Voting rights case part of long history of Pasadena ethnic strife
The San Jacinto battleground lies 11 miles northeast of Pasadena’s City Hall. The symbolism is almost too obvious: The site where Texas won its independence from Mexico is a short drive from the municipal building where Pasadena officials devised a local elections plan being challenged in court as discriminatory against Latinos.
But perhaps it’s not too great a leap to connect the themes of 1836, when Anglos took control of Texas government, to those of 2016, when demographic changes threaten that control in parts of the state.
According to a scholar of Latino history in Texas, Pasadena’s political and civic institutions have trampled on the rights of its Latino residents throughout the city’s history.
“The political leadership of Pasadena, the educational leaders, and employers have employed … discriminatory practices such as racial segregation, police intimidation, voter dilution, slating, restrictive covenants, and job discrimination to restrict the equal access of Latinos to fair treatment before the law, economic opportunity, and open democratic processes,” writes Andrés Tijerina, the author of four books on Mexican-American history and a former president of the Texas Institute of Letters.
Tijerina prepared a lengthy report for the plaintiffs in a federal voting rights lawsuit challenging a City Council district system narrowly adopted by Pasadena voters in 2013. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday in federal court in Houston on Pasadena’s motion to dismiss the suit, which claims that the creation of two citywide positions on the eight-member council illegally diluted Latino voting strength.
The author recounts the widespread appropriation of lands from Tejanos — the Latino settlers of what became Texas — by Anglos in the years after independence. He also cites examples of segregation and discrimination in housing and schools, and the shunting of Latino workers into less-lucrative jobs in the refineries and chemical plants that rose up along the Houston Ship Channel in the early 20th century.
“Restricted to menial labor, Latinos, even in the unions, could expect no advancement,” Tijerina writes.
Pasadena’s public schools excluded the hiring of minority teachers and administrators until the mid-20th century, according to Tijerina. And to this day, all of the Pasadena ISD board members are elected districtwide, the same “at-large” approach being challenged in the lawsuit against the city of about 150,000.
Two similar lawsuits seeking to change the school board election system have been unsuccessful. Houston attorney Chad Dunn, who represented plaintiffs in the more recent of those actions, now represents the four Pasadena City Council members who voted against putting the charter change for the new council system on the ballot.
Subtle discrimination
Judicial support for voting rights has been intermittent, Dunn said.
“There was sort of a heyday of voting rights litigation in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s that caused a lot of school districts to go to single-member districts,” he said. “Then the courts started to turn against those cases.”
Discrimination in city and school board election practices, Dunn said, takes more subtle forms today than it did during the years when the Ku Klux Klan maintained its state headquarters in Pasadena (the organization left town in the early 1980s).
“We’re in a kinder, more polite era where officials don’t talk about what their motivation is, but it’s nonetheless just as discriminatory as leaders in the 1950s and ’60s,” Dunn says. Among “rational observers,” he said, it’s clear that Pasadena’s leaders moved to change the council system because “white citizens are about to start losing city elections.”
Mayor Johnny Isbell, who initiated the charterchange efforts, has said he believes citizens are better served by a system that includes some citywide council positions.
Two-thirds Latino
State Sen. Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat whose district includes part of Pasadena, says the business community has responded far more ably than the city government to the growing Latino population. She noted that H-E-B opened its first “Mi Tienda” store, a brand catering to the Latino market, in Pasadena.
“The city was just not responding” to its changing demographics and culture, said Garcia, who defeated Isbell in a 2002 campaign for Harris County commissioner.
Tijerina’s report is a distressing litany of repressive actions, providing valuable context for the voting rights case now playing out in a Houston federal court.
But it’s important to remember that almost two-thirds of Pasadena’s residents are Latino, and Latinos are approaching a majority of voting age citizens, even though the current system has left them in the minority on the City Council.
Change is inevitable. A community’s history need not be its destiny.