Count Me Out
TWO DAYS AFTER Tropical Storm Imelda battered her district in Houston, state Sen. Carol Alvarado drove from its heavily Latino east side, past taquerias and signs for immigration attorneys, to another predominantly Latino neighborhood just north of the downtown skyline.
Senate District 6 is shaped like a dragon whose head starts in the city’s industrial outskirts while its body snakes and stretches into its center. She arrived at a red, Southwestern-style building that houses a community center named after Leonel Castillo, who led a boycott of the city’s segregated schools in 1970 and became the first Latino elected to citywide office. As she went to the podium to address more than 100 of her constituents, Alvarado praised Castillo as “a trailblazer who paved the way for so many of us, like myself, to be able to run for office.”
The daughter of a cement worker with a third grade education, Alvarado grew up in Manchester, a Latino neighborhood squeezed between the train tracks, the freeway, and the port of Houston. Rail cars frequently blocked the main road leading into the area. Her school playground overlooked massive chemical tanks and oil refineries that billowed gray smoke. Residents of the neighborhood breathe some of the dirtiest air in Texas and suffer from some of its highest cancer rates. Her 92-year-old mother still lives there, next to the Catholic church that Alvarado attends on Sundays. She got involved in politics “because of where I lived,” the 52-year-old Democrat told me over beef enchiladas at the community center. “I saw what was going on around me. It pissed me off.”
She joined the City Council, then the state House of Representatives, where she served five terms, and was elected to the state Senate in a special election in December 2018. Despite being outnumbered by Republicans in Austin, she’s proved to be a skilled legislator, helping pass 32 bills in the 2019 legislative session, and securing more funding for schools, flood protection, and mammograms. “You’re getting a very good return on investment from me,” she said jokingly at the meeting.
Even in the best of times, serving this district is a big job. Alvarado represents over 850,000 people—about 100,000 more than a typical member of Congress. After highlighting her legislative successes, Alvarado talked about the bills that would have been vital for her district if her Republican colleagues had not blocked them: One in five residents of Harris County are uninsured, but the legislature refused to expand Medicaid; Texas has some of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country, but it won’t adopt online voter registration; despite the recent mass shootings in El Paso and Santa Fe, Alvarado couldn’t pass a single one of her gun control bills.
These hot-button issues were a mere prelude to the fight to come. “The next session, as we move forward, the redistricting process will dominate,” she said, referring to the once-in-a-decade exercise of redrawing the state’s legislative boundaries that will follow the 2020 census. “The census gives us the
