Point Austin: Senator Farewell

Gonzalo Barrientos steps down from his place as the people's senator

Point Austin: Senator Farewell

By my rough and conservative count, there are currently 23 state senators, out of 31 – definitely a bipartisan selection – whose first official loyalties are to business as usual. They appear to sincerely believe, in their rhetoric as well as their actions, that what's good for the state's dominant property owners, its major employers, its biggest bosses (and all their insurance companies) is – as a matter of course – good for all Texans. (Despite current appearances, the overall percentage is a bit better in the House, though the numbers are still daunting.) This week I'm not going to dispute the rightness of their perspective, nor even name names – generally speaking, they win all the vote counts, so you can figure it out for yourselves. Add your own candidates if you like.

Austin Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos is not among them. Announcing his retirement after this term last week, Barrientos quietly but proudly recapitulated his political career, and summed up his own perspective broadly but accurately. "I endeavored to fairly represent my constituents of all creeds, colors, backgrounds, and means," he said, "but especially the poor, the children, the elderly, the disabled, those who are ill – and any who have traditionally been discriminated against." I don't begrudge those other senators their devotion to the status quo and the interests of the state's wealthiest and most powerful people (several of themselves numbered among them). After all, they're only doing what they've been hired to do.

I'm just glad there are a few elected officials, like Barrientos, who at least try to see the world from the bottom up – where most of us live and work – instead of from the top down. The big boys in the owners' box have plenty of representation, direct and indirect. Barring some egalitarian Texas miracle, it's reassuring to know that the little guys have an occasional voice in the temples of power.

Sen. Barrientos is such a voice.


From Corral Barrio

The last time I got to talk with Barrientos at length, it was in unlikely circumstances – at an Albuquerque Marriott designed to look like a pseudo-Aztec pyramid, complete with an interior fountain wall to accompany our conversation. The immediate issue was congressional re-redistricting – Barrientos and most of his Democratic colleagues had broken the Senate quorum and fled to New Mexico rather than provide a helpless minority backdrop to the Republican ratification of Tom DeLay's political map for Texas. A common theme among the mostly minority senators was the consequent racial discrimination in voting rights, for Barrientos a very personal subject. "The reason I feel so strongly about these issues that I grew up with," he told me, "is because I know that the damage done by [discrimination] can take decades and decades to overcome – if then – and that it leaves wounds forever."

We returned to that subject last week in his Capitol office, after his announcement. He recalled his childhood in a migrant family, working the fields, and occasionally coming home from school in tears over beatings from Anglo classmates. "My grandfather would tell me, 'No los culpes a ellos si no al corral donde se criáron,'" he remembered. "'Don't blame them, rather blame the corral in which they grew up.' So I've spent my life trying to knock down those corral fences, to let people's minds expand."

It's a useful lesson, and in Barrientos' case it might also be applied in reverse – if a man is raised in a corral where he learns early and in his bones the disfiguring effects of deprivation and discrimination, he's more likely to be trusted to speak for those still suffering from the same afflictions. There is plenty of rhetorical noblesse oblige available at the Capitol – I wish I had a nickel for every corporate lawyer or absentee bossman or insurance broker in legislative drag who knows what's best for "the working people of Texas." With Barrientos stepping down, there will be one less advocate for the rest of us who actually knows whereof he speaks.


Not on His Knees

Of course, the re-redistricting fight ended in defeat for the fugitive Democrats, and it has been pointed out from more than one quarter that Barrientos has spent much of his legislative career defending lost causes. The polite code word is "ineffective." It's not accurate – he's been a very effective advocate, especially for teachers and for state employees, with even an occasional environmental victory (in a body reflexively subservient to "economic development"). For himself, the one-time amateur boxer responds pugnaciously, pointing to the small portrait he keeps of Emiliano Zapata and declaring, "I would rather fight and lose every time, and be right, than to go along to get along, suck up, and be a window-dressing Meskin."

He has lost a lot of fights. We all have, in Texas, and it shows. The most recent debacle – in which a bipartisan majority of the Legislature managed only to fight to a draw yet another attempt to further impoverish public schools – means those schools (and our children) will spend yet one more year with insufficient and indeed shrinking educational resources. Another Pyrrhic victory, at best. If so many of our leaders say they support public education, why are they doing such a bad job of it?

The answer is contained in those same lopsided percentages with which I began. The handful of big shots in the owners' box – as a matter of course – get a whole lot more representation than the vast majority of ordinary working Texans. We can only hope, now that Texas is in fact a "majority-minority" state, that the odds may slowly be shifting in our favor.

But when Gonzalo Barrientos steps down next year – to whatever new battlegrounds, many thanks and Godspeed him – we will have lost, for the moment, a voice of and for the people. end story

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KEYWORDS FOR THIS STORY

Texas LegislatureGonzalo Barrientos, Gonzalo Barrientos, Legislature, re-redistricting, Emiliano Zapata

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