion of Anglish involves a purist anti-Norman conception. For more on lingo purism – contra [sic] pluralism and amalgamation – look no farther than wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English
Anglo is a bit of a silly term, encompassing persons of Polish, German, Italian, Greek heritage and many of Jewish religion. “Non-Hispanic whites” is perhaps a better description. The boundaries of “Hispanic” depend on your political goals. When Cuban-born Orlando Sanchez ran for mayor of Houston, many Hispanic activists were at pains to insist he was really just a another white Republican. The authenticity of Hispanic Republicans is often challenged, including by looking to see the ethnicity of their donors and supporters. Do we look at the donors to Sheila Jackson Lee or Sylvia Garcia to check their ethnicity?
RE: CANDIDATE PURITY AND CREDENTIALING
Ah, perhaps a certain Herspanic AG candidate is really a Teuton or Ashkenazi: Any His/Her/Nonbispanic Dem operatives looking into Gußmann authenticity?
And while we are at it: For aspirant P-Bush, the His credential may be ascertainable, but what about the spanic part?
Ahnenpaß anyone?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenpass
File under: Limpieza de Sangre
As to why Latin use in law, Politica, there is another reason, not the one that could be inferred from your comments above.
Jason, interesting information about the word Anglo Saxon associated with the English language. I ran across the information while reading a fantasy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
It is interesting. From reading the Canterbury Tales and other literature from way back, English has changed quite a bit.