Count Me Out

Letting states decide who gets representation is the new front in the Republican War on Voting Rights.

- By Ari Berman. Ilustrations by Ben Giles

TWO DAYS AFTER Tropical Storm Imelda battered her district in Houston, state Sen. Carol Alvarado drove from its heavily Latino east side, past taquerias and signs for immigration attorneys, to another predominantly Latino neighborhood just north of the downtown skyline.

Senate District 6 is shaped like a dragon whose head starts in the city’s industrial outskirts while its body snakes and stretches into its center. She arrived at a red, Southwestern-style building that houses a community center named after Leonel Castillo, who led a boycott of the city’s segregated schools in 1970 and became the first Latino elected to citywide office. As she went to the podium to address more than 100 of her constituents, Alvarado praised Castillo as “a trailblazer who paved the way for so many of us, like myself, to be able to run for office.”

The daughter of a cement worker with a third grade education, Alvarado grew up in Manchester, a Latino neighborhood squeezed between the train tracks, the freeway, and the port of Houston. Rail cars frequently blocked the main road leading into the area. Her school playground overlooked massive chemical tanks and oil refineries that billowed gray smoke. Residents of the neighborhood breathe some of the dirtiest air in Texas and suffer from some of its highest cancer rates. Her 92-year-old mother still lives there, next to the Catholic church that Alvarado attends on Sundays. She got involved in politics “because of where I lived,” the 52-year-old Democrat told me over beef enchiladas at the community center. “I saw what was going on around me. It pissed me off.”