Buried deep in Jack Herrera’s fine Texas Monthly piece titled “Why Democrats are losing Texas Latinos” is the story of 28-year-old English teacher Melissa Castro from Laredo, Texas:
The year 2020, in all its foul intensity, unleashed a sort of identity crisis in South Texas. For years, in the day-to-day lives of many Tejanos in places like Laredo and Rio Grande City, labels simply weren’t necessary. Townspeople were, after all, so similar. Kids grew up visiting grandparents in Mexico and listening to rancheras. Almost everyone spoke Spanish or was bilingual. There was no real need for South Texans to find words to describe themselves because their neighbors understood, naturally, who they were.
But the question of race arrived in South Texas like a heat wave during the protests against the murder of George Floyd last year. On a sweltering day in late May, a group of a hundred demonstrators, most of whom were young Mexican Americans, marched on Laredo’s city hall. They carried signs declaring Hispanic-Black solidarity (“Tu Lucha Es Mi Lucha: Your Struggle Is My Struggle”) and “Black Lives Matter.”
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