WASHINGTON — For years, Texas Republicans tried to win the Spanish vote using a brand of compassionate Bush-era conservatism. The idea was that the touch of a moderate and a softer rhetoric on immigration was key to getting through to Spanish voters, especially in the Democratic strongholds along the southern border.
That’s how Texas used to be. The Trump era has spawned a new brand of Texas Republicans, one of whom is already running through the halls of Congress: the far-right Latina.
Representative Mayra Flores became the first Republican to represent the Rio Grande Valley in more than a century after she won a special election last month and changed the congressional seat from blue to red. She also became the first Latina Republican ever sent to Congress by Texas. Her shortened term only lasts until the end of the year, and she is seen as having a chance of winning reelection to full.
Most notably, though, Ms. Flores won by eschewing moderates, embracing the far right, and wearing her support for Donald J. Trump on her sleeve—more Marjorie Taylor Greene than Kay Bailey Hutchison.
Her campaign slogan — “God, family, country” — was intended to appeal to what she calls the “traditional values” of her majority Hispanic district in the border town of Brownsville. She called for the impeachment of President Biden. She tweeted QAnon hashtags. And she called the Democratic Party the “greatest threat America faces.”
In an interview in her still bare office the day after she was sworn in, Ms. Flores asked if she considered Mr. Biden to be the legitimately elected president.
“He’s the worst president in the United States,” she said.
When asked three more times whether Mr Biden had been legitimately elected, she repeated the same non-answer.
Two other Latina Republicans, Monica De La Cruz in McAllen and Cassy Garcia in Laredo, are also taking part in the vote in congressional races along the Mexican border. All three — GOP officials have called them a “triple threat” — share right-wing views on immigration, the 2020 election and abortion, among others.
They share the same advisors, have held campaign rallies and fundraisers together, and have been side by side at the door. They accuse the Democratic Party of taking Spanish voters for granted and consider themselves, like their supporters, the embodiment of the American dream: Ms. Flores often speaks of working with her parents as a teenager in the cotton fields of the Texas Panhandle.
Ms. Flores, Ms. De La Cruz, and Ms. Garcia grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, a four-county working-class region in the southernmost tip of Texas, where Hispanics make up 93 percent of the population. All three are bilingual; Ms. Flores was born in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and the other two in South Texas. Only Ms. De La Cruz has been backed by Mr. Trump, but they all remain outspoken advocates for him, his movement and his hard talk about limiting immigration and building the border wall.
The Rio Grande Valley has long been a politically liberal but culturally conservative place. Pews are packed on Sundays, American flags flutter from their posts on lawns and law enforcement officers are honored. Ms Flores’ husband is a Border Patrol agent, a comment she often emphasized during the campaign.
In 2020, the conservative culture of the Valley began to exert a greater influence on politics. Mr. Trump flipped rural Zapata County, narrowing Democratic victory margins in the four Valley counties and other border towns.
“Growing up there, you’ve always had Republicans in the closet,” said Ms. Garcia, a former aide to Texas Senator Ted Cruz. “Now the desire to embrace Republicans is really expanding. They really feel connected.”
Other pro-Trump Latinas are running for House seats in Virginia, Florida and New Mexico, among others.
Republican leaders and strategists say Ms. Flores’ victory and the candidatures of other right-wing Hispanic women are proof that Latino voters are increasingly shifting to the right. More than 100 candidates for the Republican House are Hispanic, a record number, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Democrats see the situation very differently. Some Democratic leaders dismiss Ms. Flores’ victory as a fluke — the product of a low-turnout special election that saw 28,990 voters — and a volatile one.
Ms. Flores, who was elected to serve the final six months of a outgoing Democratic congressman’s term, is running for a full term in November. She faces a popular Democratic incumbent who is changing districts, Representative Vicente Gonzalez.
Democratic leaders are optimistic that Gonzalez will beat Ms. Flores and that Ms. Garcia will lose her race to Representative Henry Cuellar, the conservative Democrat who narrowly defeated a progressive challenger in a primary runoff.
However, Ms. De La Cruz is competing in the most competitive House race in Texas and will face Michelle Vallejo, a progressive Democrat.
Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat who heads the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, dismissed Ms. Flores’ victory as a “public relations coup” for Republicans.
“It doesn’t mean she represents mainstream Spanish voters,” said Mr Gallego.
Mr. Gonzalez, the Democratic congressman, nearly lost to Ms. De La Cruz two years ago when she challenged him in Texas’s 15th congressional district. He won by 6,588 votes. Now he’s challenging Ms. Flores in the 34th district.
“This was a profound message for the party,” he said of Ms Flores’ victory. “It really shook up the Democratic grassroots. I have never had so many people volunteer for free in all my years.”
As she moved into her convention office across from the Capitol, Mrs. Flores, an evangelical Christian, looked at the bare walls. She planned to put up a large picture of the SpaceX launch site in her district, as well as pictures of Jesus.
She had campaigned with the support of evangelical churches; her pastor staged a “Make America Godly Again” campaign and traveled to Washington for her swearing-in ceremony. “I do believe that pastors should be involved in politics and in guiding their congressmen,” said Ms. Flores. “Our pastors know our people better than we do.”
Ms. Flores wasted no time displaying a combative style with Democrats. Minutes after she was sworn in, Speaker Nancy Pelosi posed for a photo with Ms. Flores and her family. What happened next is up for debate. To the Democrats, it looked like Ms. Pelosi had slammed her arm against Ms. Flores’ 8-year-old daughter as the two stood side by side. To Republicans, it seemed as if Mrs. Pelosi had pushed her aside.
“No child should be pushed aside for a photo. PERIOD!!” Mrs Flores later wrote on Twitter†
To hear Ms. Flores tell her, her move to the GOP was inevitable.
In the beginning, she said, she had voted Democrat, mainly because everyone she knew was doing the same. The first time she cast a vote for a Republican for president, she said, was for Mitt Romney in 2012.
After attending a Republican event for the spouses of Border Patrol agents, Ms. Flores volunteered for the Hidalgo County Republican Party in McAllen. By 2020, she was organizing pro-Trump caravans through the Rio Grande Valley.
She also posted tweets using the hashtag #QAnon.
When asked about QAnon, Ms. Flores denied ever supporting the conspiracy theory, which claims that a group of Satan-worshipping elites running a child sex ring are trying to control the government and the media. Hashtags have long been considered an abbreviation on social media for expressing support for a cause or idea, but Ms. Flores insisted that her intention was to object to QAnon.
“It’s just to reach more people so more people can see that this has to stop,” she said of using the QAnon hashtag. “This only harms our country.”
Ms Flores deleted the tweets about QAnon, but she did not refrain from expressing other right-wing views. After the 2020 election, she insisted on Twitter that Mr Trump had won, writing in one post:Ganamos y lo vamos a demostrar† or “We won, and we’ll prove it!” After the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, she retweeted a post that it erroneously called an antifa “settlement.” She has called Mr Biden “president in name only” and has demanded his impeachment. And since her own oath of office coincided with the hearings of the House Committee investigating the January 6 attack, Ms Flores has largely rejected the procedure.
“Frankly, my district doesn’t care,” she said of the hearings. “My district is struggling to pay their bills. We have to focus on that.”
Like Ms. Flores, Ms. De La Cruz describes herself as a former Democrat who “ran away” from the party. She said she cast her first vote in a Republican primary for Trump in 2016.
“I believe the president exposed the terrible things we were doing to our country,” said Ms. De La Cruz.
After narrowly losing her challenge to Mr. Gonzalez in 2020, Ms. De La Cruz suggested, without proof, that both she and Mr Trump had been victims of voter fraud in the district.
Ms. Garcia, on the other hand, said she has been a Republican all her life. Raised conservatively, she attended church three times a week and entered politics shortly after college, where she worked as an outreach director for Mr. Cruz in McAllen.
As a candidate, she has focused on religious freedom, choice of school and abortion bans — issues on which she said Spanish voters in the region were increasingly like-minded.
“The red wave is here,” Mrs. Garcia said.