Texas Redistircting Turns Into Latino-lead Courtroom Fight

If Texas is an indication of what the rest of the country will be like and look like in the future-and we at News Taco have been pounding that drum for a while-then recent developments in the Rio Grande Valley beg for attention.

A group of Latino state legislators, the Mexican-American Legislative Caucus, has filed suit against Texas Governor Rick Perry and their Republican counterparts to block them from using the results of the 2010 Census to draw the state’s new political boundaries.

The Texas legislature is well into the back room bargaining that precedes the more open and official hearings and meetings that result in the new political map. This lawsuit could put a burr under the Republican’s saddle, and that’s probably what the MALC wants.

According to  The Monitior, a Rio Grande Valley daily,

Hidalgo County officials are pursuing potential litigation against the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Cabinet Department that oversees the census, contending it missed as many as 200,000 residents here alone off the county’s official population of 774,000. Neighboring Cameron County is considering joining the county’s claims that sending census workers door-to-door in impoverished colonias — rather than use the traditional process of mailing each home a form — prevented an accurate count in those neighborhoods.

Veteran civil rights lawyer Jose Garza, who’s leading this fight in court, says that the failure to account for the hundreds of thousands of under-counted Texas residents will dilute the burgeoning Latino community’s voting power and restrict their ability to elect the candidate of their choice.

A note to people and politicians from other states who may be looking at this and wondering if it’s what they should expect when Latinos grow in numbers and influence in their states: Texas politicians have a way of turning an afternoon social into a bar room brawl, but the good news is that it’s not an exclusive fight, and everyone is invited to partake.

We’ll keep track if this fight and let you know who gets bruised and who remains standing.

Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda