"The Voting Rights Act also meant that the Americans who could stand for and win elected office would be much more diverse than they had ever been, at least since Reconstruction. And while some states would continue to try to subvert the letter and spirit of the law, they were met by a federal Department of Justice that, by and large, was able to stop efforts to disenfranchise voters through identification requirements, polling location closures, or racially gerrymandered districts.

That is until the Shelby ruling in 2013, which abolished a requirement to "preclear" changes states made to their voting laws with the Department of Justice. Over the next few years, Southern states began adopting laws that flew in the face of what the VRA had protected for the previous fifty years. And Texas was at the front of that pack, it laws limiting opportunities to vote and participate in the multicultural democracy that our state helped to create in 1965.

And now, what might once have been seen as a momentary slip into something less than full democracy has clearly become a slide toward something else altogether: authoritarian government won through intimidation and violence instead of votes.

On January 6, 2021, a violent, organized plot to overturn a lawfully decided election was set in motion by President Donald Trump and a number of white supremacist organizations. Like the People's Party partisans in 1886, many arrived at the Capitol masked, disguised, and armed. And like the Washington County ballot thieves, they attempted through violence and terror to steal the votes of a lawfully, legitimately decided election.

Though the 2021 attack on the Capitol was unsuccessful in the short term and Congress certified the election of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States, the larger and longer effort to roll back the right to vote and undermine free and fair elections in this country has been extraordinarily effective.

In the months following the insurrection, the violence at the Capitol was succeeded by a coordinated attempt to rewrite election laws— making it harder for voters of color, among others, to register or cast a ballot. These efforts have become law in fourteen states, including ones where election margins are often thin, like Georgia, Florida, Iowa, and Texas. It's not unlike the organized legislative effort following the failure of the federal government in 1890 to respond to the Texas Outrage that disenfranchised Black voters and other voters of color throughout the South for more than seven decades." (16-17)

"I've been asked: Given all the other pressing challenges we face, why should we be fighting for the right to vote?

If this were only theoretical or academic, I'd understand the need to prioritize other issues, However, every other issue imaginable— from our ability to see a doctor, to the quality of our kids' schools, to the kind of job we can get, to the expectation to be treated and judged fairly within our criminal justice system— is dependent on the right to vote. If your voice is not heard, if your vote is not counted, if your community is not represented, then you will, at a minimum, be less likely to realize the opportunities that this country makes possible; at worst, you will be targeted for and unprotected from some of its most violent abuses.

If we accept that democracy is foundational to our mutual and individual success, then it's on all of us to save it, restore it, and expand it until every eligible citizen is fully included. We all benefit from democracy when everyone is able to participate in our democracy. Everyone's in or it doesn't work." (18)

“As I have become more involved in voting rights work over the years, I continue to turn to [Dr. Lawrence Aaron Nixon] for inspiration, convinced that he is the example we need at this moment.

Nixon did what he knew had to be done, regardless of the cost and consequence to him and regardless of the fact that when he began his fight, he had no idea how it would end. Now that we find ourselves facing the greatest threat to democracy since the crucial battles of the civil rights era, and nowhere more so than in Texas, we must look to the heroes of our past to guide us more toward the victories that out country needs.

That’s why so many Texans have been fighting for voting rights since the Shelby decision— signing up with organizations like powered by people, MOVE, Black Voters Matter, and the Texas Freedom Network. Because like those who came before us, we refuse to sit back and allow those in power to destroy our democracy.

It isn’t easy to get involved. Why spend the time on something that’s so hard to do when there are so many other pressing priorities? Why get you hopes up when, judging from our recent history and current odds, they’re likely to get crushed in the end?” (43-44)

“Sometimes the only way to avoid succumbing to the odds is to keep moving right through them. That’s what these volunteers all over Texas understand. They’ve given us cause for hope in an otherwise hopeless situation.

Action, it turns out, is the antidote to repair.

We are fighting the clampdown on democracy since 1965. And there is no guarantee that we will be able to overcome it. But for those of good conscience who understand that this moment will determine whether we have a democracy at all going forward, there is no other choice. We’ve got to try.” (46)

“The citizens of Gainesville had been able to pull off a victory denied to every person who’d tried before them for the last 110 years. It was a feat of civic leadership, a rescuing foundation, a resounding confirmation of the power of our democracy. People peacefully, nonviolently organized to put an end to the public praise of those who’d violently attacked our democracy in the past. They help us to understand that we can never condone, encourage, or celebrate sedition, whether it occurred in 1861 or 2021.” (65)

“In fact, as of 2019, more than 30 of Texas’s 254, predominantly rural counties do not have even a single doctor. More than twenty other counties have only one. Seventy-one counties do not have a hospital. And many, like Pecos, are having to cut services like obstetrics to be able to stretch limited resources further and deliver basic services to people.” (74)

“Those in the coverage gap don’t regularly see a doctor, don’t get medication, and don’t receive any kind of preventative health care. When they do see a provider, it’s often in the emergency room, where outcomes are going to be worse and much more expensive than they would have been with care delivered preventatively. And because these patients are uninsured, it is society as a whole that will end up footing the bill— premiums go up, local hospital district tax rates go up. Whatever additional expense is involved in increasing coverage, it pales in comparison to the costs of treating the uninsured.

And it turns out the cost to expand coverage in Texas is close to nothing. After the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, the federal government offered Texas the opportunity to expand Medicaid for an initial cost of zero dollars. Literally, the feds would pick up 100 percent of the bill, moving down to 90 percent of the time. Texas rejected the deal.

In the more than ten years since, Texas has left more than one hundred billion dollars on the table. That’s money that would have kept people from dying premature deaths. One hundred billion dollars that would have kept more rural hospitals open, attracted more providers to underserved communities, and reduced the property tax bills that underwrite the uncompensated in Texas. There’s a lot of good we’ve forgone.

But that doesn’t have to be the future of our fate.” (77)

“As soon as enough voters feel that the can no longer sit by while people die unnecessary deaths or have to choose between feeding themselves and filing their prescriptions, we will elect leaders whose political will matches that of the people they represent. It’s also up to make sure that our democracy is what it claims to be: government of, by, and for the people. All of the people. There are a lot of potential voters out there, millions of them in Texas, who have a hard time registering to vote or getting out to the polls on election day and don’t vote. Very often they are the ones without insurance, struggling to make ends meet, for whom politics might seem like a luxury they can’t afford. If you’re making less than a living wage (in a state where the minimum is still $7.25 an hour!), you might be working two or even three jobs to make ends meet. If, on top that, you’re taking care of a sick kid or parent who doesn’t have health care, when are you going to find the time to go down to the courthouse and register to vote? And if you look up to see how badly gerrymandered you district is— meaning you chance of affecting the outcome of a state legislative race in November is truly marginal— you might just say to hell with it anyway. It’s these potential voters who bear the brunt if the most stringent registration and voting laws in America (where you can’t register online and where wait times to vote sometimes stretch for hours) and some of the most cynically drawn districts in the country. Their absence from the electorate has a lot to do with how we end up with these kinds of policy outcomes.” (78-79)

“Without and ‘R’ or a ‘D’ next to your name, there’s one less divide to bridge as you build coalitions to get things done. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t define yourself by you differences from others.” (84)

“In order for this country’s democracy to really start working for us, it needs to learn from local governments, where elected officials are far more closely connected and responsive to the people they purport to represent. And whether or not this happens— whether we let a broken system break our spirit or we find a way to rise above it— comes down to us.

That means getting involved— taking stands at the local level, yes, but also demanding better of our state and federal governments. It means an end to partisan gerrymandering and adopting independent citizen-led redistricting commissions so our federal and state representatives aren’t choosing their own voters. It means removing the barriers to full democratic participation, like adopting comprehensive voting rights reforms.

And we can also learn from an important change that El Paso citizens made to our city charter the year before I was elected to the council: term limits. Knowing that I would have no more than eight years to serve my community before I termed out forced me to think through exactly what I hoped to accomplish and introduced a greater urgency to my work than if I’d had the prospect of unlimited terms in front of me. Term limits are also an acknowledgment that in this great country no single one of us is indispensable or irreplaceable. It’s a pledge of faith in our fellow citizens and in the diversity of our communities to commit to serving for a set period of time and then getting out of the way so that someone else can bring their unique experience, expertise, and perspective to bear on the pressing issues before us. It has also added the benefit of producing a government that looks a lot more like the people it’s supposed to represent. When you have the same guy serving the same community in the same office for twenty, thirty, or even forty years, you’re losing out on so much of the change and opportunity that has taken place there in that time.

To do all of this we must channel the resilience of Lawrence Nixon, who paid his poll tax year after year, even when he wasn’t welcomed in America’s democracy, because he wanted the world to know he wouldn’t stop fighting until he was. That’s the approach we need to have— voting in every single election, volunteering to bring more voters onto the rolls and into our elections, even as we acknowledge all the ways the system is designed to prop up the status quo, because we recognize that only through our participation can we overcome that and elect the people who reflect our values, who are ready and willing to make the changes necessary to ensure that our democracy more closely resembles the ideal of full citizen participation.” (84-86)

“In 1928, after his freshman year at Southwest Texas State Teachers College, [Lyndon Baines Johnson] was hired to teach fifth, sixth, and seventh grades at the Wellhausen School in Cotulla— an institution reserved primarily for the Mexican American community. He was soon promoted to be the school's principal (some say because he was the only male teacher on staff) and proceeded to throw himself into both the academic education of the children and what we might today call their social and emotional learning.

 Often against great resistance, Johnson pushed the other teachers at Wellhausen to do more for, and to expect more from, the children in their care. He organized athletic teams, bought the children volleyballs and softball bats out of his own pocket, and applied his nearly unstoppable determination to helping them improve.

Almost forty years later, as president of the United States, Johnson spoke to a joint session of Congress about his time in Cotulla, ‘My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry,’ he said. ‘They knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished wishing there was more that I could do, But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew. hoping that it might help them against the hard ships that lay ahead.’

Johnson went on to connect his experience in Cotulla with his work on voting rights.

Johnson knew there was nothing inherently lacking in the kids he had taught. They just hadn't had access to the same resources, the same set of expectations, the same investment that gave other kids a leg up.

He also understood that the surest path out of poverty and into opportunity— including the full realization of civil rights was voting. Common sense and political experience tell us that elected officials are mostly focused on the people who can either help or hurt their chance of getting reelected. They're typically less concerned about ST someone who disenfranchised— either legally or functionally— and therefore unable to vote and affect the outcome of the next election.

As a result, if a neighborhood or community doesn't vote, it's less likely to get the same attention or resources as one that does. And the consequences can be far-reaching. Voter participation rates help determine everything from which schools get the latest technology and facilities to where the city dump is located.” (88-89)

“As usual, most challenges can be traced back to voting rights and the strength of our democracy. When you combine decades of disenchantment with redlining, differences in educational opportunity, and an uneven application of the law, you begin to understand the forces driving inequality in Texas.” (96)

“When I visited Cotulla a few years back, I thought about Lyndon Johnson and the connection he drew between his experience as and educator and his fight for democracy.

At the time, America and Texas were as divided as I could remember them being. And becoming more polarized by the day. Public school classrooms, I though, might be the last bastion of democracy and comity in our country.

I most smaller tons like Cotulla, all the schools are pubic. There isn’t the wealth or population to support private education. So whatever your zip code or income, your kids are in the same classroom as everyone else’s kids— regardless of political affiliation, religious denomination, or any other difference. Everyone learns together.

And everyone’s invested. Literally.

Texas public schools are financed primarily by local property taxes, so everyone in Cotulla pays to educate every child— even after their own kids have grown up and moved away.

School boards in towns like Cotulla are also elected by the public and kept accountable at public board meetings, leading to greater participation, which leads to better outcomes for the kids. … We also believe that when public schools are starved of resources, when the suffer from low expectations and a general disrespect for the educators who’ve dedicated their lives to this form of public service, we don’t just let our kids down— we imperil the civic life of our community and, by extension, our country.

At a time when some are questioning the value of public education, and educators everywhere feel under attack, we must vigorously make the case for public schools. Like Johnson did in 1928, we need to invest in our classrooms. At a time when the average Texas teacher makes seventy-five hundred per year less than the national average, we need to fully support our educators. And at a time when Texas invests four thousand dollars per year less than the national average in each student, we need to make sure our young people are getting the support they need to learn and grow.

We have to listen to the people who are taking on the toughest jobs in some of the most underserved communities— just like President Johnson did. These educators know better than anyone how we can assess progress, determine need, and help spark a lifelong love of learning that will allow all our children to reach their full potential in the classroom.

To help bring a deeply divided and unequal society together, we must make sure public schools are a persuasive choice for families who have other options. And we need to improve the quality if public schools for families who have no other choice. Because better public schools make for a stronger, better democracy.” (100-102)

“The citizenship of America today looks forward to the time in the near future when every boy and girl born in this country will have the right and opportunity to get all the education that they can take.

And when they have that right, when they have that opportunity, from ‘Head Start’ to a college Ph.D. degree, a great many of them will exercise it— they will profit from it— we will have a better and stronger, and what is very important, a more prosperous and happier America.” — Lyndon Baines Johnson (104)

"... the story of Cotulla, is the the story of American democracy. A future president was able to see himself in the lives of those he taught, and he carried their stories and their struggle with him all the way to the White House. Lyndon Johnson based his fight for voting rights and democracy on the pursuit of justice— seeking to bridge the gap between the way things are and the way they're supposed to be. And he took to heart the examples of those whose own fights inspired him— from John Lewis crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the kids of Welhausen in Cotulla trying to cross into a life of dignity and respect." (105-106)

"... democracy rests on the right to vote. And that right makes everything else possible..." (106)

"But if convict leasing's abolition is a story of what happens when institutions of democracy, including a free press, start to work, then the reason that convict leasing existed in the first place is a story of what happens when democracy dies." (114)

"As was the case a hundred years ago, those behind bars tend to be people of color, primarily Black and Latino. And though they are not worked to death, their opportunities and options in life after release are severely constrained. (The requirement to check a box on every employment application form indicating a prior felony and the likelihood of being disqualified from a student loan are but two examples.) The incarceration rate for whites in Texas is 768 per 100,000; for Blacks it is 2,855 per 100,000.

Overall, the state of Texas locks up a higher percentage of its residents than almost any other democracy on Earth.

This has produced a direct threat to democracy itself. With nearly half a million Texans on probation or parole and another quarter million behind bars at any given time, Texas is locking up over seven hundred thousand potential voters, all of whom are ineligible to cast a ballot until they are off paper, meaning that they have satisfied all of the conditions of their probation, as well as other requirements from the court.

Furthermore, there are thousands more Texans who are currently out of prison and off paper, who may nevertheless be unaware that that they have the right to register to vote.  And then there are those who know that they are eligible to vote, but who have no interest in interacting with government or law enforcement again. When you add them all up , that is simply far too many disenfranchised Texans, whose voices are not heard by our elected officials. And the consequences of these policies can be dire." (119)

"I was born and raised in El Paso, another border city, up the river from Porvenir.

El Paso and its sister city of Ciudad Juárez are unlike any other place in the world. Nearly three million people share this Chihuahuan Desert valley carved into the southern Rocky Mountains by the Rio Grande.

You'll have a hard time finding another two cities in two countries conjoined in this way: our street grids interconnected, our families interrelated, our economies interdependent. While we may be isolated from the centers of power and influence in our respective countries, we have each other. Two languages, two cultures, two nationalities. One people.

It's also breathtakingly beautiful, physically and culturally. Rising more than four thousand feet from the desert floor, the twin cities are nestled between the river and the surrounding mountains, which, while studded with cactus, mesquite, and desert shrubs, are unadorned by the carpet of grasses or canopy of trees that dominate other parts of the Rockies.

The Franklin Mountains run down the middle of El Paso, with the river, the freeway, and the city's neighborhoods wrapping around them. There's a road that skirts the high edge of the southern end of the Franklins from which you can look out over the valley. From that perspective, El Paso and Juárez are indistinguishable.

There is a mural in South El Paso by the artists known as Los Dos that depicts the two cities as conjoined twin sisters whose powerful gazes greet greet travelers as they come north across one of the international bridges that join El Paso and Juárez. There's always been a strong connection between these cities— geographic, familial, and cultural.

Our identity is fused in other ways as well. While English and Spanish are spoken on both sides of the border, there are phrases, words, and inflections that combine the two tongues in ways that you don't hear outside of the borderlands. You'll notice it as people mingle under the stars before the mariachis begin playing when you take your family out to the Chamizal, an international park and amphitheater that commemorates the successful negotiation of a land dispute between the two countries in the 1960s.

Many of the kids I went to school with at Mesita Elementary led their lives on both sides of the border. Their parents might have a home in El Paso, but they'd spend the weekends with their grandparents in Juárez. When they'd cross back over on Monday morning, they'd join thousands of other cross-border travelers on our international bridges: U.S.-based plant managers crossing south to run the maquilas of multinational corporations on the Mexican side; Mexican-based college students crossing north to attend the University of Texas at El Paso, which offers in-state tuition for residents of Juárez; and a multitude of other fronterizos— shoppers, day laborers, tourists, and people just crossing to visit family, go to a movie, or have a drink at a bar on the other side.

But what was normal for me and the people of this community was seen as dangerous to so much of the rest of the country. That disconnect between the beauty and opportunity I know from growing up on the border and the fear and panic that it can present in the popular imagination creates an opening into which comes the evil of the Porvenir massacre from a hundred years ago— or a more recent slaughter of border residents much closer to home.

The border is so physically isolated from the centers of power and popular culture in the United States and Mexico that it ends up being defined by those who've never been there, whose imaginations run wild with danger.

It's not just movies and popular culture. It reverberates in political speech, in the halls of Congress, the sensational news coverage and punditry, and in the legislation and policies that flow from the opinion makers and law makers who feed off one another's fear and who see profit and political opportunity in casting the border as a lawless wasteland. But this isn't new. It's a story that goes back to 1848, when the border was created, and continues through to this moment.

Never mind that U.S. border communities are far safer than the rest of the country. Or that millions of American jobs depend on the binational manufacturing, trade, and logistics hubs of Juárez/El Paso, Nuevo Laredo/Laredo, and Tijuana/San Diego.

Now this is not to say that there aren't real challenges at the border. There are. And we must guard against and do our best to stop the very real threats of human smuggling and illegal drug trafficking. But the answer to these challenges isn't to demonize the border and all who cross over it." (125-127)

“Until we change our immigration laws to reflect current demands and challenges— like increasing the per-country immigration caps, speeding up the adjudication of visa requests and asylum claims, and implementing a viable guest worker program— we will continue to create incentives for people to break the law and place federal law enforcement and border communities in an untenable position.

And unless we are serious about addressing the factors that cause people to leave their home countries in the first place— including confronting our contribution to climate change, the illegal drug trade, and political and economic instability throughout the Western Hemisphere— we will continue to see people show up at our border in increasing numbers for the foreseeable future. No surge in Border Patrol staffing, no amount of wall construction, no level of clamp-down on border communities will stop that.

Absent real fundamental change, we will only ever see more of the same: desperate people taking desperate measures to flee desperation on their home countries; overstretched social service agencies and immigration courts; reactionary rhetoric that inflames more than illuminates; a metastasized response that prioritizes interdiction and incarceration over long-term solutions.

Why is all of this in a book about democracy?

Because when we fail to seriously address a problem as big as this one; when we choose stopgaps to help us in the short term at the expense of the real work and decision-making necessary to solve the underlying challenge over the long term; when we’re not honest with ourselves and fellow Americans about what is happening and why it is happening, we open the door to the charlatans and demagogues who stoke anxiety and fear about immigrants to further their own political ambitions.

You get ideas like the Muslim travel ban. Family separation. Kids in cages.

It becomes easier and more popular to scapegoat immigrants for problems with crime, or jobs, or social services.

Or even elections.” (131-132)

“This accelerating attack on the right to vote is alarming but it is not out of rhyme with what has come before.

For much of American history, those in power have used fear— of fraud, of scarcity, of ‘the other’— to justify voting restrictions against Americans they could easily demonize and scapegoat. One hundred and fifty years ago, it was the Irish, two million of them, fleeing famine and widespread death, who showed up at our maritime borders seeking refuge and legal status in America. Their cultural and religious differences and extreme poverty provoked anxiety that they would use elections and the right to vote to overwhelm the status quo.” (134)

“In the years after Lawrence Nixon came to El Paso in 1910— the years of the Mexican Revolution— politicians and the press in the border community by stoking fears of Mexicans. El Pasoans were told that their neighbors to the south would bring illegal voting, crime, disease, and drugs.

Political paranoia led to paranoid policies. In 1915, El Paso became the first city in the country to outlaw marijuana, following sensational news of Mexicans who developed a ‘lust for human blood’ and killed innocent Americans while high on cannabis.

But it was bigger than the changes made to the criminal justice system. A wave of political terror against Mexicans and Mexican Americans was unleashed throughout the borderlands.” (134-135)

“The whites-only voting law, passed and signed in 1923, was motivated by the same paranoid hated that targeted immigrants and Latinos throughout the borderlands and the same white supremacy that violently pushed African Americans from political participation— all coming from the same civic and political leaders who comprised the growing Klan membership throughout Texas. But Lawrence Nixon stood tall against it.

He knew his fellow El Pasoans supported the Klan in significant numbers. He was unaware of the reign of clan terror across Texas and he was also aware that they were known to target Black doctors for humiliation and brutality. (A Houston Klansman castrated one black dentist and tarred and feathered another.) And yet, even with this knowledge, knowing he could be killed for speaking out, Nixon exercised extraordinary courage in stepping forward to challenge the whites-only law.

Lawrence Nixon’s bravery, patience, and tenacity would ultimately win the day when it came to ending the white primary. Texans of future generations would need to call on those qualities again and again to preserve those gains in the years to come.” (143)

“In November 2020, lieutenant governor Dan Patrick put one million dollars toward funding bounties for anyone able to produce proof of illegal voting— another historical echo of 1922. There was just one problem: actual voter fraud in Texas is nearly nonexistent. In the five year period leading up to his offer, only fifty-five Texans had been prosecuted for voter fraud , out of seventeen million registered voters. That’s a fraud rate of 0.00032353 percent. In fact, when Patrick finally paid out, it was to a man in Pennsylvania who nabbed a registered Republican who’d voted twice in the 2020 election.

But finding voter fraud wasn’t the point of Lieutenant Governor Patrick’s bounty. It was about spreading suspicion and fear— and creating the conditions that would allow for the introduction of increasingly proscriptive and suppressive voting laws.

There may be nothing new in the effort to scapegoat immigrants for political advantage and profit. But what is different about what’s taking place in Texas now is this: the existential threat it poses to our democracy. If politicians can make us anxious and angry about immigrants— and scare us into believing that they are taking American jobs, committing crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans, and changing the character of our country— and then connect that to voting and elections, they can use that fabricated fear to rig the rules and stay in power.

This fear of democracy— of allowing the extraordinary , diverse population of Texas to be reflected in the political power of this state— is clearly not only a part of our history. It’s a part of who we are today.

The question is: will it be part of our future?

On August 3, 2019— just over one hundred years after the massacre at Porvenir— a man drove six hundred miles across Texas to the Walmart in Central El Paso, with an AK-47-style semiautomatic rifle. He would later tell police that he came ‘to kill Mexicans.’

The El Paso Fusion girls’ soccer team was selling drinks and chicharrones at a table outside the Walmart to raise travel money for a tournament in Arizona. The shooter shot many of their parents and grandparents and then followed the young girls when they fled inside. In a matter of minutes, twenty people inside and outside of the store were dead and more than a dozen were seriously wounded. Two more people would die of their wounds in the coming days, and a third would die within the year.” (145-146)

“Fear of Mexicans and immigrants, stoked by politicians and the popular press and centering on a threatened ‘invasion,’ created the conditions for an extremely violent and twisted vigilante justice,

The El Paso shooter claimed in his manifesto that his planned massacre would be ‘an incentive that myself and many other patriotic Americans will provide’ for ‘the Hispanic population… to return to their home countries.’

That’s literally what happened in Porvenir, Texas, in 1918. After the massacre there, the great majority of residents, by one count 140, left the small town for refuge in Mexico, removing the perceived threat and real power of those border residents.

The Walmart shooter wrote that he had given up on ‘peaceful means’ of confronting this challenge, presumably through elections and our democracy. He feared that, as the Hispanic share of the population of Texas grew and as more immigrants received citizenship, Anglo Texans like him would no longer have political power and would be victims of a ‘political coup’ of newly legalized Hispanic voters.

Unfortunately, despite the horrors of the El Paso shooting, Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick appeared on Fox News  to renew the warning of an invasion of immigrants and, in a chilling echo of the El Paso shooter, claimed that a ‘revolution’ led by Democrats and undocumented immigrants was going to politically take over the country.” (149)

“Social scientists use the term ‘stochastic terrorism’ to describe the public vilification of a group or community resulting in the incitement of a violent act. The stochastic terrorist does not say, ‘Kill this specific person in this place at this specific time’; instead he says, ‘We are being invaded and we must take matters into our own hands.’” (150)

“There are those in this country who try to make us afraid of each other based on our differences. They do this to maintain and increase their power, to distract us from the real challenges and opportunities in front of us, to focus legitimate anger not at its cause, but at those who are most defenseless against it. We see this in their hateful rhetoric, acts of terror, and attacks on rights— including the right to vote— directed at the marginalized and the vulnerable.

And then there are those who understand that the genius of America is that we are a people from all over the planet, who each contribute our unique cultures, experiences, and stories to the larger culture, experience, and story of America; that, at our best, we are able to peacefully and democratically resolve the natural conflicts and competitions that arise in a country this large and diverse; and even better, that we are at times able to come together to pursue a destiny not possible anywhere else precisely because we all bring all of these differences to bear on the challenges before us.” (151-152)

“For me, El Paso can be summed up in Nixon saying ‘I’ve got to try’ when others wanted to deny him the right to cast his ballot in 1924.

This city has always made its own luck. So physically and politically isolated from the rest of the country, El Paso has always had to look within itself and to its sister city of Juárez to find its strength and opportunity.” (158)

“The friendship between Bert Williams and Nolan Richardson, a white man and a Black man from the same Mexican immigrant neighborhood of Segundo Barrio, had produced a groundbreaking transformation in American civil rights.

El Paso would now officially become the first city in the former Confederacy to desegregate places of public accommodation, two years before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.” (165)

“When we fight— when, no matter what they tell us we can or can’t do, we try anyhow— we make the impossible possible. That’s Lawrence Nixon, Nemo Herrera, and the Bowie Bears. That’s Thelma White, Raymond Telles, Bert Williams, and Nolan Richardson. That’s the ’66 Miners. That’s El Paso, And that’s America.” (167)

“At the State of the Union address in February 2019, Donald Trump described El Paso as a violent city with one of the highest rates of crime in the country.

He looked into the camera and told the sixteen million Americans watching that El Paso was one of ‘the nation’s most dangerous cities.’ He said only extreme measures, like building a wall, would make it safe.

But here’s the truth: El Paso was ranked among the safest cities in America in 2019, and for many years before that— long before ant wall with Mexico was built. In fact, violent crime increased during the wall’s construction and after it was completed.

Six months after Trump’s incendiary speech— and after years of his baseless lies about violent immigrants in places like El Paso— a gunman killed twenty-three innocent people because he believed the fictions being spun by those in power.

In a peaceful city that usually saw no more than twenty people killed in a year, twenty-three El Pasoans were murdered in a matter of minutes. The lie that we were dangerous, deadly, and violent, unchallenged by the truth that we were none of those things, ended up producing the very death and violence Trump had made up.

That’s why we have to know our history. That’s why we have to tell our stories— to ourselves and to those we’ve never met. And it’s why we must connect what’s happening today with what has happened before. Because that’s the only way to learn from our past, to use those lessons to get through the challenges we face in the present, and to build on that progress so that we live up to our true potential in the years to come.” (169-170)

"I'm sure there were days when [Dr. Nixon] wondered if he would live to see the progress for which he was fighting, but regardless of what stood in his way, he never wavered from the sentiment he expressed election after election at the fire station upon being told they could not let him vote: 'I've got to try.'

Do we share that faith in democracy? The belief that, despite the obstacles in our way, we have to try?" (171)

"When the Supreme Court handed down the Shelby decision, it threw out the preclearance provision. Now, Texas legislators can basically do whatever they want, not only through redistricting, but also through old-school voter suppression.

In the years since Shelby was decided, more than seven hundred polling places in Texas have closed, double the number of the next closest state— despite that Texas has added more people than any other state. Most of these closures have been concentrated in the fastest-growing Black and Latino neighborhoods.

So, when we see voters lined up six hours deep on Election Day outside Texas Southern University, a historically Black institution, we should see this not simply as a demonstration of persistence but also as a deeply shameful indication of how broken Texas's voting system is.

For every person who could wait six hours in line to vote, how many physically could not manage the same feat?

How many could not get six hours' leave from work to wait?

How many simply refuse to out up with the indignity of waiting for half a day in order to cast their ballot?

The answer to why more Texans don't vote is not complacency, nor is it apathy.

And it is not by accident that Texas has one of the lowest levels of voter turnout in the country.

It is by design.

In fact, according to voting rights scholar Ari Berman, Texas is the toughest state in which to vote. Voter ID, racial gerrymandering, and the mass closure of polling places have a lot to do with it, but there are a number of smaller nefarious obstacles that give the Lone Star State such an ignominious distinction.

For example, unlike almost every other state in the country, Texas does not allow you to register to vote online. There is essentially nothing you can't do online in Texas, or anywhere in America today, except register to vote. And in the middle of a pandemic that has killed more than eighty-seven thousand Texans, the governor chose to limit ballot drop-off boxes to one per county, including in giant urban counties like Harris, which as 4.7 million people.

But there's one provision of the elections code, added in 2021, that is just a half step from some of Texas's grimmest history. It allows partisan poll watchers, 'concerned citizens,' to monitor and intimidate voters, with nearly unchecked power, at polling places throughout the state.

The goal is to make it harder to vote, to intimidate certain voters from voting so that those in power can stay in power. This is the kind o thing that Texas officeholders will even brag about. On January 6, 2021, hours before Donald Trump incited an insurrection during a speech on the National Mall, Texas's attorney general— a man named Ken Paxton— was on the same 'Stop the Steal' rally stage, boasting about how he'd made it harder for Texans to vote in the 2020 election." (174-175)

"In 2019, Maryland congressman John Sarbanes introduced the For the People Act, which includes provisions for automatic voter registration, making Election Day a national holiday, and replacing gerrymandered districts with those drawn by nonpartisan redistricting commissions.

Texas wasn't the original impetus for the For the People Act. But by 2021, after its voter suppression bill was signed into law, Texas became its case in point.

And yet, as happened with the Federal Elections Bill of 1890, there has once again been a lack of political will to pass the necessary protections to save our democracy. Even thought the pro-democracy party (this time, it's the Democrats) has a majority in both chambers of Congress, and even though that same party controls the White House with a president who campaigned to improve voting rights, it has been unable to pass the For the People Act or other voting rights bills, like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act." (178-179)

"After the 1890 Federal Elections Bill dies on the horns of a Texas-led filibuster, it would be seventy-five  years before another major voting rights bill finally succeeded. And in the interim, our democracy collapsed.

Will that be our fate once again? Will we refuse to act and continue this descent into something that no longer resembles a democracy? Or will we seize the opportunity before us now to once again secure voting rights?

Are we 1890 or 1965?

The question is ours to answer. But I am confident that Texas— as it did in the aftermath of the 'Outrage' of 1886, as it did in the courage shown by Lawrence Nixon in 1924, and as it did by shaping and inspiring Lyndon Johnson's leadership on the Voting Rights Act on 1965— will play a critical role in deciding what comes next. (179-180)

"At a time when we may wonder whether our democracy can make it— after the insurrection attempt on January 6, 2021, the hundreds of voter suppression bills introduced across dozens of state legislatures since then, and the rise of political terrorism like the 2019 murders in El Paso— we can be tempted to despair.

But then I think about what Opal Lee faced in 1939, when the mob burned her home down, wondering whether things could ever be made right. And I think about how Lawrence Nixon was denied the right to vote year after year during the 'white primary' era. Nixon and Lee didn't just wonder, or fret, or complain. They found that the antidote to despair is action. And action, even in the face of seemingly impossible odds, can bring victory.

The challenge we must accept is not only to go out and vote, but to make sure very eligible American can do the same. If our history has taught us anything, it is that democracy is never guaranteed. The fight is never fully won. And while progress is always possible, backsliding, suppression, and even violence are inevitable unless we consciously commit ourselves to the work before us. We are always becoming a democracy; it never ends. It can be exhausting, daunting, even brutal work. But compared to the alternative? We don't have a choice.

Lawrence Nixon understood this. It's also what the Mexican American kids from Bowie High School in El Paso fought and died for when they became the men of Company E in World War II. It was realized by the election of Raymond Telles; in the desegregation of Texas higher education thanks to Thelma White and Thurgood Marshall; and in Lyndon Johnson's successful push  for national voting rights. Opal Lee has lived it from that June night in 1939 right to today.

We must embrace the challenges before us. Because our democracy, which makes everything that is essential to this country possible, is on the line. And while the outcome of the fight before us might be uncertain, we know one thing for sure. We've got to try." (184-185)