Free As Texas Goes... by Gail Collins Page A

he put in a tour as Bill Clinton’s secretary of housing and urban development, Cisneros never ran for office again. Part of the personal things he had to deal with was the illness of his son, who was born with a serious heart defect. But the big, whopping personal thing was Cisneros’s stupendously messy affair with his chief fundraiser, which became public and the source of a family crisis and several long-running though ultimately meaningless federal investigations.
    “It should have been Henry,” said Lionel Sosa, talking about when Texas would get its first Hispanic governor. “Henry cares for the community more than anybody I know. But he screwed up.”
    Julián Castro is sometimes referred to as the great Hispanic hope who “won’t screw up.” But the question of when Mexican Americans will get their natural share of top offices is not just a matter of finding the right candidates. It also involves the Anglos who still make up a majority of the state’s voting population and the politicians who currently run the state in Austin. How much do they want to let Latinos have the biggest prizes? After the 2010 census, Texas was awarded four new congressional districts thanks to its enormous—and largely Hispanic—population growth. The Republican-dominated legislature promptly drew the new districts in a way that made only one ripe for minority takeover. The whole issue sparked a raft of court cases, but the message was pretty clear. The Hispanic community “went forward in good faith,” said Steve Murdock. “And I think they feel like they got nothing.”
    “We’ve run out of white folks to flee”
    Murdock, the former state demographer turned sociology professor, was sitting up in his aerie at Rice University in Houston, at the top of a remarkable old building that boasts only a small, balky elevator. (For a while, Rice liked to put its sociologists up where only the eagles could get at them. Sadly, Murdock and his colleagues have now been moved to a more normal perch.) His desk and bookcase were filled with printouts. Murdock, who was also once head of the US Bureau of the Census, thinks a lot about numbers—births, deaths, migration patterns. “Texas’s future is clearly tied to its minority populations. In particular, how well Hispanic and African American populations do is going to be how well Texas does in the long run,” he said.
    There’s nowhere that points to the future more than Houston, where the exurbs keep growing but the new arrivals from the city are different from the generations that preceded them in one way: they’re Asian, Hispanic, and black. “We’ve run out of white folks to flee,” said Richard Murray, director of the Survey Research Institute at the University of Houston.
    Harris County, where Houston is located, is now less than one-third Anglo. And all the trend lines point in the same direction: nearly three-quarters of the county’s residents sixty years of age and over are white non-Hispanics, while more than two-thirds of adults under thirty are Hispanic, Asian, or African American. “I think older people tend to think they’re not going to be around to see the most dramatic transitions,” says Murdock. “The younger population not only knows from the numbers, they know from looking around in their classes, in the places they go. The younger population is much more open to diversity. But whether they’ll be more accepting of power sharing when they move along—we’ll see.”
    Murdock has made it his great mission to educate the state about what’s coming. The degree to which Texas is prepared to become a majority Hispanic state, he feels, will decree the success to which the state will march into the future.
    And where Texas goes, so goes the nation.
    “This is the US,” says Murdock, pointing to one of his many piles of printouts. “Look at the under-eighteen. Had there not been Hispanic growth in the number of children, we’d have had the largest decline