06/24/2007
Bush's immigration stance has Midland roots
None
Midland Reporter-Telegram

New York Times News Service

MIDLAND -- Late last spring, Republicans in this West Texas oil town called for a boycott of Dona Anita's Mexican restaurant, a retaliatory step against its owner, Luz Reyes, for closing shop and showing up at a rally against proposed new penalties for illegal immigrants.

But President Bush's three best friends here defied the boycott and went to the restaurant, Bush's favorite when he lived here, regardless. One of them, the president's close confidant and former commerce secretary, Donald L. Evans, told Reyes: "Luz, you didn't do anything wrong. We love you."

The hometown divide helps to shed light on a broader rift, as Bush and like-minded Republicans engage in an unusually contentious fight with the rest of their party in the national debate over immigration.

Bush has pursued a goal of providing citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants with rare attacks on his conservative supporters, who have derided his approach as tantamount to amnesty. There are various political motivations for Bush to push for his plan, including the rapid growth in the nation's Hispanic population, a voting group that he has long considered to be potentially Republican.

But the roots of Bush's passion lie here in Midland, now heavily Hispanic, where Bush spent much of his childhood, and to which he returned as a young adult after spending his high school and college years in the more genteel settings of Andover and Yale.

As a boy, and later as a young, hard-drinking oilman, his friends say, Bush developed a particular empathy for the new Mexican immigrants who worked hard on farms, in oil fields and in people's homes, and went on to raise children who built businesses and raised families of their own, without the advantages he had as the scion of a wealthy New England family.

The symbiosis fit with the Bush family's Northeastern, free-trade Republicanism, which took on a Mexican flair, especially after Bush's parents hired a live-in Mexican maid in Texas who became part of the family, and his brother, Jeb, married a young woman from Mexico who initially spoke little English.

But interviews in Midland also tell another story, of how a place that Bush credits with informing his relatively liberal views on immigration has started to move away from him.

Central to the shift is the perception among some in this city of about 100,000 people that he does not understand the sense of siege that has set in about the illegal population that has grown considerably since he traded up from the Texas governor's mansion to the White House seven years ago.

"There's just a real disconnect between the folks of West Texas and the president right now," said Mike Conaway, who was the chief financial officer for Bush's oil exploration company here in the 1980s and now represents the area as a Republican in Congress.

The disconnection has been exacerbated by a steady increase of illegal immigrants since Bush left the state, and newspaper reports about the strains on social services that they have brought. It is visible on a grand scale, with Conaway and this state's two Republican U.S. senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, breaking with Bush on immigration in recent months after having followed his lead with Rolex reliability for most of his term.

And it is visible in smaller, more personal terms here in Midland, with the boycott that some Republicans called against Reyes' restaurant. The dispute put Evans and the rest of Bush's friends -- who used to join Bush and his wife there nearly every Friday night -- on the opposite side of the local Republican Party, including its chairwoman, Sue Brannon.

Evans said his appearance at the restaurant after the boycott had been called was "just dinner, not a political statement" against fellow local Republicans including his close friend Brannon.

But to Reyes, who has known Bush and his wife since their twins were in baby carriers, and who recounted the encounter with Evans in an interview at her restaurant, it was an important show of support from a group she still calls "the Bush clique."

NEW BEGINNINGS

George H.W. Bush came to the Midland-Odessa area in 1948 when his son George W. was 2, hoping to make his own fortune in oil, forming a drilling company, the Zapata Petroleum Corp., named for the movie "Viva Zapata!" about the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and later taking as a partner Jorge Diaz Serrano, a contender for the Mexican presidency before being imprisoned for fraud.

Friends of the current president have recalled how they occasionally saw Mexican workers in his father's oil fields, part of a steady trickle of new immigrants from the other side of the Southern border who also took jobs as ranch hands, maids and grounds keepers.

Randall Roden, one of Bush's close childhood friends, recalled an upbringing that included "being aware that there were people who were poor and hard-working, and just looking for better opportunity, and a chance to do just about anything."

Joe O'Neill, another friend from the time who remains close with Bush to this day, and who helped introduce Bush to the first lady, said of the newcomers, "They were hard-working and they were usually very close families -- there was generally a father and a mother at home; you noticed it."

Bush's closest boyhood contact with anyone of Hispanic descent seems to have been in Houston, where the Bushes moved when George W. Bush was in middle school, two years before he went to boarding school at Andover in Massachusetts. Bush's mother sought household help in the local paper, and answered an advertisement for a Mexican woman who was seeking sponsorship in return for housekeeping services. The woman, Paula Rendon, moved in and has stayed on with the Bush family for decades, following George H.W. and Barbara Bush to the White House and back home.

The current president has mentioned her only rarely, but he has described her as "a second mother." Bush declined several interview requests. But in a brief e-mail exchange, Bush's younger brother, Jeb, said of Rendon, "I adore her," and added, "I got pretty good at Spanish thanks to her." But, he said, he became fluent through his wife Columba, with whom he has three children whom George H.W. Bush once famously, and affectionately, called "the little brown ones."

THE SON RETURNS

Bush returned to Midland in 1975 to find a much more Hispanic town than the one he left behind, because of an influx of Mexicans who went there to cash in on the 1970s oil boom just as Bush did.

"When the president and I came here we saw more and more Hispanics moving into the oil fields, working on well-servicing rigs -- 12-hours-a-day kind of stuff," said Evans, who arrived in Midland around the same time and married one of Bush's grammar school friends. "So we saw a lot of Hispanics coming into that sector of our economy here, and of course, migrating their way into the community, and the schools."

Bush became a man about the very small city,drawn to its Mexican restaurants and the entrepreneurs behind them feeding on the boom times.

"The sky was the limit and who we were mattered less than where we were going," said one of his friends from the time, Jose Cuevas, a third-generation Mexican-American who established a fast-food burrito chain with a few thousand dollars.

Said O'Neill, "He had a great deal of admiration for someone like Jose who started with a lot less and built it up."

Another Hispanic friend from the time, George Veloz, recalled playing basketball at the YMCA with Bush and sometimes "sharing a few cold ones."

Bush's parents had eaten at the small Mexican restaurant Veloz's parents started after immigrating from Mexico, and which Veloz went on to build into a statewide chain. "As important as that family is, he didn't treat me any different than any of the friends he grew up with," Veloz said.

EL DEFENDER

In a telephone interview, Brannon, the local party chairwoman who has known Bush for decades, said Bush did not understand the new realities of illegal immigration. She said the friends he made in the Hispanic community when he lived in Midland were "not here illegally and taking freebies."

"I love George and Laura dearly, and I respect him," she said, "but this immigration thing is going to ruin our country."

In winning election as governor in 1994, and winning re-election in 1998, Bush succeeded in drawing an unexpectedly high level of support from Hispanic voters.

He did so in part by speaking out against efforts by Pete Wilson, then the governor of California, to push initiatives intended to cut off services for illegal immigrants in his state.

Bush spoke out against anti-trade sentiment at the time in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times that had as its headline, "No Cheap Shots at Mexico, Please."

In a state that had for the most part reacted negatively to the amnesty provisions enacted under Ronald Reagan in 1986, Bush as governor found Texas to be largely receptive to his push to provide a bilingual education program for the children of Hispanic immigrants.

In the current climate, that seems like a distant memory, a casualty of what Bush's longtime political adviser, Karl Rove, a Texan, said reflected how "the feelings about immigration have waxed and waned over the years" in Texas. In the 1990s, Rove said, Texans felt as if the immigration problem was relatively under control -- an assessment of that time that even Brannon shared. But now, she said, "there's just more and more coming in."

http://www.mywesttexas.com/site/news.cf ... 5626&rfi=6