Vela has bold approach in legislative race
Immigration attorney Jose “Chito” Vela III first delved into state politics when he was a student at the University of Texas in 1995.
He had criticized thenGov. George W. Bush’s picks to sit on the UT System Board of Regents and testified before the state Senate Nominations Committee.
“Why is there not a Chicano regent?” Vela told the American-Statesman at the time. “Could they not find a qualified appli- cant? I don’t understand how in the UT System, where 35.2 percent of the students are Hispanic, that not one of the regents is Hispanic. I think that’s very symbolic of the lack of access a lot of Chicanos have to the UT System, and the lack of outreach by the system to those same students.”
Vela’s testimony landed him on the front page of his hometown newspaper, the Laredo Morning Times.
“I left feeling like I had done something positive ... and at least moved things a tiny little millimeter, hopefully in the right direction,” he told the Statesman last week.
Vela, 43, graduated from UT in 1995 and later earned degrees from the LBJ School of Public Affairs and UT’s Law School. He’s worked as city manager of El Cenizo, a colonia near Laredo; inthe Texas attorney general’s office; and as general counsel for a Democratic legislator from Corpus Christi. Now he hopes to return to the Legislature as the next state representative for a diverse district that stretches from East Austin to Pflugerville.
Vela will face former Austin City Council Member Sheryl Cole in a May runoff for the Democratic nomination. Vela won 39.6 percent of the vote in the March primary to Cole’s 38.2 percent. Both outpolled state Rep. Dawnna Dukes, D-Austin, who earned 10.2 percent.
Cole enjoys support from big names in Democratic politics in Austin and across the state, including Ron Kirk, a former U.S. trade representative and Dallas mayor; U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin; and state Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin. Cole also has support from major liberal organizations, including Annie’s List, Planned Parenthood Texas Votes and the Texas AFL-CIO.
Vela claims grass-roots support in the district from working-class voters and like-minded organizations, including Liberal Austin Democrats, Austin Young Democrats, Northeast Travis County Democrats and Tejano Democrats. Vela supports raising the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid, legalizing and taxing marijuana use to help fund public education, and creating housing for state employees and retirees living in Austin as one way to address affordability concerns in the city.
Vela said he wants to move the Texas Democratic Party from the center to the left.
“We’ve staked out this political ground that no one actually supports,” he said. “We have to shed our old, very timid attitudes as Texas Democrats and be more bold and adopt a bolder, progressive agenda. I want to change the conversation. I want to get Democrats away from this ‘Republican lite’ phi
losophy to a more bolder, left-wing agenda, focused on bread-and-butter, working-class issues.”
Headed to Austin
Vela said that as an undergraduate, he stepped onto the UT campus not knowing much about life outside of Laredo, where he was the only child of a father who was a lawyer and a mother who was a teacher and librarian.
“I remember one of the first conversations I had was with a junior or senior African-American student who was like, ‘This building is named for a racist; this building is named’ — I had no idea of any of that, and those conversations weren’t really part of a broader discourse at the time,” Vela said, recalling learning about campus history. “In the ’90s, that was not polite conversation.”
Vela said learning about institutional racism at the university played a large role in his campus experience.
“I think that was what pushed me to testify” to the Board of Regents, he said.
As a graduate student at the LBJ School, Vela’s activism evolved into “institu- tion building, working on the inside,” and included a stint on the LBJ School’s admissions committee.
In 1999, a day before Vela’s graduation ceremony, his father, Jose Vela Jr., had an aneurysm. Vela rushed home to Laredo. His father died shortly after.
“He was a practicing attorney, and he died with everything on his desk, with active cases,” Vela said. “I was his only child, so it fell to me to pick up the pieces.”
Vela remained in Laredo for about two years and worked for the city, managing grants awarded by the city to nonprofit organizations.
Then he returned to UT, and he graduated with a law degree in 2004. He accepted a job in the open records division of the Texas attorney general’s office. In that role, he issued rulings on questions about public access to government information. He remained in the job for just over a year and a half.
“Good job, good people there. I enjoyed it, but a little too boring for me,” he said. “You’re in a cubicle or an office, and you’re just reviewing documents all day
and issuing the same kind of letter of open records rulings again and again and again. And after 18 months or so, you’ve pretty much done every type of ruling there is.”
General counsel
Solomon Ortiz Jr., a Corpus Christi Democrat and the son of then-U.S. Rep. Solo- mon Ortiz, had just won a seat in the Texas House and needed a general counsel. The 2007 legislative session was coming up.
Vela said the job was the right fit, combining law and policy.
Ortiz said Vela was ani- mated and inquisitive and worked late hours, occasion- ally with his children in the office. And their working relationship turned into a friendship. Ortiz was Vela’s best man at his 2016 marriage to his second wife, Fabi- ola Flores.
“I’ve seen all facets of his life,” Ortiz said. “I couldn’t be prouder of him.”
Vela remained in the job until Ortiz lost his seat in the 2010 tea party wave that decimated Democratic ranks in the House. Vela decided it was time to start a law prac- tice.
His policy was to take just about any case that came his way, but as deportations were on the rise at the time,
with a wave of immigrants entering the country from Central America, more and more people approached him with immigration-related cases. He and former law school classmate Jennifer Walker Gates later joined forces, and now they lead the Walker Gates Vela firm. “No one wants to take
those cases, because they’re heartbreakers, they’re diffi- cult, they put folks in these immigration detention cen- ters in the middle of nowhere ... and make you drive two, three hours to go and visit your client, and it’s such a headache, but we took them. So people kept calling us,” Vela said.
Austin Planning Commission
Austin City Council Member Greg Casar nominated Vela to serve on the Austin Planning Commission in 2015. Casar said Austin’s planning historically had lacked the voice of working-class people. On the commission, Vela led efforts to protect the historic Montopolis Negro School from redevelopment and fought for affordable housing in Austin, Casar said.
“He is an unabashed progressive with a real focus on social justice and working-class people issues,” said Casar, who hasn’t endorsed a candidate in the runoff.
Planning Commission Chairman Steve Oliver, who also hasn’t endorsed a candidate, said that having an attorney on the board was helpful and that working with Vela was fun. Affordability and transportation were passions for Vela, he said.
“It was always about the person, the walker, the runner, the cyclists, and, ultimately, connecting those pieces were the highest priority, and that was, in a way, in his mind ... one way to try to make our communities more affordable over time by reducing car dependency,” Oliver said. “And if you could design a community where someone didn’t have to have a car, he saw it as a win for Austin.”
‘You don’t go in there asking for crumbs’
Republicans control both chambers of the Legislature and all statewide offices, but it would be wrong to start a conversation about how Democrats can overcome those realities without having an agenda in place first, Vela said.
“I would start with something like minimum wage,” he said. “Is the Texas Legislature going to pass a minimum-wage increase (next session)? Probably not. But we as Democrats need to talk about it. If we don’t talk about it, if we don’t promote it, it’s not going to happen.”
The same can be said about Medicaid expansion, an issue that affects districts represented by rural Republicans
and urban Democrats, he said. The two groups could form an alliance, Vela said. Democrats have to start a conversation first and “be bold,” he said.
“You don’t go in there asking for crumbs,” he said. “You go in there with a bold proposal that animates your supporters and move the bar in a certain direction,” he said. “I’m not underestimating how it’s going to be to get things passed, but if we don’t have a bold and ambitious and progressive agenda, then I don’t know how we campaign.”
Election day is May 22, with early voting beginning May 14.
The winne r w ill fa ce Republican Gabriel Nila, a public school teacher, in November.