STARR COUNTY, Texas — Alberto Olivares is a fourth-generation Tejano who worked for Customs and Border Patrol for 26 years. He’s also been a Democrat most of his life.
“I was a Democrat because I was told I was,” said Olivares, a square-jawed 54-year-old in a cowboy hat and boots. “I didn’t want to be different than my parents and my brothers and my sister.”
But he said he was so turned off by what he saw as President Barack Obama’s failure to support law enforcement that he switched parties. “I had to deal with the feeling of divorcing my family,” he told me over a Coca-Cola in Rio Grande City, the seat of Starr County. This year, he became the first person, as far as he knows, to run for local office as a Republican here since the 1880s.
During his campaign for county sheriff he was careful not to mention Donald Trump, fearing an association with the former president could hurt him in this traditionally Democratic area. But, he said, voters kept bringing up Trump themselves, telling Olivares how much they liked the billionaire from Queens. I saw this myself more than once when I heard drivers honk their horns in town at trucks waving flags for Trump.
A tectonic transformation is underway in the Rio Grande Valley, which is a reflection of what’s happening nationally. “The GOP is what the Democrats used to be,” Olivares said.
Starr County is almost 100 percent Latino. In years past, that should have made it a lock for Democrats, and for generations, it was. “Los Democratas hacen por los pobres. That’s their catchphrase,” said Olivares of the local party’s mantra, which roughly translates to Democrats will represent the poor. For decades, there simply was no Republican Party in the area. In 2010, when Olivares’s wife wanted to vote in a Republican primary, poll workers had to make phone calls and send her to numerous polling stations just to track down a GOP ballot.
But last week, the county flipped to the Republican Party for the first time in over 130 years, voting for Trump by about 58 percent. The last time Starr County voted for a Republican presidential candidate was in 1892, for Benjamin Harrison.
There’s no better place to witness America’s political realignment than the small Texas border towns along the Rio Grande. Across the country, the swap from Democrat to Republican has been unfolding for decades, but it went into overdrive with Trump’s arrival in U.S. politics in 2015. In 2020, it became clear that a seismic political shift was underway when Trump almost won Starr County, taking 47 percent of the vote in a county that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 79 points, and for Barack Obama by 73 points in 2012 and 84 points in 2008.
“We were so close,” Olivares said of Trump almost winning 2020. But this year, “Everyone was ready to flip.”
In Starr County, you can see the change happening across two key axes: class and race. Rio Grande City is a poor town, with a median income of $44,000—barely half the median income of the country as a whole. Almost everyone has a Spanish surname, and most people are bilingual. But Starr County has found itself increasingly out of place in the progressive Democratic Party of the twenty-first century.
As Olivares says, “People here are conservative.”
Although Olivares lost the sheriff’s race this time, if he tries again, it’s highly likely he could win and become the area’s first Republican public servant since the age of westward expansion. It’s only a matter of time: The Rio Grande Valley is now Trump country.
I spent last weekend in Rio Grande City, asking people there how they voted in this presidential election and whether their choice represented a departure from the past. The pattern was unmistakable: The region is full of lifelong Democrats who are now stalwart Republicans.
“I was raised in a Democratic family,” a 48-year-old Mexican American man told me as he leaned against the tailgate of his pickup truck, about to go for an afternoon run. He was reluctant to give me his name, but he told me he grew up a farmworker, toiling in the fields with his parents when he was 12 or 13 years old. Now, he said, he works as an EMT, and has been in the Rio Grande River numerous times, saving migrants from drowning. Today he’s a Republican, and is happy that Trump will be the next president. “Tradition. Values. Rules,” was how he described his worldview.
Such old-school social conservatism is typical of residents of Rio Grande City. Matt Gonzalez has a jumbo-size Trump-Vance lawn sign in his front yard. He’s a 38-year-old husband and father who owns his home. He works in law enforcement, is a Christian who considers abortion “demonic,” and is offended by Pride parades and by biological males competing in women’s sports—themes that came up unprompted in several conversations with Tejanos. “We still have the values of our grandparents,” he told me. “Especially in the Latino community.”
He said his grandparents were hardworking fruit pickers from Mexico. But he believes many of the immigrants crossing the border less than a mile south of his house are cut from a different cloth. “People are coming for the American dream,” he said. “But the American dream isn’t getting free things.” He said he resents new immigrants getting government handouts while his family pays $100 a week for groceries that a few years ago would have cost $80, including luxury treats like barbecue sauce.
For at least the last 20 years, Democrats have tried to win over Latinos by promising a more humane approach to immigration. And indeed, the people I spoke to in Starr County were careful to note their sympathy for migrants. But they’re as frustrated with uncontrolled immigration as their Anglo counterparts in border towns that have long voted Republican.
“I have nothing against immigrants. I really don’t,” said Joann Yarbrough, who, despite the Anglo last name she inherited from her “blue-eyed, blond-haired” father, has a darker complexion than most Tejanos. But she complained that she sees new arrivals pushing two or three shopping carts of groceries at a time out the doors of the local H-E-B store, with, she claimed, rib eyes and lobsters in their bags. “You’ve got people from Mexico that think that we should bow to them,” she said of some of her neighbors, speaking in an unmistakably Mexican American accent.
Ross Barrera is chair of the local GOP, which was basically nonexistent before he took over in 2017. He wears a Veteran For Trump baseball hat, but unlike the president-elect, he’s a moderate on immigration. He’s staunchly opposed to deporting “Dreamers”—undocumented immigrants who crossed the border as children and were raised as American almost their entire lives. Still, he thinks it’s crazy what now passes for normal at the border.
If you get up and drive around at six in the morning, he told me, you’ll see Border Patrol arresting people, with helicopters flying overhead; it’s as routine as an early morning traffic jam in a big city. His friend David Porras, a former watermelon farmer and botanist who just switched from Democrat to Republican this year, told me he has seen Chinese nationals wandering around his backyard, while Border Patrol officers were “just watching them—couldn’t do anything about it,” because they didn’t have the support of the Biden administration.
Barrera described legal immigrants who have been in the community for years, and who waited as long as a decade to become naturalized. Now, they’re watching new arrivals buy groceries with government assistance, while the naturalized citizens struggle to pay their own way in the face of skyrocketing prices. “It’s dividing our people,” he said.
Immigration and inflation came up more than any other issue in my conversations with Starr County residents. But there’s another concern many Rio Grande Valley locals share that’s more specific to Texas: oil.
Rio Grande City has few employment opportunities, especially if one lacks a college degree. The careers that are available are nearly all public sector jobs—school teaching, law enforcement, Border Patrol—positions that are highly coveted and hard to get. So hundreds of local men still young enough for physical labor drive out to Midland–Odessa, about 10 hours away, to drill on the Permian Basin. They live in mobile homes there for three weeks at a time, Barrera told me, then come back to Starr County for a week before heading back to the oil fields again. These workers are building homes in Starr County and buying new pickup trucks with “Proud Pipeliner” decals on them, he said. Afraid the Democrats will restrict drilling and jeopardize their bright futures, Barrera said oil workers drove all the way home just to vote for Trump.
“Hopefully he’ll drill more,” said Manuel Alaniz, a 27-year-old who works at his father’s oil-change station. Alaniz didn’t vote in the election. “I’m not one for abortions,” he explained. “But I’m not one for having a felon in office, either.”
Alaniz brought up another issue that arose several times in my interviews with Rio Grande City residents. “I’m not one for wars,” he said. “You get anybody who’s a Democrat in office, we’re going to war.”
“We keep giving them money,” Olivares said of Biden’s support for Ukraine. He wondered why we keep worrying about what’s happening in other countries when we have so many problems here at home. He said he respected Trump for “brokering peace deals” during his first term. Olivares is a fan of Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and now Republican who is also skeptical of American military intervention overseas. She was one of the only members of the Democratic Party he liked, he said, but then she left. Now she’s closely allied with Trump and likely to get a job in his administration. “I don’t know that there’s much left in that party that represents me,” Olivares said.
The only argument Democrats seem to have left for these voters is that Trump is a racist. But not a single person I spoke to seemed concerned about that.
“They still haven’t proved how he’s racist,” said Olivares. “He’s not very polished, we all know that. He’s offensive when he speaks. But I’m willing to deal with that if he’s going to put this country back in line.”
“I just think he doesn’t have a filter,” said nonvoter Alaniz at the oil-change shop. “He talks out of his ass. But sometimes, you need that in a country. Because fuck your feelings, you know what I mean?”
I asked Alaniz about the controversial joke that insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe made at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally a week before the election, in which Hinchcliffe said: “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. . . . I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
But Alaniz just shrugged. “It’s Tony,” he said. Hinchcliffe often appears on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and Alaniz told me he is a Rogan fan.
Gonzalez, the Christian law enforcement officer, was also dismissive of the joke. “I didn’t take it as offensive at all,” he told me.
For years, Democrats have thought of Latinos as a large, uniform category of voters who would one day turn Texas blue. But that’s never been the reality. “Californians, Tejanos, and Miami—we’re not the same,” said Barrera. “We don’t think the same way.”
But there is one major commonality among Latinos: They’re overwhelmingly working class. According to Ruy Teixeira, co-author of the book Where Have All the Democrats Gone? about the ideological and demographic shifts of the party, nearly 80 percent of Latinos fall into this socioeconomic group. And, if nothing else, last week’s election results show the GOP is now the party of the American worker.
Meanwhile, for residents of the Rio Grande Valley, the Democrats have become the party of the affluent and out-of-touch. The class divide remains; it’s just that the parties have switched places.
“Everybody that’s rich, up there with the ladder, living off the peons,” Yarbrough said. “I don’t think it’s changed.”
Leighton Woodhouse is a journalist and documentary filmmaker in Oakland, California. Follow him on X @LWoodhouse and read his Free Press piece “The Fall of Oakland.”
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