Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right by Erica Grieder

Author:Erica Grieder [Grieder, Erica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610391931
Publisher: PublicAffairs

WITH ALL OF THAT SAID, there have been pockets of progressive activity in Texas. Of all Texas cities, San Antonio has had the most significant sideline in leftist politics. Its demographics and economy have historically set it apart from the rest of the state.

The city’s political evolution began around seventy-five years ago. About half the city’s population was Hispanic, many earning about five cents an hour working as pecan shellers in what was the city’s biggest industry at that time. Living conditions were grim. San Antonio’s Mexican Americans were about six times more likely to die from tuberculosis as Anglos and more than twice as likely as African Americans.16

The city’s political life had effectively been controlled by an Anglo machine for generations—until things began to change in the 1930s. In 1934, Maury Maverick, an outspoken liberal (and descendant of Sam Maverick, the accidental cattle baron), was elected to Congress. Following in his grandfather’s linguistic footsteps, Maury is credited with another contribution to American English: the word “gobbledygook,” inspired by his frustration with his fellow congressmen, who were, he said, “always gobbledy gobbling” like turkeys.

Maverick lost the primary in 1938 after conservative Democrats realized how liberal he actually was. He had supported the creation of a federal welfare department, denounced fellow Democrats for trampling on civil liberties, and joined Rayburn and Johnson in backing the Fair Labor Standards Act.17 In San Antonio, the latter issue was especially charged. At the beginning of that same year, Mexican American pecan shellers had gone on strike in response to a wage cut that would have whittled their pay to even less than five cents an hour. City police had responded by beating and jailing thousands of people. Before the year was out, and in spite of having lost his congressional primary, Maverick became the first person in modern history elected mayor of San Antonio with significant support from the city’s Mexican American voters.

In 1956, San Antonio sent Henry B. Gonzalez to the state senate; he was the first Mexican American to serve in that body since annexation. Over the next year, Gonzalez spent twenty-two hours filibustering and helping to ultimately defeat a number of segregationist bills.18 He was elected to the US House in 1961, and stayed there until 1999.

A boxer and a polymath, Gonzalez acquired something of a national reputation as an uncompromising idealist—a trait that occasionally led him in unpredictable directions, as when he opposed the Voting Rights Act, reasoning that special legal protection would only aggravate the separation between ethnic minorities and America’s Anglo majority. In 1986, at age seventy, someone called him a communist. In response, he punched the man in the face, which he later described as a measured response: “If I had acted out of passion, that fellow would still not be able to eat chalupas.”

Maury Maverick’s son, Maury Maverick Jr., upheld the city’s progressive tradition when he represented San Antonio in the Texas legislature from 1951 to 1955. In the 1950s when legislators mulled a bill that

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