7th District reflects Texas’ transformation
Long a political bellwether, the GOP haven is now up for grabs as diversity powers change
West University could have been the set for “Leave It to Beaver” when Serpell Edwards and his wife Betsy bought their home there 45 years ago. The neighbors were mostly white, the moms stayed at home and took care of the kids, and the politics were reliably Republican.
West U. was part of Houston’s 7th Congressional District, which had flipped from Democratic to Republican back in 1966, when a handsome young oilman named George H.W. Bush won the seat.
“The Seventh” soon came to be considered the safest GOP district in Texas, if not all of America, dominated for almost 50 years by Bill Archer, who succeeded Bush in 1970, and the current incumbent Republican, John Culberson, who’s occupied the seat since Archer retired in 2000.
But now, as Texas is transformed by hundreds of thousands of new arrivals from other states and other countries, The Seventh has become one of the shakiest — among two dozen Republican districts nationally that Democrat Hillary Clinton carried in the 2016 election.
Democratic turnout surged in Tuesday’s primary election, spurred in part by President
Donald Trump’s intense unpopularity among liberals and his seemingly limitless capacity to energize minorities, who now make up a majority of residents in The Seventh, reflecting the transformation of Texas as a whole.
“We have noticed a flood of vote Democratic signs,” said Edwards, 75. “This never happened before.”
If deep red Texas turns purple and then blue over the next several election cycles, as some political experts and demographers believe it could, The Seventh and other districts like it in and around Texas’ already blue major cities most likely would be ground zero.
“Politics always follows cultural shifts, and this district is coming of age right now,” said Mustafa Tameez, a political consultant born in Pakistan who lives in The Seventh, worked as a homeland security consultant for former President George W. Bush and later managed the campaign of the first Vietnamese-American elected to the Texas House, a Democrat.
“This is not the district of Bill Archer anymore, certainly not the district that George H.W. Bush won for the Republicans,” he said. “And it’s not the district that John Culberson first ran in.”
Instead of mostly white Republicans, with pockets of African-Americans and Latinos, the district is now a rainbow of different cultures — 38 percent white, 31 percent Latino, 12 percent African-American and 10 percent Asian, a demographic face that looks like much of the rest of Texas, which in 2014 was 44.4 percent white, 38.2 percent Latino, 11.6 percent black and 4.1 percent Asian.
The Seventh is shaped like a jagged horseshoe. At its eastern extremity in the city of Houston, The Seventh includes wealthy River Oaks, upscale West University and Bellaire, and super-diverse, working-class Gulfton, home to 80 nationalities, where the store signs on Hillcroft Avenue are in Arabic, Spanish and Urdu and the cuisine is from Latin America, the Middle East, Pakistan, Vietnam and China.
Extending west from Houston, the district takes in an east-west corridor between Westheimer and Interstate 10 that runs a dozen miles all the way to Barker Reservoir and the neighborhoods that flooded behind Barker during Hurricane Harvey. It then turns north and includes well-to-do, increasingly diverse subdivisions all the way up to Houston National Gulf Club. And then it hooks to the northeast to encompass Jersey Village, a city at U.S. 290 and F.M. 529 that has grown from 500 mostly white residents in 1960 to an ethnic kaleidoscope of more than 8,000 today.
All of the demographic and cultural trends powering political change in Texas are evident here in The Seventh, which has long been a political bellwether. The district’s new residents tend to be more Democratic, though many older Latinos who oppose abortion and Vietnamese who remain strongly anticommunist have long voted Republican. But even these patterns are changing because many of their children seem to be swerving left in the era of Trump.
Trump energizes the left, the immigrant community and women, to be sure — turnout among Democratic women was particularly strong in Tuesday’s primary. But Trump also uniquely energizes conservative Republicans — and more Republicans than Democrats voted on Tuesday, continuing the strong turnout that has kept the Texas Republican Party in power.
Then there is lingering Harvey anger in The Seventh, especially in the flooded upscale neighborhoods west of Barker and Addicks, where homeowners could produce a potent vote for change, feeling deceived by local politicians and officials who never told them that their homes were built on land the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers knew could flood.
“This district is many more colors now than just white, and so is Texas,” said Chloie Nantamba, a naturalized citizen from the Ivory Coast and nearly 20-year resident of Gulfton. “What is happening here is happening across Texas.”
The 1964 nomination of conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona as the GOP presidential nominee buoyed support for Republicans in Houston.
George H.W. Bush, a Goldwater supporter, ran for and won The Seventh in 1966 by defeating Frank Briscoe, the law-and-order district attorney of Harris County and cousin of Dolph Briscoe, who would be elected governor six years later when Texas was still under Democratic control.
Bush won with a surprising 57 percent of the vote, the first Republican ever to represent Houston in the House. With the Republican Party in Texas on the rise, Bush established a political beachhead in Houston’s Tanglewood neighborhood that, roughly a decade later, would help propel the GOP into statewide power — putting in office the first Republican governor since Reconstruction, former wildcatter William P. Clements.
With the creation of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake in 1967, Houston began to boom. Energy, financial and medical sectors lit the fuse for growth that would continue for decades, slowly changing the demographics of Texas’ largest city as suburban sprawl covered lowland coastal plains.
When Bush left the U.S. House in 1970 to run for Senate unsuccessfully against liberal Democrat Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a fierce critic of President Richard Nixon, his house seat was filled by Archer, a former Hunters Creek Village councilman and mayor pro tem. After serving two terms in the Texas House as a Democrat, when Republicans were still a rarity in Austin politics, Archer had become a Republican only the prior year.
Archer won with nearly 65 percent of the vote — a benchmark he would surpass in each of his 14 reelection campaigns that spanned the next 30 years. He never dropped below 79 percent, and four times faced no opposition at all.
“It was different back in the days when my mother would stand out in front of the River Oaks community center, asking people to vote for me as they went in,” said Archer. “People were moving in from everywhere, even in the early days, but it remained a Republican district because the Republicans turned out and voted — that was the key.”
Archer retired from Congress in 2000 and was replaced by Culberson, a state legislator known for his tea party politics and an earnest technocrat style during his 12 years in the state Legislature. Culberson won his first campaign with 73 percent of the vote, eight points more than Archer managed in his first win.
Between 2000 and 2010, Texas gained the largest number of new residents of any state — 4.3 million people brought the total to 25.1 million — and surpassed New York as the nation’s second-largest state.
With the growth came hundreds of thousands of new residents who needed jobs and places to live, an influx that brought a rainbow of different ethnicities that, by 2010, had made Houston the fourthlargest city in the United States — and one of its most diverse.
Culberson’s share of the vote reached a high of 81.9 percent in 2010, when incumbent Republican Gov. Rick Perry was at the top of the ticket. But it sank to 56.1 percent in 2016, its lowest ever, when an antiTrump sentiment propelled Clinton to win the district with 51 percent of the vote.
Change came gradually for Serpell and Betsy Edwards in West University. After they spent three years in Indonesia, where Serpell worked for an oil company, they noticed two-income families were becoming the norm.
Then, as Houston grew to more than 2 million people, the Edwards saw West U. change again and again, as upper-middleclass professionals arrived, many of them working at the Texas Medical Center about four miles east on the other side of Rice University.
Now, a family from Spain lives across the street. A family from India is next door. A Chinese family lives nearby.
When Edwards put a Trump sign on his front lawn in 2016, it got torn down again and again. He eventually padlocked it to a metal frame. “Nobody took it then,” he said.
“It used to be so civilized,” his wife said.
A few miles west of the Edwards’ upscale neighborhood, Cesar Espinosa lives and works in Gulfton, home to more than 80 nationalities.
The building where he has his immigration consulting office highlights the district’s diversity: A woman from Columbia sells lingerie downstairs, next to a man from India who operates a clothing shop. The building is owned by a Chinese man.
Some residents call it the “Ghandi district” for the large number of Indians and Pakistanis.
“Even though I can’t travel the world, it has come to me,” said Espinosa, 32. “There are four churches nearby: Guatemalan, nondenominational Latino, Vietnamese and Ethiopian. You can visit the world right here.”
The area is the arrival point for many new refugees and immigrants to the Houston area, immigration lawyers said, because of its cheap housing. Most landlord don’t do background checks, Espinosa said.
“In my neighborhood, people do vote,” Espinosa said on a recent afternoon. “It’s mostly a Democratic area.”
Espinosa has never voted because he is a socalled Dreamer — an undocumented immigrant brought to the U.S. as a child. He has been allowed to work legally under an Obama-era program Trump wants to end. His brother, however, is eligible to vote and planned to do so Tuesday. He is a U.S. citizens because their mother remarried a naturalized citizen years back when he was under 18, enabling them both to petition for naturalization.
Espinosa’s younger brother, Abraham, now 27, took his oath of citizenship a week after Trump was elected president in 2016. The election results diminished his pride at becoming a U.S. citizen, he said, considering Trump’s angry campaign rhetoric about Mexicans and immigrants. “He insulted the Mexican people,” Abraham said.
Eduardo Coutin, 31, a software technician who became a naturalized citizen 11 years ago and has been a resident of The Seventh for the past four years, hasn’t voted in the past and doesn’t consider himself a Republican or a Democrat. But he plans to vote Democratic this year in protest against Trump’s policies.
He lives in one of the many apartment communities at the north end of the district, which have sprung up rapid-fire in the past few years. “Most of my complex is Latino,” Coutin said.
But anyone who believes Hispanic voters are a Democratic monolith doesn’t know Texas. “I vote Republican, and I like President Trump. Write that down,” said Carlo Suarez, 48, a petrochemical technician who has lived in Bear Creek, in the northwest part of the district, for 15 years. “The Democrats keep telling Latinos that if we turn out to vote, we will vote for them. In all my time out here, I’ve never had a Democrat show up and even ask for my vote.”
Even so, he said, “as people keep moving into this area, into the apartments and new houses and everything else that’s getting built, things are changing.”
Tran Le’s family came to Houston in 1975, along with thousands of other Vietnamese who fled the communist regime. With a frown, she remembers being called “boat people” by Anglo Texans.
Her family first lived in a tiny apartment on Houston’s southwest side, in an area near Gulfton where hundreds of other refugees settled. She fondly remembers the day she became a U.S. citizen — and could vote.
“It was 1980. I voted for Ronald Reagan, sir. He was Republican, against the communists,” she said. “Most everyone was
a Republican. I have voted that way ever since. So did most of the other Vietnamese people who are here.”
Sitting across the table at a Minuti Coffee near Fondren and Westheimer, Janet Ng, 34, listened as her mother spoke.
“I’m not interested in politics. It doesn’t affect my life,” she said. “It’s something older people do. But I have friends who do vote. They vote for Democrats.”
“We don’t talk politics at home because it starts arguments,” Le interjected. “We are Catholic. We are pro-life. We are not liberal. That was the way I was raised.”
Her daughter rolled her eyes, then smiled.
Le has worked for years as an executive secretary for several corporations and is now with an architectural firm in Houston’s Energy Corridor. Her daughter has an engineering degree from the University of Houston and has worked as a software developer for gaming, web security and cloud-computing firms.
The family now lives together in a five-bedroom home in the northern tip of The Seventh, an upper-income neighborhood that is home to citizens — and some noncitizens — from Vietnam, Venezuela, Mexico, China, Korea, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, France and Argentina, along with Anglos and African-Americans.
“Everyone lives together and respects each other,” Le says. “There are no problems.”
Every spring, her daughter said, the entire neighborhoods remembers the end of the war in Vietnam. “We celebrate the fall of Saigon every spring,” Ng said. “Everyone comes. It has become a celebration for more than just the Vietnamese.”
With rat-a-tat-tat precision, Mustafa Tameez recites statistics to bolster his bottom line that The Seventh represents how Texas is changing — more quickly by the day.
Houston has the third largest concentration of Asian residents of any U.S. city. By 2065, students of Asian descent are expected to outnumber Latinos, who now are close to becoming the majority in The Seventh, like they already are in other parts of Texas.
At first blush, Tameez seems an unlikely Texan. But in The Seventh, he’s almost typical.
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, he immigrated to the United States in the late-1970s with his parents at age 8. He grew up in Queens, N.Y., where his father worked for the New York City Police Department as a civilian manager of an impound lot.
He moved to Houston in 1994, he said, to “get from high taxes and to a warmer climate. When I left, I was probably center-right politically, but after I got here I became center-left.”
In two years, he relocated to Briar Forest, an upper-middleclass enclave north of Westheimer and east of Texas 6. He was soon working on the mayoral campaigns of Lee Brown and Bill White and getting an education in Houston’s growing diversity. “Our goal was to get the various communities to turn out and vote: Vietnamese, Chinese, South Asians” like himself, he said.
In 2004, after serving as a homeland security consultant for President George W. Bush, he managed the winning campaign of Hubert Vo, the first Vietnamese-American elected to the Texas House by beating a longtime Republican, Talmadge Heflin.
Briar Forest, in The Seventh’s midsection, is a case study in the district’s growing diversity. The neighborhood lies in a belt of diversity that stretches from the Galleria to “Katy-zuela,” socalled for its large population of Venezuelans working for Citgo. Most residents in this zone are professionals, working for oil companies in the energy and engineering corridors of West Houston. Others work downtown, or at the Medical Center.
Near Tameez’s home are pockets of South Asians from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, East Asians from Vietnam and China, Iranians and others of Middle Eastern descent, and Latinos from South and Central America. The district’s politics, he said, are just now beginning to play catchup.
Bob McDowell, 67, grew up in southwest Houston not far from where Tameez now lives, back in the days when the edge of town was west of where Greenway Plaza was developed in the late 1960s. He and other kids picked dewberries in the open fields out past where Richmond Avenue turned into a gravel and dirt road.
His father, an insurance man, had come to Houston from Louisiana after the war. The family started out in a 1,900 square-foot starter home much like the hundreds of others in the growing suburbs, filled almost exclusively with Democratic voters.
By the 1970s, when McDowell returned from four years at the University of Texas to get into the oil field trucking business, Houston was changing. Bill Archer had replaced George H.W. Bush in Congress in what had become a solidly Republican district in less than a decade. McDowell got interested in politics by volunteering on the campaign of a local Republican when the red wave that would take control of Texas politics years later was just a ripple.
Now he hears the talk of a possible blue wave that could bring the state full cycle. In his lifetime, The Seventh has transformed and transformed yet again. And so, he said, “have the politics.”