Michelle Vallejo for Congress
Democratic congressional candidate Michelle Vallejo
McALLEN, TEXAS – On the Saturday before early voting begins, progressive Democrat Michelle Vallejo held a rally in quiet Archer Park as her campaign for Texas’s 15th Congressional District, the state’s most competitive, enters the final stretch.
Raul Peña, a local land surveyor, approached Vallejo after the rally to ask why she hasn’t focused more on economic hardship.
“Honestly, for us, that’s why these door conversations are so important, because that’s when you can actually talk about the bread-and-butter issues,” Vallejo told Peña. An advertisement would begin airing this week, she added, that focuses on the economy.
Peña came away unsatisfied. “Every time I hear her ads, or [Republican opponent] Monica De La Cruz’s ads, it’s the same thing. One attacking the other about the culture wars—they want to take away your right to choose, they’re demonizing immigrants,” he told the Prospect. “Everybody that is not going to vote, or doesn’t know who to vote for, the one thing on their mind is, gas is going up, the price of food is going up.”
It’s not strictly true that Vallejo, a political newcomer who owns a local flea market, has focused on the culture wars. She has run ads on her opponent’s support for millionaire tax cuts, even specifically discussing the “struggle to pay for gas and groceries.”
Yet it has proved difficult for Vallejo to escape association with a national party focused on social issues, particularly without grassroots infrastructure to organize a shifting base of working-class voters. And local Democrats have scant funding to compete with the heavy spending of De La Cruz, a bombastic conservative who emphasizes crime, inflation, and strengthening the Mexican border wall.
A few blocks up Main Street from the rally, Sirheem “Seems” Fuentes, 33, was serving Mexican matchas and Jalisco cajeta lattes at her posh coffee shop. As an ambitious small-business owner, Fuentes is thrilled to see Vallejo, who was her high school classmate in Mission, Texas, running for office. But she worries that the high cost of campaigning drives candidates to tailor their message on issues like abortion to a national audience, rather than local values.
“As a woman, I would hope that all women have a right to have control of their bodies. But I do think that when you sensationalize abortion, you start making people think in extremes,” Fuentes told the Prospect. “I wish there was some place in the middle where people were like, it’s not for everyone, but we do need to have control of our bodies.”
On the same Saturday, Donald Trump held a rally in Robstown, Texas, further up the Gulf Coast, where he told the gathered crowd that “the silent majority is back, and stronger than ever.” Trump and the Republicans are looking to build on the improved performance in 2020 with voters in South Texas. After redistricting, TX-15 now leans about one point more Republican than the national average, according to the Cook Political Report.
This weekend, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) will travel to the region to stump for Vallejo. Sanders could be a powerful mobilizing tool in the Rio Grande Valley, historically a Democratic stronghold. Yet many local voters say that the election, dominated by national debates, has taken on an air of unreality.
“It feels like if a campaign is not sensationalized, people aren’t going to get funded, so you need to have a big name attached,” Fuentes said. “The question is who’s getting more views, so more people seem to be voting that way, so that they can get the funding, so that they can continue to propel the movement forward.”
Farmworker Organizing “Died Out”
“The movement” was once more straightforward: It meant organizing Mexican American labor. The Valley’s economy grew up around low-cost farmwork. A suspension bridge across the Rio Grande to Reynosa, Mexico, built in 1941, made the region a key migration port. McAllen was also the site of the first inland foreign-trade zone (FTZ) in the United States, established in 1973.
That economic base made McAllen a hot spot for organizing by labor unions like the United Farm Workers of America, founded by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. But over the past two decades, the landscape has shifted.
Farmwork has slowed, overtaken by construction, service-sector and industrial jobs, and employment at bodegas. The population of the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission urban cluster is projected to nearly double by 2060, the second-highest growth rate of any metro area in Texas. The growth of health care and services has driven fast, turbulent urbanization.
Vallejo’s campaign is backed by LUPE Votes, the elections arm of La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), a community group also founded by Chávez and Huerta. But unlike its labor predecessor, LUPE fights primarily for housing improvements at colonias, unincorporated neighborhoods outside city limits that often lack basic infrastructure, including safe drinking water and drainage systems, and flood badly when hurricanes hit the coast.
Making matters more difficult for organizers, Texas is a right-to-work state hostile to unions, where migrant labor is treated as disposable and predominantly Latino sectors face a deadly lack of worker rights. LUPE helps combat issues like wage theft at worker centers, but the heart of its work is improving living conditions in the rambling exurban sprawl.
“The work has shifted from farmworker organizing to community organizing,” said Genaro Rocha, an organizer with LUPE. In the 1990s, Rocha campaigned with agricultural workers in Florida, California, and Texas, mobilizing for higher pay at mushroom plants and onion farms. “Now, instead of saying, we’ll raise your wages, in politics you say, this candidate promises to raise minimum wages, improve OSHA.”
“Farmworker organizing pretty much died out,” agreed Danny Diaz, LUPE’s political director. “This used to be all about farmwork. Everybody’s grandparents or parents were farmworkers here. That’s no longer the case. People don’t work in the fields anymore.”
Turning out residents in TX-15, a recently redistricted strip of land stretching up from the border through rural areas to the outskirts of San Antonio, is a growing challenge. LUPE has won concrete gains for the colonias, earning a fierce Democratic membership, but the question is whether it can mobilize enough locals in a young region with a dismal voter turnout rate.
Lee Harris
An electrician, a school maintenance worker, and a retiree from a Shell oil refinery expressed frustration with President Biden, but said Democrats are more likely to address bread-and-butter issues.
“She’s a Coalition-Builder”
Vallejo has been joined on the campaign trail by Jessica Cisneros, another young progressive who burst into the national spotlight when she came close to beating Henry Cuellar, the neighboring congressman from Laredo, who is one of the most right-wing Democrats in the House. Cisneros said that Vallejo is the kind of shrewd leader who has been able to win her own support as well as Cuellar’s endorsement.
“She’s a coalition-builder,” Cisneros told the Prospect. “It’s great to see her creating progressive infrastructure here in South Texas.”
At a block party on Saturday night in Pharr, Texas, a mixed crowd of older retirees, workers, and children gathered to hear LUPE’s Diaz talk about the importance of electing Democratic candidate for governor Beto O’Rourke and other progressives, to protect Medicare and public investment.
Over tamales at one table, an electrician, a school maintenance worker, and a retiree from a Shell oil refinery agreed that the Democrats on offer this cycle are the best of a disappointing set of options. Juan, the oil refiner, grumbled about the growth of homeless tent cities, despite the promises of “El Biden.” But the three agreed that politicians don’t need to be perfect to be electable.
A warehouse worker for Black+Decker who attended the block party said she had come because she sees Democrats as the alternative to an increasingly hostile Republican Party led by Donald Trump. “He’s a racist. If we don’t vote, nothing will change,” she said.
Others say Vallejo’s messaging has been too determined by influences outside the area.
“She’s extremely intelligent, very articulate. Unfortunately, she has taken a lot of advice from a bunch of idiots from freaking Austin that are gender-pronoun-specific. Like, ‘Hey, my name’s Kelly, she-she.’ We’re old-school down here. That type of stuff doesn’t work,” George Rice, an ex-military owner of a craft brewing company, told the Prospect. “It’s not her, it’s her staff … their ally base is culture warriors from Austin and California.”
Rice still plans to vote for Vallejo, he added, “but I do think she will get tainted by Nancy Pelosi and everything like that.”
Lee Harris
Longtime McAllen resident Jack Edwards is irritated by noisy and rapid development in his neighborhood. A large yard sign on his lawn displays his concerns.
“Community-Centered” Organizing
Vallejo was identified last year by LUPE, whose board voted to back her from a slate of potential candidates. Her family owns Pulga Los Portales, a flea market near McAllen where local vendors serve thousands of people weekly. While Vallejo was studying history and political science at Columbia University, her mother died following a long battle with multiple sclerosis. Vallejo left college to return home and run the market, which she told the Prospect she has treated like a community center, hosting health fairs and back-to-school events.
Vallejo acknowledged the challenges of organizing a changing working-class base. “The issue is that there are some unions who don’t have members in our district. They are supporting us. But really, really, the organizing is being done within our community,” she said. “It’s more community-centered.”
What does that mean, exactly? “Community-centered means the way that we’re reaching out to voters is a way that they recognize—our language and modes of communication,” she said. “We are campaigning with bright colors, that depict influences from papel picado. These are cultural images, cultural colors that mean a lot to us, that add vibrancy and youth.”
But cultural signaling may hit limits in a district facing rapid change. Far-right Republicans have gained traction as the Rio Grande Valley has developed, often appealing to the region’s workforce of border patrol agents and running on slogans like “God, Family, Country.”
Jack Edwards, a conservative voter in McAllen, said he is distressed with both parties’ heavy spending, given the pace of inflation. Some of his biggest worries concern local development: He is frustrated with the new Japanese-Peruvian restaurant up the street that pushed out a longtime neighborhood joint, Los Cazadores.
Edwards is nostalgic for a time when politicians like Eligio “Kika” de la Garza, a Democratic representative of TX-15 beginning in the 1960s, appealed to local concerns. Now, Edwards thinks the race may be decided by candidates’ association with national figures like Sanders and Trump.
Edwards plans to cast his own vote for the Trumpian De La Cruz, and expects many of his neighbors will do the same. And perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that national politicians would court their votes, Edwards reflected. “Donald Trump identified with us.”
Lee Harris
Several community members at a block party in Pharr said they support Democrats because they fear cuts to public investment.
Outside Campaign Cash Won’t “Invade Our Home”
In the final weeks before the election, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee decided to shift resources out of the battleground district, with the House Majority PAC canceling scheduled advertisements for Vallejo at the end of October. Polling by the progressive donor group Way to Win showed her neck and neck last week with De La Cruz.
National Democrats have instead prioritized the re-election bids of incumbent Cuellar and Rep. Vicente González, who currently represents TX-15 but decided to run for re-election after redistricting in the less competitive 34th District. González did not respond to a request for comment.
The national party’s absence has drawn outrage from Texas Democrats, who say it is part of a pattern—when national Democrats triage, more progressive candidates are set aside, no matter what the polling shows. “Maybe she’s not a priority because she’s not as establishment-minded as Vicente and Henry Cuellar,” Diaz said.
Texas Democrats were similarly indignant in 2018 when the DCCC publicly went on the offensive against progressive activist Laura Moser in a primary runoff, which she subsequently lost. National Democrats were also late to support populist Jamie McLeod-Skinner, who holds a narrow lead in this year’s Oregon primary. House Majority PAC has also pulled out of that race.
The lack of cash has meant that Vallejo’s schedule is crammed with private fundraising calls, even as early voting kicks off. She has had to confine most public voter events to weekends, her spokesperson said. Meanwhile, her opponent De La Cruz, who has refused to participate in a public debate with Vallejo, is flush with cash.
In rhetoric, at least, Vallejo spins this smartly to her advantage.
“We’ve seen that there’s millions and millions of dollars against us, trying to infiltrate and get a message out that fighting for people is too radical,” Vallejo told volunteers at a weekend block walk. “It’s up to us to stand up and fight back against any interest that’s trying to come in and invade our home.”
