by Juan Batista
Chapter 9:
El Paso and Austin Conventions
El Paso sits on the furthest western edge of Texas. It is actually closer to Los Angeles than the eastern edge of Texas. It is a city of about 800,000, right across the border from Juarez which has twice that many people. Not too surprisingly, the metro area of El Paso-Juarez has long been a crossroads between New Mexico and the nation of Mexico. It was not until the modern interstate highways were built in the 1950s that it saw much contact with the rest of Texas.
The western panhandle area never wanted to be part of Texas. When Texas was taken over by the US to become another slave state, naturally that caused quite a bit of controversy. The US Congress debated whether or how to divide up the state, finally adding the provision it could be split into four more states at a later time. Culturally, economically, and geographically, this western area is much closer in every way to New Mexico. But the “Texas Republic” was dead broke and heavily in debt due to its leaders incredible incompetence at governing. So to get the federal government to pay off the debts, at first they agreed to let go of claims to the territory now making up New Mexico and parts of Colorado and further north. But a later governor changed his mind and threatened to send Texas militia into New Mexico. It looked as though Texas and New Mexico might have a mini-war. To satisfy the Texas governor, the federal government agreed to hand over large chunks of what at the time were looked at as mostly useless barren territory, west Texas, including two western panhandles.
These two panhandles, one northwest and one southwest, play a big part in Texans’ self-image. Just like the Rio Grande Valley in the south, they give Texas its unique distinctive shape and are the clearest sign of aggression, of reaching out to grasp territory against the wishes of the people there. Take them away and you take away some of the foolish pride of some Texans. Texas without the panhandles looks more like an oversized Idaho, a comical rather than an aggressively shaped state.
The southwest panhandle has only one big city, El Paso. The remaining counties are huge in size and very low in population. Only two of the counties have more than a few thousand people each, sometimes much less. Loving County, right at the corner of the state, has the smallest county population in the US, barely sixty, with a “town” of about half that.
Guerrero and other Aztlan Now leaders traveled to El Paso to the convention. They had been in contact with El Paso civic leaders and community organizers almost from the day his editorial was published. The convention had begun immediately after the end of the Aztlan meeting in the dome. Again, the gathering had the same mix of activists with Latino business establishment members. But unlike in Rio Grande, El Paso had very few Anglos. Whites make up not quite one in ten people in the region, and most of them mixed freely, lived in the same neighborhoods, often intermarried, and spoke Spanish.
The only worry was in gathering support from the rural counties. For just El Paso to break away would send a different message than an entire region. Small town politics in Texas is enormously insular, decided by very small groups that literally could fit around a single table. This gave these few counties outsized influence in the convention, but also made them easier to influence. Guerrero’s presence and that of other Aztlanistas was just what the rural counties needed to see. He reassured them this was a wise step.
To move the convention along and get a public vote while enthusiasm was still high, the convention adopted virtually all of the Rio Grande state constitution. The main exception was that protection and deference extended to the Kickapoo tribe and other Indians was instead extended to the tiny Tigua people, Ysleta Pueblo within the borders of El Paso itself.
The only debate was over the name of the new state. Some half heartedly suggested Aztlan as a name once again. But business leaders put their foot down, worried about spooking Anglo investors from outside the region, pushing for a neutral geographic name again. The convention settled on Pecos, named after the river.
The constitution and new statehood passed by a ridiculously high margin, 89% to 11%. In the rural counties, the margin of victory was only by a few percentage points.
Things were looking very poorly for Republicans in DC. The region votes consistently Democratic, by more than 90%. Two more Democrats joined the US Senate, and like in Rio Grande, they were strong progressive working class Mexicans.
Texas was getting smaller by the month. Thank you, Rick Perry!
Austin sits in the center of the state. It was not always so. The town actually once was what is called a forward capital, a capital on the edge of claimed territory, designed to serve as notice by an aggressive nation that “we will hold onto this land, come what may.” (Other famous examples from history include St. Petersburg in Russia and Richmond of the Confederacy.)
Austin is named after the man who brought over the Anglo-American colonists who decided to commit treason and overthrow Mexican rule. Stephen Austin was as much of a racist as most of the insurgents, and in the first decades the population of Austin was almost two fifths Black slaves brought there against their will. That makes it doubly ironic that today Austin is famous as an eclectic center of progressive thinking. This is the city that takes as an unofficial slogan, “Keep Austin Weird.”
In the 1970s and 80s Austin began attracting an impressive music scene with everyone from Willie Nelson to the punk rock band Millions of Dead Cops. Austin ever since has attracted many people who see it as a liberal oasis, with a strong environmental movement, anti-corporate movement, and probably proportionately the large gay community of any southern city. Over a third of the city is Latino, with Asians and Blacks each making up about one twelfth of the city population. The city’s progressiveness has attracted the largest concentration of high tech industry outside of Silicon Valley, leading to another nickname for the area, Silicon Hills.
Texas legislators who come to Austin often cannot stand the atmosphere, and even derisively redbait the city as the “People’s Republic of Austin.” The frequent sight of openly gay couples, a wide variety of cultures, tolerance for the homeless, and health food stores and vegetarian restaurants outnumbering “regular” ones makes for quite a culture shock for the conservative Republicans who make up most of the legislature. So it was only fitting that Austin responded to such a long history of contempt from Texas state officials by finally declaring their independence as a city-state. Recall, the Texas Nationalist Movement is on record as calling for no less than a purge of all Texas “communist” progressives. Most Austinites knew all too well, they would have to flee any new “Republic of Texas.” Flee, or even be kicked out by force!
Austin’s statehood movement met at the Frank Irwin Center, less than ten blocks from the Texas State Capital Building. The movement attracted everyone fed up with interference from the Texas state government, its kowtowing to business interests, spending more on prisons than schools, gerrymandering districts based on political advantage for Republicans, and a state school board notorious for putting false history in textbooks. They wanted a state with schools where you could mention Darwin, lynching, and condoms, where you could admit gay people exist and that many Founding Fathers weren’t Christians (most were Deists), and where oil, banks, and Evangelical churches did not try to dominate every aspect of daily life.
Austin’s statehood convention was the most contentious and drawn out of any held by the statehood movements, if only because every idealistic thinker saw a chance to put their ideas into reality. Environmentalists proposed enshrining environmental protections into the new state constitution. Blacks and Latinos wanted an end to rampant poverty and exclusion of the city’s poorer east side. Gays wanted civil rights protections included, including a guarantee of the right to marry. Feminists hoped to see abortion explicitly protected by a state constitution for the first time, and some hoped to see quotas for women as elected officials. Some idealists even called for nothing less than experiments in alternatives to capitalism to be set up by the city-state.
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p; Even on the most central questions, that of the structure of the new government, there was little agreement. Some wanted an open forum much like some small towns in Vermont, where every adult would be allowed to speak their piece and then vote. They hoped to see this act of direct democracy go even further, replacing any legislature. Some quickly pointed out this was not practical. The city had close to a million people. Their quick response was that every neighborhood should have open forums, and that each neighborhood would then have one vote. Other proposed instead having a legislature chosen by lottery, with one hundred persons chosen in proportion to the ethnicity, gender, and income level of the populace. Some wanted a council leading the executive branch rather than a governor. Others proposed every cabinet member be elected separately, completely decentralized government. (This failed when someone pointed out this was exactly what Texas already had, and it resulted in a weak government that doesn’t work.) Some wanted judges elected while others preferred appointed but easily impeached. One speaker even suggested any supreme court be replaced by a council of wise elders taken from all areas of life, from religious leaders to artists to teachers.
Finally, one convention member brought Carlos Guerrero up from San Antonio to address them. Guerrero worried this convention would founder because it had too many abstract idealists rather than hard headed realists who could get things done:
“My friends, I beseech you, do not let your high mindedness get the better of you. Do not struggle to achieve perfection in an afternoon, or even a week or a month. Instead, build the means to achieve all you seek, the structure, the skeleton, and let the flesh be added later.
I humbly submit that our own constitution for the state of Rio Grande would make an excellent outline for your own. It can be the skeleton, the blueprint on which you can hope to build your noble experiments. Do not seek such radical democracy, for it may become cumbersome, and especially in this early phase, your opponents who wish to see you fail can latch on to your indecision and spread disillusion. The skeleton now, the flesh added later. Or if need be, let there be amputations and implants.
Then once you have the basic structure, let each faction, each section of thinkers add that which will guarantee the rights they hold dearest. I beseech you to consider my words.”
The convention accepted Guerrero’s plan. The structure of government branches was the same for Austin as for Rio Grande and Pecos, and as it would be later for West Texas. Then gays added a clause protecting gays. Feminists got one protecting abortion and birth control. All members also agreed to push for every political party to have a quota guaranteeing each gender would have no less than 40% of all elected offices, and would strive for a 50-50 ratio. Economic progressives got one clause limiting corporate power and another strongly dissenting against the federal definition of corporations as “persons.” Ethnic minorities got a clause defending minority language speakers, with every language with over a hundred speakers in the city specifically named. An official language was specifically banned as promoting prejudice.
For those hoping to see experiments in alternatives to capitalism, they had to admit such plans might cause a flight by large employers. Instead they settled for one clause protecting unions and another guaranteeing poorer people would not be taxed unfairly. Texas has one of the most regressive set of taxes in the nation, with the poor paying much more than the wealthy, since it has no income tax but does have a high sales tax.
From now on, the people of Austin were not only taxed progressively, they were even fined progressively. If a millionaire and a man making minimum wage got the same traffic ticket, they no longer paid the same $250, which is inherently unfair. Instead, they both paid one week’s income, $250 for the poorer man and $40,000 for the millionaire. Justice was served. Activists across the nation took note, and the same proposal spread quickly to small towns as far away as Alaska and Maine. Even Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla considered it, and passed the law. The former governor learned to drive more cautiously, not wanting to lose the wealth she made fleecing anti-intellectuals.
The day after Austin voted to become a separate city-state, Governor Rick Perry and the other Republicans were in a quandary. Most Texas state buildings were now technically in another state. And the state of Texas had no money to build a whole new set of offices, another capital building, another governor’s mansion, another supreme court, another set of buildings for the dozens of agencies this “small government” philosophy maintained. To do so, one would have to raise taxes, and that was a political death sentence for Perry or any other Republican.
Besides, where could Texas choose for its new capital? The obvious choices were either Dallas or Houston. Competition for the new capital would set off a stark choice over who would run the state, oil interests in Houston or bankers in Dallas. Perhaps the best choice would be a compromise. College Station was the home of Texas A & M, and many legislators were alumni. Choosing College Station would also please the rural whites of east Texas, many of them angry over how Perry bungled the secession issue and lost half the state’s territory and population. There was even a good chance healthcare reform might pass because of Perry’s screw up!
But Austin did not really want the state of Texas to leave either. The state was their number one employer. Especially vital was the University of Texas at Austin, one of the nation’s best public universities, and one that received more funding than all other state universities put together. Austin was glad to work out a compromise with Texas. Texas could keep its state offices in Austin, free of charge. In exchange, Texas must keep funding the University of Texas at its current levels, and must also fund any rise in enrollment. Failure to do so, and the City-State of Austin would foreclose on Texas government buildings and expel their occupants.
Thus the City-State of Austin became the only state to have another state’s capital within its borders, and the only city to be the capital of two states. There was also a nice irony in the conservative state of Texas funding this most liberal new state of Austin.
For Rick Perry though, it was yet another state to not recognize officially, insisting publicly that they were just some misbehaving residents who would come back any day now, even while his conservative party negotiated with Austin and prayed they would be allowed to stay in the city. (For one thing, where else would it be so convenient for closeted married gay conservatives to find gay sex partners?)
The City-State of Austin became the only US state besides Vermont where third parties had a good chance of getting elected. The Democratic Socialists had a small chapter in the area whose membership soared after statehood. So did the old radical labor union, the International Workers of the World, or Wobblies. But the best chance was for the Greens. And any Democrat would be guaranteed to never be a Blue Dog, Green in almost all but name. While the suburbs sometimes vote Republican, only a sharp split between two strong Democratic and Green candidates could give them a chance at winning.
That meant two more progressive US Senators added to Washington DC….
Thank you, Rick Perry!