As Texas draws its maps, Latinos push for political power

AUSTIN, Texas — As a Dallas County commissioner, Elba Garcia represents some 670,000 people — nearly the population of a congressional district. The majority of her constituents are Latino and live in the fast-growing suburbs west of Dallas, where they share worries about managing growth, schools and access to health care.

Garcia is the area’s voice on the commission, but her constituents don’t have such neat representation in Congress. The area is divvied up among three House members, according to boundaries drawn by Republican legislators 10 years ago. None is Latino.

Garcia says the impact of the divisions is clear: “Everyone gets cut up and scattered around,” she said. “They dilute the Latino vote.”

Texas this week will begin redrawing those congressional lines, and Latino advocates and officeholders say it’s time to correct past wrongs. The state’s explosive population growth over the past decade — half of which comes from Latinos — has earned it two new congressional seats. At least one should be a Latino-majority congressional seat in the Dallas area, they argue.

The push is part of a national campaign ramping up as states dive into a once-a-decade redistricting fight that could determine control of the House of Representatives. Although the battle is expected to be sharpest in Texas, Latino advocacy groups are already fanning out across the country, working in Arizona, Colorado and Texas with one clear message: Latinos accounted for slightly more than half of all U.S. population growth in the last decade, and it’s time for the political system to pay attention.

While Latinos don’t vote as a monolith, they lean heavily toward Democrats in Texas and across the country. Advocates argue that district lines shouldn’t blunt their power.

“Ultimately, it’s about providing Latinos a fair opportunity to choose their representatives,” said Dorian Caal of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials. “We’re all better off when a community can choose someone they prefer.”

But the tactic of “packing and cracking” racial and ethnic groups has a long history. In every decade since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, courts or the Department of Justice have ruled that Texas’ redistricting plans violated federal laws — partly by scattering Democratic-leaning Latino voters among multiple districts dominated by non-Latino white residents who lean Republican.

This year there will be less federal oversight. For the first time in decades, the state does not need approval from the Department of Justice before enacting its plans, because of a 2013 decision by the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court.

Using census data released last month, advocates say they see a handful of places ripe for new Latino-majority congressional districts. In Florida, which is adding a new seat, some are pushing for a new district south of Orlando, where an influx of Puerto Ricans has led to a population boom.

In Colorado, another fastgrowing state gaining a seat, some advocates see a way to draw a majority-Latino district in the state’s urban heart, but only by splitting Denver in half and merging it with various close-in suburbs. The initial drafts of maps drawn by a nonpartisan commission kept Denver in the same district.