The most Latino county in the United States, where naming Reagan was a sin, jumps on the Trump Train

The Texas Café is the place to talk politics in Rio Grande City. Every inch of its walls is decorated with curiosities and memorabilia. From an old photo of the hand-operated ferry that used to cross the river, a few horseshoes and a portrait of the singer Selena, to an altar to the Rattlers, the local high school football team. Together, they describe the essence of the place that surrounds them: the border. And in one corner, a couple. They are Toni and Benito Trevino, lifelong Texans — she is originally from Houston — and leaders of the local branch of the Republican Party.

They are happy on the Friday morning after the election, in which their home, Starr County, the most Latino county in the country — where 98% of the population is Hispanic — voted for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in 132 years. Overnight, this land of ranches, poor neighborhoods — the average income, at $41,000 (€38,000), is approximately half the national average, and 30% of the population lives below the poverty line, three times more than in the rest of the country — and a tradition of ironclad control by the local Democratic Party machinery, became international news.

Naturally, Toni Trevino, 67, the County Chair of the Republican Party, was not surprised by the result. “For two years I have thought that if Donald Trump was the candidate, he was going to win here, from what I heard among the people.” She says that the main reason he won, as in the rest of the country, is economic discontent. “When you go to the store and you can’t afford to buy groceries for your family, that’s a problem. That’s what it was,” she says, dispelling mysteries with one sentence. Although she doesn’t blame the Biden Administration alone. The global context, with the post-pandemic, was a decisive factor, she admits. “But in the end, that doesn’t end up mattering much in politics,” she says, after making a concession that was never heard from candidate Trump during the campaign, an expert in painting his own reality, even if it is with falsehoods or half-truths.

The Republican’s promise to close the border to illegal immigration was also decisive in the local vote. In an area that in recent years has grown accustomed to seeing hundreds of undocumented migrants crossing every day and every night — “although they don’t stay because, when they cross the river, they look around and see that there is nothing for them” — a strong position on immigration is seen as common sense. Even local Democratic candidates support completely stopping the flow of undocumented migrants.

Residents turn a deaf ear to progressive outrage about how it is possible that an almost entirely Latino population can turn away migrants. It’s not about race, it’s about, interviewee after interviewee says, “following the law.” But then come some of the stereotypes that stigmatize the recent wave, especially the Venezuelan migrants, as dangerous criminals and even as a potential sleeping army, in the heat of a post-9/11 paranoia that bears the unmistakable Trump stamp.

Just as important as the reasons for the unprecedented support for a Republican here — essentially the same ones that propelled Trump in other Latino and working-class areas around the country — is the way in which the grip that Democrats have held for generations has been loosened. At 77, Benito Trevino, born and raised here in a family with roots on the banks of the Rio Grande since before Texas was Texas, has a much longer-term vision.

“This has been a Democratic area basically since the end of the Civil War. The schools, the water, the county — everything. My father was very political. He had a group, he never ran for anything, he just tried to fight what he saw was wrong with the county. But it was always within the Democratic Party. So was I. As a volunteer I did whatever I could for the best of the two Democrats,” he recalls of a time when the Republican Party simply did not exist. When Ronald Reagan was president, his wife Toni opened his eyes and made him see that he, a conservative man, was actually a Republican, something he had never considered possible.

Suddenly, he began to see the political strategies that Democratic Party candidates deployed against their own colleagues as “vicious.” Then, he joined a nascent Republican group in the area and even took its reins in the nineties, after the president lost her position in the local School Board because of her political affiliation, according to his account. From then until 2004, he swam against the current with conviction, but without much hope.

A few blocks away, retired intelligence operations colonel Ross Barrera, 58, tells a very similar story in an office he bought a few years ago and has filled with all kinds of mementos from his travels around the world with the military, creating a kind of surreal home museum. “I’ve been a Republican since I was in high school. My father had converted when Reagan first ran for office and that shaped my ideas. Growing up in Starr County, it was instilled that if you’re Hispanic you have to vote Democrat because that’s the way things are. I made my own decision and I said it out loud. But it was very difficult for people, they had to whisper that they liked Reagan because they could lose their jobs,” he says, charismatically and portraying himself as a rebel at heart.

When Barrera left the military in 2017, he returned home and things hadn’t changed much. In the previous year’s elections, Hillary Clinton had beaten Donald Trump in the county by about 9,000 votes to just over 2,000; a difference of 60%. The local Republican Party was “dead,” but Barrera took over the vacant post of chairman and got to work. “I started holding meetings, getting people excited. I put ads in local papers and started promoting conservative ideas on social media. I was pushed-back. My father’s friends told me what I was doing, that I wasn’t going to achieve anything. Nobody would lend us their spaces to meet. That’s why I bought this building and I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission,” he says, excited on the crest of the wave of a historic victory.

Barrera considers himself a conservative community influencer and takes much of the credit for the county’s historic turnaround. His background in military logistics has helped his political mobilization succeed, which has contrasted with a virtually nonexistent Democratic operation until just a few months ago, when, nervous about what they were seeing, they poured money into the entire Rio Grande Valley area. In addition, the closeness with local people that Barrera has built has also been key in the way he has been able to sell a candidate known for his misogynistic and racist outbursts. Barrera also doesn’t mince words. “They would tell me, ‘he’s so vulgar,’ and I would answer, ‘me too and you still like me. ’ Trump is a business guy and he surrounds himself, not with celebrities who don’t contribute anything like Kamala did, but with Elon Musk. People like the idea of a man who goes to work,” he says, then very consciously adds his version of the anti-immigration discourse, aggressive and stigmatizing, but expertly argued.

The work of the Trevinos and Barreras, just as focused on boosting participation as on selling a political message, speaks for itself. In 2020, Donald Trump closed the gap with Joe Biden in Starr County, achieving a margin of just five points. The Democratic Party maintained its nearly 9,000 votes; the difference was that the Republicans achieved more than 8,000. And last Tuesday, the swing was consummated: Trump won by 17 points, with almost 9,500 votes, compared to Harris’s 6,800.

In the small town of Roma, where a border bridge spans the meandering Rio Grande, a section of wall built by the Texas governor in recent months towers over the landscape and abandoned buildings that could be straight out of a Western define the place, the young mayor exemplifies the semi-converted Democrat who tipped the balance in the county in this year’s election. Jaime Escobar, 47, whose family also traces its roots in the area to the Spanish colonial era, is a lifelong registered Democrat. “Culturally, we’ve been Democrats for generations. My grandparents were. That’s just the way it was,” he explains initially, and continues: “I voted for Donald Trump. In communities like ours, economic growth and job creation is very important. There are a lot of very poor people and I see people suffering. And the border…”

On Election Day, he says, he was under the Democratic Party tent at the polling station, supporting local candidates and Henry Cuellar, the Democratic representative in Washington for this district since 2002. “But for president, a lot of us voted for Trump,” he says. “Some people are surprised, but when it comes to common-sense things like the economy and pocketbooks, people know they needed a change,” he says, noting that the Republican is that change. Escobar hopes the tax cuts will revitalize his city, which he wants to turn into an economic hub — he has bought land on the outskirts for an industrial park and is working to restore the historic center, protected by law but largely in a state of neglect.

After the electoral earthquake and the bursting of the Democratic bubble, which was not limited to Starr County but was reproduced throughout the Rio Grande Valley in a very similar way, life goes on. In the colonias, as the poorest neighborhoods of the cities in the area are known, most of the neighbors, apprehensive when talking to the press, limited themselves to saying that they never vote and this year had not been the exception. Others, who had Trump signs displayed, also did not want to give their names, because, according to what they said, they had received threats for supporting the Republican; an echo of what Trevino and Barrera had recounted earlier.

The territorial dominance that was taken for granted since the origins of South Texas’s political memory has been broken by waving the Trump flag. This is what Roel Reyes has been doing since 2016, first a little timidly and cautiously, now proudly. Leader of the Trump Train of Starr County, the caravan of trucks and cars that parades along the long roads of the area, does not measure support for the president-elect with votes, but with the reactions of the other cars. “In 2020 we started with just a few and people would give us negative reactions. And now, when we made some of 50 or 60 cars, they honked at us, and only one or two gave us the thumbs down. When we saw that, that all these people agreed with us, I said: ‘We’re going to paint the county red.’”

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