Are Texas' Hispanics ready to go Democrat?

Voting bloc has grown, but it isn’t easy to categorize

By JOE HOLLEY
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
April 3, 2010, 10:30PM

Is this the year? The year that the state's soon-to-be-majority minority group begins to exert the power and political influence reflective of its formidable numbers? The year that long-beleaguered Texas Democrats climb aboard the demographic express and ride out of the political wilderness?

The handy metaphor — now cliché — is of the drowsy Goliath that awakens, takes note of its own strength and votes Democratic en masse. The party has been waiting for nearly 20 years. Even though Hispanics make up nearly half the state's population and tend to vote Democratic, Bill White (governor), Linda Chavez-Thompson (lieuÂ*tenant governor), Hector Uribe (land commissioner) and their fellow Democrats with statewide aspirations may still be waiting come November, many experts say.

Despite the numbers, the Hispanic vote may never be the cohesive and reliable bloc the party needs to dye the reddest of red states blue. Instead of a slumbering giant, a more pertinent metaphor may be that of a brilliant Fourth of July firework arcing into the night sky. When the firework reaches its apex, to the Democrats' dismay, it branches into multiple voting patterns. The Hispanic vote may eventually be as difficult to categorize as the Italian vote or the Irish vote.

That growing diversity is reflected around the dinner table when his extended family gets together, says the Rev. T.J. Martinez, a Jesuit priest who heads Cristo Rey Jesuit College Preparatory School of Houston. A Brownsville native, Martinez says that his father, a second-generation Texan, is a yellow-dog Democrat, while his nieces, more socially conservative, “are open to other ways of understanding politics, other ways of seeing the world.â€