Write a new simple attractive title based on the title from Is Bobby Pulido’s tune catchy enough to win the Valley? and dont use quote marks

EDINBURG – On a Saturday morning before the sun is up, I back out of our Austin driveway to begin a 300-mile trip southward to this rapidly growing Rio Grande Valley city of more than a hundred thousand residents. In the evening I intend to crash a quinceañera, the traditional Latin American celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday, even though I don’t know the young woman or her extended family or their friends. 

My mission is to take the measure of Bobby Pulido, a novice congressional candidate who, serendipitously, has made quinceañeras, hundreds of them, the centerpiece of his campaign. In the process, he has attracted the attention of New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, New York Post, Economist, Texas Monthly and, of course, the Houston Chronicle. Who is Bobby Pulido, I wanted to know, in addition to being an internationally known Tejano singer and two-time Latin Grammy Award-winner.

An Edinburg native who turned a youthful-looking 53 a few days ago, Pulido is running to represent the 15th Congressional District as a Democrat, having routed a primary opponent in March. Although he majored in political science at St. Mary’s University decades ago, Pulido has never run for public office.  

The effort by a well-known, well-liked entertainer to unseat the two-term Republican incumbent, Monica De La Cruz, in the GOP-gerrymandered district makes for one of the the most intriguing races in Texas since – well, since 2018, when fresh-faced and engaging Beto O’Rourke captured the public eye trying to unseat the state’s junior senator, the dour Ted Cruz. 

Like O’Rourke, Pulido also has an opportunity to shift the course of Texas politics. If he manages to win in a district tailor-made for the Republican candidate, a district nearly 80 percent Hispanic, he’ll be the poster boy for a Democratic resurgence in the Valley. His victory would signal that the surprising swing of Hispanic voters in the Valley toward Trump in 2024 was an aberration. 

With the sun shining and the leaves of ubiquitous Brush Country mesquite a shimmering green on this spring morning, I’m getting into the 15th Congressional District, its narrow, distorted shape stretching some 250 miles northward from populous Hidalgo County on the border into farms and ranches surrounding small towns like Gonzales and Three Rivers. I’m thinking about how South Texas politics has had an outsized influence on several occasions through the years, the most notable in 1948. 

I swing through down-at-the-heels downtown Alice, detour around a street fair setting up and park in front of the Jim Wells County Courthouse. Inside the stately domed edifice during the 1948 Democratic primary, county voting officials nearly a week after Election Day produced a mysterious Box 13 containing 200 extra votes for a young, uber-ambitious congressman running for the U.S. Senate against popular Gov. Coke Stevenson. With the addition of a little curlicue in the numeral 7, the 765 votes contained in the ballot box became 965 votes, awarding Lyndon Baines Johnson with an 87-vote “landslide” victory out of nearly a million votes cast statewide. 

Back then, Hispanic voters in South Texas were usually under the thumb of an all-powerful patron. Today, these voters can’t be ignored. They set the tone for Texas politics.

About noon, I pull into the parking lot of a McAllen law firm, where a Pulido rally has just begun. The candidate, wearing jeans, boots and cowboy hat, is posing for photos and signing autographs for adoring fans, many of them too young to vote. Abel Prado, Pulido’s campaign manager, tells me the quinceañera focus was pure happenstance. He saw a video the De La Cruz campaign posted, the candidate remarking that the election “isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera. It’s about who you trust with your family’s future.” 

Prado’s immediate response: “Which gringo consultant wrote that?” Later, he worried that “gringos” might have been offended. (Given the district’s ethnic percentages, he had a bit of leeway.)

Playing quinces for free was an obvious next move.

To date, campaign spokesperson Jackie Rosa tells me, Pulido has received more than 3,000 invitations and has attended as many as seven in one night. The honorees can’t vote, of course, but their parents and family friends can. 

Will they? The honest answer is, the campaign doesn’t know; these are not the sort of folks who pop up on lists of likely voters. Campaign manager Prado tells me that of the more than 1,800 people they’ve encountered at quinceañeras, 68 percent are registered voters, but only 8.35 percent have a voting history. The campaign is doing extensive follow-up hoping to get that percentage up.

Rosa reminds me that quinceañeras aren’t Pulido’s only campaign vehicle. In addition to making himself accessible to local and national press, he’s attended ribbon-cutting ceremonies, various community events and “has also held meet-and-greets and ranch-halls where attendees can ask Bobby anything.” 

“Everyone knows his music,” Ron McVey, a Republican justice of the peace candidate, tells me. We are standing outside a riding-club horse barn at a campaign event where fans are having their photo taken with the candidate. McVey politely refuses to tell me who’ll get his vote in November.

De La Cruz, who delivered the Republican Spanish-language response to President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union message, won reelection handily two years ago. This time, though, Pulido’s notoriety may be enough to unseat her, even in a gerrymandered district. Ironically, the president may be his most potent asset.

Valley residents are angry, frustrated and anxious. Many who supported Trump in 2024 will tell you they didn’t vote for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents invading their neighborhoods and places of business. They didn’t expect ICE agents to accost their neighbors simply because of their accent or their skin color. They didn’t expect three young award-winning mariachi musicians from McAllen to be detained and scheduled for deportation. (De La Cruz helped negotiate their release; Pulido met them at the airport.) 

Valley restaurants are closing, either permanently or part-time, because employees are afraid to show up for work. Construction, health care and the hospitality industry all are struggling because of ICE-induced labor shortages. Inflation exacerbated by a foreign war no one anticipated is affecting everyone, particularly at the gas pump. Given the mood of the electorate, the Democrats’ proverbial yellow dog might have a chance.

Although Pulido labels his opponent a MAGA Republican, she seems to be trying to distance herself from White House adviser Stephen Miller’s mass-deportation crusade without ticking off the president who helped get her elected. She has urged House Speaker Mike Johnson to avoid the mass deportation label after Johnson a few weeks ago mentioned “a little hiccup with some of the Hispanic, Latino voters.” 

De La Cruz has smart immigration proposals as well. She supports a new visa category, H-2C, that would allow employers in construction and hospitality to hire foreign workers. She also would expand the H-2A visa category for seasonal agricultural workers. She calls it the Bracero 2.0 bill. 

Pulido takes what he considers a pragmatic approach to border issues. “I believe we can secure the border without destroying families and our local economy in the process,” he says on his campaign website. “We can more effectively attack the flow of fentanyl and other cartel-driven drug supply lines into our country.”

Voters paying attention to the finer points of immigration policy must choose between a Democrat with vague ideas and a Republican with good proposals but little to no chance of getting them passed by her own party.

Pulido is a polished performer – Texas Monthly’s J.B.Sauceda has called him “the definition of Tejano royalty” – but he’s not yet a polished candidate. He seems to know the issues, but he doesn’t speak in crisp phrases parsed and tested before focus groups. His campaign has a working-class, mom-and-pop feel to it; friends, family members and his fellow musicians are integral. It’s refreshing, and perhaps it’s part of his appeal. 

Taking an afternoon break at his Uncle Jimmy’s house – Jimmy Montez is his longtime business manager and a campaign volunteer – Pulido tells me he never thought about running for public office until election-night 2022. Hanging out that night with Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, he realized that Republicans were on the march in the Valley, and his fellow Democrats had only themselves to blame. He was frustrated that the Biden administration had misread the immigration issue, particularly the mass of asylum seekers clamoring to cross the river. By the time the administration responded, it was too late.

“There was a very, very big backlash against the concept of asylum,” Pulido says. “That created a lot of resentment.”

Pulido, who considers himself a conservative Democrat, also contends his party has lost the ability to connect with working-class voters, particularly Hispanics.

“Hispanics are an interesting culture,” he says, “in that we don’t have a lot

of generational wealth. We come from nothing. In most places, a Hispanic is the one who’s going to put in a restaurant and sell tacos or sell tamales to make ends meet. We’re very entrepreneurial, very aspirational.”

If Pulido wins, he would be representing one of the poorest congressional districts in Texas, although the word “poor” is misleading, he contends. “I say people down here don’t consider themselves poor. They consider themselves broke. We’re not going to accept that we’re poor. We’ll work our way out of it.”

A few hours later, I show up, uninvited, at a lavishly decorated event hall on the outskirts of Mission. I’m there for a quinceanera honoring – I have to check the name as I walk up to the entrance – Alinah Marie Garcia. I’m relieved when Alinah’s mother welcomes me with a warm handshake and a smile. Beaming on her daughter’s big night, her silver gown sparkling beneath the lights of crystal chandeliers, Mrs. Garcia hugs family members and friends and helps her husband arrange them in a line as they wait for photos with their daughter. Alinah, in a billowing Barbie pink gown, her dark hair in ringlets, stands near a multi-tiered white cake and bounteous white flower arrangements.  

Minutes later, Pulido strolls into the hall to the sound of “Hermoso Carino,” by Vicente Fernandez. He’s greeted with cheers, flashing cameras and Alinah’s shy smile. In his white hat and polished black boots, he stands beside the petite young woman and serenades her in his soulful tenor voice. Guests leave their tables and converge on the honoree and the Tejano star singing and swaying beside her. Little kids, boys and girls, can’t help themselves; they break into swirls and jigs. A line of teenage girls in black party dresses record the moment on their phones as they sing along. Pulido breaks into “Desvelado” (“Sleepless”), his signature song. He holds out his mic, and the happy crowd joins in.  

Pulido presents Alinah with a pink cap that reads “Make Quinceaneras Great Again,” then bows and bids her “buenos noches.” 

“I’m Bobby Pulido, and I’m running for Congress from the 15th District,” he says, waving to the crowd as he departs for yet another “quince.” 

“Vote for Bobby!” someone shouts. 

Maybe the friends and family of young Alinah Maria Garcia will vote; maybe they won’t. Driving back to Austin, hoping deer aren’t out at that time of night, I think about a story Pulido had told me earlier in the day about a woman who had attended a recent rally. She wanted more than a photo and an autograph; she wanted his help. 

She told him her 21-year-old nephew – he thinks it was a nephew – had legal permanent residence but was detained at the Border Patrol checkpoint on U.S. Highway 281 near Falfurrias. Immigration agents took his visa, took him. Locked up in a detention center for three months, he eventually agreed to sign his deportation order. “Just get me out of here,” he begged. Deported immediately, he now lives across the border in Matamoros.  

“I hear stories like that all the time,” Pulido told me. It’s not only infuriating but frustrating, he said, because he can’t really help unless his fans flock to the polls. 

“Are they going to turn out?” I asked.

“Hell, yes, they are!” he said. “They’re mad. And they should be.”

Joe Holley is a Pulitzer-winning editorial writer and was the “Native Texan” columnist for the Houston Chronicle.