When representative Greg Casar won his election last year, he became the first Latino to represent the Texas capitol city of Austin in Congress. A panel of federal judges had drawn his district’s lines after a prolonged legal battle over racial gerrymandering.
But under the map Texas Republicans unveiled last week, Casar would instead live in the modified version of his neighboring district to the west, which would swallow east Austin – a gentrifying but historically working-class area home to Mexican American and Black residents once forced by segregation laws to live on the east side of town.
“Even a conservative supreme court said central Texas Latinos deserve a district, and that’s why my district exists,” Casar said. “If Donald Trump is able to suppress Latino voters here in Austin, he’ll try to spread that plan across America.”
When the avenues for peaceful and lawful change are systematically obstructed, history shows that violent unrest and extra-legal responses become not only more likely, but inevitable.