Big Beat

This year’s Democratic primary race for Congressional District 35, predicted to come down to long-time Congressman Lloyd Doggett and Bexar County Tax Assessor-Collector Sylvia Romo, is like a made-for-TV movie about Texas’ changing demographics.

The ingenious Republicans used redistricting to put Doggett in a tough position. He’s running against a Latina from San Antonio in a district based partly in Bexar County where many of the voters are Latino. The race comes at a time when Latinos, who will soon comprise a majority of Texans, have celebrated a new state Tejano monument and could stand to elect Texas’ first Latina congresswoman in Romo—at the expense of one of the few Anglo politicians who has championed their causes for nearly 20 years. The alternative is to keep Doggett, a proven advocate, and turn their back on history. For Latino voters in CD 35, it’s an unenviable decision to make.

Neither Romo or Doggett lives in the newly drawn district, which begins in Travis County and runs a long skinny way down to Hispanic-heavy San Antonio. Only grass-roots candidate and Air Force veteran Maria Luisa Alvarado lives in District 35. Alvarado, who ran a lost-cause race for lieutenant governor against David Dewhurst in 2006, is considered a long shot because of her lack of funding. Both Doggett and Romo plan to move to District 35, (Doggett lives five blocks east, currently), should they win the primary on Tuesday.

“The congressman is running in CD 35 because he has always said that he will run in whichever district has the largest number of his current constituents,” Ashley Bliss-Herrera, a spokesman for the Doggett campaign, told me.

Of the five congressional districts that Travis County was sliced into, District 35 is the only one that maintains a Democratic majority. Of course, it also stretches down to San Antonio—a deliberate move by the GOP to oust Doggett by saddling him with a Hispanic majority voter base that doesn’t have a history with him. (The GOP tried this same strategy in 2003-2004, when Tom DeLay’s mid-decade redistricting plan put Doggett in a majority-Latino district that stretched from Austin to the Rio Grande Valley. Doggett won reelection anyway. The district was redrawn for the 2006 election after federal courts invalidated parts of the DeLay map.)

Romo, a former state rep who’s now attempting to leap from a county office to Congress, has some serious confidence in her raza-ness to run against Doggett in any race. But it’s a gamble that could pay off.

“This is a district that was designed to elect a Latino and my feeling is that is what it’ll do,” Romo told me. “I think many in the district see this as an opportunity to make history by electing the first Latina from Texas to Congress.”

She’s also tapped into a dark secret I, as a liberal Hispanic, hate to say out loud: Hispanic Democrats in Texas are not necessarily so liberal. At least based on her platform of “non-partisanship” and emphasis on job creation and fiscal health rather than national healthcare or broad immigration reform—two issues Doggett has a history of championing.

The race may hinge not only on money—which Doggett has much more of— but also who turns out to vote, the so-called “liberal elite” Hispanic who, in many ways, bucks traditional Latino mores, or the working class voters who share more conservative values.

Doggett has a proven record of taking on Republicans and advocating for education, fair taxation and a host of other progressive causes. Doggett was also endorsed in the race by both the Austin American-Statesman and the San Antonio Express-News. But Romo is the liberal ideal come to fruition: a minority woman representing her own district—and an experienced public official who would be Texas’ first ever Latina in Congress.

It’s liberal ideals vs. the liberal dream actualized.

Last week, the San Antonio Express-News did a piece on the changing face of Texas schools. It seems the system has gotten noticeably browner and poorer and now we have the undesirable task of figuring out how to get these brown, underperforming people educated.

“Demographers and educators worry,” the Express-News’ Gary Scharrer reports, “because Hispanic participation in higher education lags far behind that of whites.”

Watching policymakers, journalists and statisticians dance around the obvious reason for underperformance from poor students of color would be funny if it weren’t so infuriating.

Let’s see if we can solve the mystery of why kids of color do worse in school. First off, let’s look at their home life. As people of color, these kids’ parents are subjected to a higher unemployment rate than their Anglo counterparts. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for whites in Texas is at roughly 6.5 percent. For Latinos it’s 9 percent and for African-Americans it’s a whopping 15.5percent. Texas Hispanics not only make less money on average than Anglos, they make less money than Hispanics living in other states, according to a report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. As this year’s redistricting debacle has taught us, minorities in Texas have been historically discriminated against in the political process and still have to fight just to gain fair representation in government. And people of color also have a higher chance of being targeted by police as was reported in the landmark 2004 study “Racial Profiling: Texas traffic stops and searches,” which was the nation’s largest survey on racial profiling. Six out of every seven law enforcement agencies in Texas reported searching blacks and Latinos at higher rates than Anglos despite those searches turning up nothing 98 percent of the time.

All these issues can lead to students coming to school less prepared than their white counterparts. Now let’s look at the inequities in the classroom. A 2008 study by The Education Trust to learn why Texas is failing to make headway with lower-income students and students of color reveals a lot. (Spoiler: It’s not that said students are inherently stupid.)

Looking at the state’s 50 largest school districts, the study found that, year after year, Hispanic, African-American and low-income students are less likely to be assigned to teachers who know their subject matter, less likely to be in classrooms with experienced teachers and less likely to attend schools with a stable teaching force. “Not surprisingly, their teachers are paid less, too,” the study reports.

Not surprising to anyone who studies the data. Consistently, people of color are given the proverbial shaft.

• Poor and minority students in Texas are far less likely than others to have certified math teachers.
• 58 percent of Algebra I teachers in predominantly African-American schools are certified in math, compared to 82 percent of the teachers in schools with the fewest African-American students.
• Of the state’s 
50 largest school districts, 43 have the highest concentration of novice teachers in the poorest schools.
• Across Texas, at every school level and in all
core subjects (English, math, science and social studies), Hispanic, African-American and low- income students are more likely than their more affluent and white peers to be taught by teachers who do not meet state requirements.
• A similar analysis of teacher and student data in Los Angeles concluded that “having a top- quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.”
• In Arlington, for example, the average teacher salary in the district’s highest-poverty middle schools is $4,750 less than the average teacher salary in the more-affluent middle schools.
• In Amarillo, teachers working in elementary schools serving mostly Hispanic and African-American children earn on average $2,405 less than those in the elementary schools serving greater numbers of white students.

People who question the existence of systemic racism need only look at the numbers. Take the emotion out and see for yourself. The statistics are quite simply stacked against people of color in this state. Yet the media covers the issue in code, leaving it to sound like some unsolvable mystery.

“All the school districts will have to make adjustments to make sure they are prepared to address the needs of young Hispanic learners. We have this huge challenge. It’s kind of daunting when you look at it,” Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter says.

The idea of treating everyone the same does seem to be daunting to those in power, but guess what? If you treat a huge portion of your population like they don’t matter, it’s going to come back to bite you economically. So pull your head out and do something really different: Give poor kids of color the best teachers, all the money and all the support you give affluent Anglo kids. Give their communities economic opportunity, too. You know, as if they were your own white families. Then see how far they lag behind the education curve.

It sure seems like there was gun-walking going on in Texas, and yet U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder won’t answer any questions about it. The fourth member of a Dallas-area gunrunning ring that was observed for months by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) while the men bought and sold the gun that ultimately killed Laredo ICE Agent Jaime Zapata in Mexico last year was sentenced to seven years in prison Monday. U.S. District Court Judge Sam Lindsay handed down the sentence in Dallas Monday after Otillio Osorio plead guilty to conspiracy and other charges relating to a gunrunning network.

Osorio was the last of the group to be sentenced after his brother, Ranferi Osorio, received a 10-year prison term in March for running the network. Their accomplices Kelvin Leon Morrison, 26, and Luis Carbajal, 23, received two and a half years in prison and two years of probation respectively for conspiring to buy guns from licensed dealers using false statements, which the dealer is lawfully required to record and store.

Though the firearms charges are not directly related, the Osorios supplied the gun that was ultimately used to shoot and kill Laredo ICE agent Jaime Zapata in Mexico in February of last year. ICE Agent Victor Avila, also from Texas, was shot and wounded in that attack, which occurred on a stretch of highway between Mexico City and San Luis Potossi.

There is alarming evidence to suggest that Agent Zapata was the victim of an unauthorized ATF gun-walking program gone awry, much like the one that was exposed in Arizona last year, Operation Fast & Furious. Federal records show agents were watching the Osorio brothers sell a 40-gun load to an informant at a store parking lot in Lancaster, Texas. They allowed the Osorios to drive away after the deal.

Agent Tom Crowley, spokesman for the ATF in North Texas, told Dallas affiliate CBS11 in February that arresting the brothers then would’ve risked blowing a larger investigation. A gun-walking operation, perhaps? Gun-walking is when law enforcement officials allow illegal guns to enter Mexico so they can allegedly follow them to the bad guys. In the case of Fast & Furious, however, more than 1,000 guns were lost and ended up at crime scenes, including that of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, who was shot and killed while patrolling the Arizona desert last year, and, you guessed it, at the murder of ICE Agent Jaime Zapata.

“There was a stop, but it was also a part of another federal law enforcement operation,” Crowley said. “By taking them down and arresting them at that time would have possibly jeopardized that investigation.”

Attempts to find out from U.S. Attorney General Holder whether a Fast & Furious type program was occurring in Texas have gone largely unanswered, prompting congressional Republicans to consider holding Holder in contempt. The latest word, however, is that the Repubs are slowing down that effort because it’s too risky in an election year. And, that, America, is your tax money at work.

I recently attended a panel at The Daily Texan offices where some University of Texas educators and I had a conversation with the Texan staff of student reporters and editors about how to better handle issues of race in the stories they cover. The panel came about after a controversial cartoon appeared in the Texan last month regarding media coverage of the shooting murder of unarmed African-American teen Trayvon Martin in Florida. The cartoon offended a lot of people with its suggestion that the media has turned the case into a race issue when it’s not, and for its use of the word “colored” to describe Martin. The Texan editorial board issued a formal apology for publishing the cartoon and announced that its creator, Stephanie Eisner, would no longer work for the paper. It was then that they invited several professionals to come speak to The Daily Texan staff. Having covered the story twice on the Observer’s website, I decided to attend. Some things that stood out:

Stephanie Eisner was not necessarily fired. It’s not been revealed whether Eisner was fired or whether she quit. If Eisner was fired, one panelist opined, the editors who let the cartoon run should also be fired if The Daily Texan doesn’t want to appear to be making Eisner the scapegoat. No one on the staff responded.

College kids might not realize “colored” is an offensive word. One African-American professor on the panel explained to the room why the term “colored” is offensive to black Americans and wondered aloud if it was a generational thing for the young Texan staff not to know this. I followed up with an email to the editorial board to ask if this was the case. They declined to comment.

Some white people are afraid to approach subjects of color for fear of appearing condescending or exploitative. The student editors and others asked several times: Can we create more diverse coverage in the future without people accusing us of only doing it because of what happened with the Trayvon Martin cartoon? The answer we gave them was don’t worry about it. You’re always going to have critics no matter what you write. Better to write the truth, and the closest way to get to the truth is to cover all angles.

When a panelist suggested that the Texan do a story about racial profiling by approaching men of color on The Drag near campus and asking them if they’ve ever been racially profiled, one Anglo reporter asked very sincerely how he could do that without offending the men of color. It had never occurred to me that such an inquiry could be taken as offensive. I told him that if his intentions are honorable and if he listens to his subjects, most people are eager to tell their story to a mainstream media that largely ignores them.

What struck me most about the conversation with these college staffers is that they are asking the same questions about diversity that professional media outlets ask. The issues with which The Daily Texan is grappling are issues that all professional institutions grapple with.

Why is everyone in our office white? How do we reach out to people of color? Where are they? Why don’t they feel comfortable here? Why aren’t they coming for interviews when we advertise job openings? The issue is bigger than The Daily Texan. This is a societal issue. People of color are still far more likely to grow up in relative poverty, where the idea of going to college or, if they do go to college, majoring in something as “frivolous” as journalism, is just not seen as viable. It behooves those of us in positions of power to reach out to those who may never have had anyone say to them: Have you ever thought about writing for the paper?

A diverse staff won’t ensure that offensive content never gets published, and that’s okay. As one African-American professor said, “It’s important those kinds of views get printed in the paper so we can know what those people are thinking.” Still, having a variety of life experiences represented on the masthead increases the likelihood that more viewpoints are expressed.

Cindy Casares

Willie Nelson checks out a bronze version of himself.

I just got back from the dedication of a statue of Willie Nelson from non-profit Capital Area Statues to the City of Austin. The Theme was “4/20.” For the uninitiated, the numbers four and 20 when put together are, for reasons known only to Cheech & Chong, a reference to marijuana smoking. When people say, “It’s 4:20,” they mean it’s time to smoke pot. April 20, or “4/20,” is unofficial Marijuana Appreciation Day. So, Willie Nelson being the cannabis aficionado that he is, the city of Austin chose to unveil his statue on April 20 at 4:20. We get it Austin. You’re so weird.

The crowd of about 100 people gathered to watch the unveiling, on Willie Nelson Boulevard, a patch of road on 2nd Street in downtown Austin, was jubilant. And they were probably mostly high.

Though I am not a pot person, I must confess that I have been known to call Willie Nelson my fantasy grandpa as well as my spiritual guru. I have several of Willie’s books on philosophy and dirty jokes on a shelf at home and have seen him perform at baseball fields and arenas alike across this great land. So I, though not high, was jubilant, too.

After all, there was a baldheaded baby in the crowd wearing red pigtails and a bandana.

Kris Kristofferson showed up, too, seeming a little out of it. We may have disturbed his nap.

Suddenly an odor came wafting through the air, where I was standing mere feet from the Austin Police Department. I looked at my phone. Exactly 4:20 on the dot. For potheads, these guys were pretty on the ball.

Of course, Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell was on the stage at 4:20 and the statue was not, as had been promised, being unveiled. The crowd became restless. “Willie! Willie! Willie!” they chanted. I felt sorry for the mayor, but he didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t get off the stage until 4:21. Magic time be damned.

Several famous people I didn’t recognize got up on stage and pulled off the tarp. There it was. I managed to snap a photo of Willie first laying eyes on it. He went straight to Trigger. The guitar. What a musician’s musician.

The eight-foot-tall, one-ton bronze cast, created by sculptor Clete Shields of Philadelphia captured Willie’s depth of spirit. And the depth in Trigger’s trademark hole. I’m glad we’ll have it long after (bite my tongue) Willie is gone.

“Anybody know what time it is?” Willie playfully asked the crowd. Cheers from the potheads.

Sorry, Willie. At this point, it’s like 4:25. Not too late for you to play a song, though.

Which he did. “On the Road Again” with harmonica player Mickey Raphael and his son (I think) on back up. Then he dedicated one to the crowd, “Roll Me Up & Smoke Me When I Die.” I will leave that to the hardcores. I will more likely just visit the statue.