Gubernatorial underdog Valdez fueled by struggles
70-year-old is first Latina and LGBT candidate
DALLAS — When Lupe Valdez faces a big decision, she likes to disappear for a few days to think.
She’s done it for years: No phone. No outside contact. Nothing but a blank notebook, where she writes out her thoughts.
“I don’t like making large decisions without having direction, without having a clear mind,” she says. So she asks for the “hermit treatment” when she takes her retreat, looking for absolute silence over several days so she can make her decision.
“I would wake up at whatever time, sometimes that was 1 o’clock in the morning, and just get up and write. I just write down whatever comes to me. … This is how I make big decisions.”
She did it when she got out of college, contemplating her future career. She did it 14 years ago, at a cabin on an isolated lake, when she pondered a run to become the first Latina sheriff in Dallas. When
she was sheriff, she headed to a monastery in Kentucky. She did it again last fall, when she was trying to decide whether to run for governor of Texas, as the first Latina and LGBTQ candidate to do so.
Should Valdez succeed in her longshot campaign to unseat popular Republican incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott, Valdez may be spending some time in seclusion because she’s got a list of big decisions about how to fix everything she considers broken in state government. Among the major challenges are reforms in education, health care, criminal justice, immigration and property taxes.
At age 70, older than any other candidate in the race, Valdez said she remains confident she can win a May 22 runoff against Houston entrepreneur Andrew White and can pull off a surprise win over Abbott in November. So confident, in fact, that she talks about how she has successfully beaten long odds throughout her life — and how this is just her latest challenge.
While Democrats nationally are predicting a “blue wave” in the fall elections, political observers believe it would take a tsunami of biblical proportions to carry the grandmotherly Valdez into office. After all, no Democrat has won a statewide office in 24 years — not even the betterknown Wendy Davis, who spent about $40 million to get trounced by Abbott by 20 points four years ago.
Abbott has more than that in the bank for his re-election bid. Valdez has but a fraction of that. Yet, she is unfazed.
“People are tired of the status quo, and they are ready for a change,” she said on a recent morning, explaining how she believes she can win the election by appealing to the “everyday Texan, the Texan who is most like me.”
Like White, she has little name ID outside of her hometown, even with her prime-time speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, as sheriff, which some political observers thought could preface a rise to higher office.
Though Valdez has been criticized in recent weeks for her apparent lack of understanding about state government and lackluster performance on the campaign trail, she insists she has the chops to run Texas — from her experience being sheriff in the seventh-largest county in America, with about 2,500 employees and a budget of more than $160 million. By contrast, state government has more than 327,000 employees and a budget of $216.8 billion.
“I can do this. Don’t tell this Latina she can’t. Do you know what it was like to be a woman in the Army during the Vietnam era? I was a federal agent for 20 years when a federal agent was a tall white guy in a white shirt. I was sheriff of Dallas County when there was not a single Latina sheriff in the U.S.”
Austin resident Kevin Orr, who attended Dallas’ Metropolitan Community Church with Valdez about 25 years ago, recalls her as being strongly spiritual, a lay minister who taught girls’ Sunday school. “She wore a robe, greeted people at church — was always very outgoing, very positive. She would talk about her career doing undercover work, though … I never could picture her being that tough.”
As for how Valdez arrived at her decision to run, while on the retreat to a convent last November, Valdez said she wrote in her notebook and pondered — “me and silence,” as she describes her time there.
“One of the things I wrote while at the monastery was, ‘If I do this, what happens? I will go until I cannot move another step.’ ”
She also prayed. “Did I get a message?” she said, repeating a reporter’s question. “I don’t know.”
‘Her life story has appeal’
Born just after World War II, the youngest of seven children born to a migrant worker, Valdez grew up in a poor neighborhood in San Antonio. Her father, Plinio, built the family’s two-bedroom, one-bath, one-story frame house at 219 Calles.
“(He) bought the lot and camped out on the lot with two or three children, and then he built the first room,” she recalled. “Then he just extended it as he continued to build.”
Each year, the family traveled to Michigan for seasonal work, where Valdez picked green beans and other vegetables. When she was about 7, her mother, Teresa, decided the children needed to stay in school and, after one last trip north to work with her older brothers, Valdez remembers her dad came home early and took a job with the city digging ditches.
“She’s the quintessential success story for a lot of Latinos in Texas,” said Filemon Rodriguez, 72, a retired truck driver who grew up near where Valdez did in San Antonio, and is supporting her campaign. “Her life story has appeal.”
On the suggestion of a middle school teacher, Valdez transferred to a better high school across town, in a white neighborhood. After struggling to adjust to the unfamiliar environment at the new school, where she “didn’t know a soul,” she graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School and then enrolled at Bethany Nazarene College in an Oklahoma City suburb. She graduated in 6 ½ years with a business degree, after working two jobs most semesters to pay her way.
“I worked serving food in a school cafeteria, in a bowling alley taking care of children while people bowled, another year in a restaurant and another year in a factory,” Valdez said. “I wanted to get out of the barrio. I wanted to make sure I had the instruments, that I had what I needed.”
In 1974, she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps and served in the Army National Guard — attaining the rank of captain — in Kansas City, Mo., where she worked as a substitute teacher. She later took a job as a program manager at the county jail, enrolling inmates in workrelease and treatment programs.
“I needed a job,” she said. “That started my law enforcement career.”
By 1978, she had returned to Dallas to be closer to her aging parents, for a job as a guard at a nearby prison. She soon stepped up into a job as an investigator with the federal General Services Administration that was followed, after training to investigate white-collar crime, by stints at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Customs and the Department of Homeland Security.
Undercover work
Valdez excelled at undercover work, said Art O’Connor, a nowretired federal agent who worked a few cases with her and recalls her as “determined and fearless.”
“How did I learn to go undercover? I’ve been poor all my life. All I had to do was to go back to that. You dress different. You talk different,” Valdez explained. “I would pretend to be on food stamps and sell them to grocers. … You’d go to somebody and they’d give you $100 for it, and then that grocer could turn the stamps in for $250. … That was big abuse back then.”
In a Dallas sting on sellers of fake IDs, she posed as a new immigrant. “We made the introduction by phone … and when he came to pick me up, (the agent) said, “Hey, it looks like you just crossed the river. And I said, ‘Que quieres? … I dressed poor.’ ”
Valdez said she was wired so federal agents in a truck parked nearby could record the illegal transaction and make the case. “You know, I can get these done,” she recalls the target told her. “I said very humbly, ‘Could you do please do that for me?’ And all the agents in the truck started laughing. … I remember he said, ‘Lupe, that’s so good’ ” — her come-on to the suspect to win his trust before he got busted.
“It’s not like on TV. I’ve worked on cases for as much as five years,” she said, including a covert money-laundering case that took her to South America for a time. “I did what I needed to do to make cases.”
That included disregarding any fears she might have had about dealing with criminals, up close and personal. “We always have fear but we go right through it,” she said, speaking of herself in the third person. “Resilience. Stubborn. I’m both.”
“That could be part of the reason I’m running for governor,” she said. “My whole life has been about struggle, about achieving things I was told I couldn’t do. Like going to college. Like being sheriff. Like becoming governor.”
“I will bring this to the job in Austin.”