♪ ♪ -Texas -- The Lone Star State has seen explosive growth.

over 30 million call Texas home.

But Texas is changing.

Today, it is one of the most diverse states in the nation.

Leading this demographic change are Latinos, who are now the majority population in Texas.

-Young people of color are registering, mobilizing, and turning out like never before.

-On the eve of the upcoming presidential election, will this new generation of Latinos finally reveal their growing power that neither political party can ignore?

-We're out here today in a celebration of worker power, of community power.

-This is a story about Latinos taking matters into their own hands, determined to have their voices heard.

♪♪ ♪♪ In Texas, a quarter of a million people of color turn 18 each year.

Today, these community organizers will use rose petals to symbolize the number of Latinos who turn 18 each year.

Their plan -- to show state legislators the growing power of the Latino vote.

♪♪ -If the Capitol Police do start to get aggressive or ask you to stop, um, just listen to what they're asking you to do.

Don't try to resist.

-We want to show the power and beauty of young people of color.

So thank you all for being here so early.

[ Cheering ] ♪♪ -This past year, we saw Texas break all voter turnout records.

And rather than celebrating and asking what we did right, lawmakers are making it more difficult in every phase of the voting cycle to have people's voice heard.

♪♪ ♪♪ -All right, y'all ready?

We're gonna go.

-♪ Amazing grace ♪ ♪ How sweet the sound ♪ ♪ That saved a wretch ♪ ♪ Like me ♪ ♪ I once was lost ♪ ♪ But now am found ♪ ♪ Was blind ♪ ♪ But now I see ♪ [ Cheers and applause ] -It was a symbol and a message to the young people of this state, and to the Texas legislators that if they want to cling to the past, they can have it.

But the future is going to belong to all of those young people that are determined and have power to see a different kind of government in this state.

-They call themselves Jolt.

They're part of a network of progressive volunteer community organizers across the state, working to mobilize and encourage young Latinos to get involved in getting out the vote.

-At Jolt, we believe that our power comes from standing together as one Latino community, that there is no one way to be Latino or Latina.

So our members are dreamers, they are kids of immigrants, they're halfies like me, fifth generation Texans, Peruanos, Mexicanos, Salvadoreños, and everything in between.

-When I came to Austin after finding housing and a place to work, the first thing I did was look for places where I could organize with the Latino community.

¿Cuando?

-Crowd: Ahora!

-I started looking for places to volunteer and I found Workers Defense Project.

We were not afraid to protest.

When do we want it?

-Crowd: Now!

-And so when I found organizing, where you can bring people together to change their own circumstances, to change how those in power react to them and what they can win and how it changes their lives, it became like oxygen to me.

-Todo mundo que se puede quedar toda la noche... -Among the early organizers is Greg Casar, who eventually served on the Austin City Council and today is one of the youngest members of the U.S. Congress from Texas.

-I, just like all sorts of other young people, wanted to match my passion with my skills and found out that I thought I was better at labor organizing than I was at being a teacher or doing something else.

And so I signed up to help and give time at workers events.

And we will not stand down until we get our goal, which is to have our rights.

A lot of organizations, a lot of people would have said, "Y'all are the younger new people, take our lead, do it the way we want to do it."

But instead they told a lot of the young organizers, "Go ahead, you make this whatever it is that you think you should make it."

And I think when you entrust young people and entrust the community and trust immigrant workers and trust the Latino community, other people, to own the movement, then you give so much more to it.

-A lot of people, understandably, they go hold a sign and they protest, right?

But I don't think that tells the full story or captures the humanity oftentimes, or the hope or the possibility of the issues or the communities that we're working with.

You can do so much of that through the power of art and storytelling, and those have been some of my favorite moments of all the work that I've been able to do, 'cause it also gives people the opportunity to be part of the art, part of the storytelling.

-People want to be a part of something that is inspirational to them or moving to them, not just the boring, same old, same old formula.

We want to bring out the huge papier-mache puppets, or we want to make sure that we're marching down Congress Avenue, not just with our normal signs, but with coffins that we built to really respect and show that these are life and death issues should be a way of life, and it should be a community thing.

I think that's part of how we build enduring institutions in Texas that include lots of people, and we have to make sure that people can express their culture and their art.

And then if people really want to be a part of something, and want to come together, it's harder to take that apart.

And eventually that changes the state.

-How are y'all, Turning Point?

[ Crowd cheers ] -Conservatives are working hard to bring in more Latinos into the Republican Party.

-Something I want to do, and I felt like I could make a positive change.

-Joel Castro, one of the youngest city council members ever elected in Texas, is part of Run Gen Z, whose mission is to recruit and mentor the next generation of conservative young leaders.

-Latino values are conservative values -- faith, family, and freedom.

That's the exact same thing we believe in in our culture.

We believe it in also in the party, in the Republican Party.

What we have to do is better as conservatives is be able to reach the Latino community and talk to them.

We've kind of just neglected Latino communities for a while, unfortunately.

But I think now that what we have done has really just helped the Hispanic community, the Latino community, prosper.

And that Latino communities are realizing that and that they're voting with us and they're voting for us.

-So here we are on Sycamore Street, which is the first street that I lived on, you'll see down here.

Um, when I moved here from Mexico, we actually lived in... -Michelle Gamboa, as a first time voter, felt pressure from her friends.

-The first time I went to the ballot box, I had a freak-out moment when I first turned 18 because I didn't know, like, how I would vote, what things I would do.

But I realized that it's important to never change your moral values and vote based on those.

And so although my peers in college were trying to pressure me, I think through that pressure is when I realized how to stand up for myself, and that's when, to me, it dawned on me -- I'm conservative not even 'cause of certain ideals or things, but because that's the Hispanic spirit, you know?

-During her term as executive director of the Texas Latino Conservatives, Joel Castro encouraged Michelle to run for local office.

She's now serving her first term on the city council of Longview in East Texas.

-We don't want the government to come tell us what we can and can't do.

We want them to give us the freedom and remove the red tape so that we can be successful business owners and make good decisions for ourselves.

-Michelle was born in Juarez, Mexico.

She and her family immigrated to East Texas to join her father, Ricardo.

Today, she and her father are the owners of a successful roofing and sheet metal company.

-When we first moved to this country, I was a self-loathing Latina.

At times, my family and I did feel like we were being prejudiced against.

That's obviously changed a lot.

East Texas is a very loving, warm community, and I think that's evidenced by me being elected the first Hispanic person ever in history to represent the city council.

There was over 5,000 doors in my district, and I actually knocked on over 3,000 of those myself and with a team.

And I had people deployed from all over the state, like the Texas Young Republicans who came and helped me because I was passionate about people in my community.

Knowing that I wanted to run for office, I wanted to represent them, and I wanted to make sure that they had a seat at the table.

That really burned a fire inside me to let other Latinas know, like, "Hey, we don't just have to go along to get along, or we don't just have to pretend that we want to do something because we don't, just to, you know, blend in and not make ruckus."

If you care about something, we don't just have to complain.

We can do something about it.

Here at the Republican Party of Texas, you know, we acknowledge that Latinos are a growing force and we embrace them.

And we are the big party tent.

I think in both parties, there's always those those people who don't really like others and don't play well with others.

But I can say that the Republican Party of Texas here, we're a team.

We're working together to make sure we're outreaching, not just to Latinos, but everyone.

So I know that we have, like the voter engagement project that I was a part of for a while in regards to not just community engagement, but how to register voters.

What are cold calls?

How do you send a letter to someone you know?

I've been tasked to kind of help be on the lookout for more women, but more Latino women as well.

-In Austin, Cristina's work as a community organizer took on new meaning.

¡Queremos justicia!

-¿Cuándo?

-Ahora!

-Manuel came to the United States when he was just eight years old.

He came as a dreamer, undocumented, with his mother, and we met when we were younger organizers trying to make sure that immigrant workers were treated with dignity.

And through doing that work, I fell in love with the idea of the world that we could build together Here, dame la manita.

Dame la manita.

Santi's entire life has been in this work, this movement.

He went to his first rally when he was a week old.

...Mexicanos... All he's ever seen and known is that this is part of his life, part of his family.

-I wanna stop.

-You wanna stop?

Giving birth to Santi and starting Jolt at the same time, that week was when all the raids started happening across Texas.

♪♪ -We all watched it and sat in silence as we saw people being arrested and watching families being torn apart.

And so we kind of just wandered down to City Hall.

We didn't have any signs with us or anything.

We were just there in our backpacks.

And then afterwards, I ended up walking, leading the protest back to City Hall with a megaphone in hand with my brother right next to me.

-We're currently at 7th and Congress Avenue, this is the very front of the protest line.

-We're just protesting and we're all really excited.

We're all 17-year-old kids there, like, super excited to be a part of something.

This was a moment for us to use our voice as a movement of power.

-And you can hear they're waving flags, different flags, the American flag... -We were in pain.

And we were grieving for these people that had just been stripped from the only life they knew.

And you're watching people be taken against their will, and they're crying and screaming and asking and begging you not to take them.

And we had to sit there and watch that happen.

-This is what democracy looks like.

[ Crowd cheers ] And this is what fighting for democracy feels like.

-Former congressman and former presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke is traveling the 254 counties of Texas with a new mission.

-It is harder to cast a ballot in Texas than it is in any other state in the Union.

It is harder to get registered to vote in Texas than it is anywhere else.

And so our volunteers in Powered By People work to enfranchise to register those who are the targets of this suppression and this intimidation.

And by the way, the intimidation and suppression is not aimed at people who look like me.

I'll give you an example.

In 2017, a three judge federal panel described the gerrymander of our congressional districts as a racial gerrymander, meaning that if you're Black or Latino, there's a good chance you've been drawn out of a congressional district where your vote has the power to decide the outcome into a district where you will have no power whatsoever.

Another example, Texas has closed more than 700 polling places.

That's more than twice the number of the next closest state.

And almost all of those polling place closures have occurred in the fastest growing Black and brown neighborhoods in the state.

-Texans always fight for each other.

-At 21 and nationally recognized, Olivia Julianna became a political activist in her teens, and her commentary has millions of views through the power of her social media.

-I do social media full time.

Social media's important for reaching voters, informing voters.

Social media does not win elections.

Field wins election, knocking doors and talking to voters face to face wins elections.

But social media is an incredibly important tool in terms of alerting and informing voters about what is going on and where they can get more information.

Look at the 2020 presidential election.

That was a year when, you know, door-to-door canvasing and door-to-door knocking really wasn't that possible because of the pandemic.

And social media filled the gap, and now more and more people are going to social media, to people like me to figure out what's going on in politics.

Young people aren't watching the news.

They're not watching network television.

They're coming to people like me to figure out what's going on.

What's even more surprising to a lot of people is I actually have a lot of older followers as well.

A lot of my followers are Gen X, Millennial, Baby Boomer.

I have a lot of older women in particular who follow me, who listen to what I have to say.

I think people think, "Oh, it's just young people on social media."

It's not just young people, it's everyone.

-Every weekend somewhere in Texas, a quinceañera celebration is taking place.

Family and friends gather to celebrate a young woman's monumental rite of passage, a transition to womanhood.

The quinceañera means "she who is 15," and is a strong tradition in the Latino community.

Jolt created Poder Quince as a platform to reach new voters through registration and to encourage those already registered to the ballot box.

-They're being proactive in their activism, they're being proactive in their voice in politics, and they're being active in being a leader, a future leader.

♪♪ -I wanted to see if there was anything out there on quinceañeras and resistance.

So, I Googled it and the first thing that popped up was the Jolt quinceañeras at the capital.

-¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!

But I remember feeling so empowered because I thought back to my quinceañera.

It was amazing to then translate that feeling of community to a feeling of a community coming together to stand up against Senate Bill 4.

-We are brown and beautiful.

-Girls: We are brown and beautiful.

-And we won't back down.

-And we won't back down.

Because we are Texans.

-These legislators have passed a law that discriminate against our community and our families, that disrespects our parents and everything that they've sacrificed for us.

Many of you, your parents, risked their lives just so you could have a better education and life.

You're not just doing a dance up here, you are saying that you are the future of Texas.

[ Tejano music plays ] ♪♪ -In the '50s and '60s, they were rounding up immigrants, they were rounding up Latino people and pushing them back into Mexico.

In ways that are similar to what they're trying to do with the laws that they're passing right now.

So these quite literally are challenges and attacks that our grandparents and great-grandparents faced all those years ago, that now we are having to face again today.

-It's important that we realize what we symbolize today.

We're not just 15 girls.

All those little kids, all those grandparents, your parents, we are them today.

We represent them.

-Bravo!

-[ Crowd cheers ] -The girls were walking through the Senate chambers, and when we walked back out, I said, "I want you to remember this moment.

Because in a few years, you all will be old enough and will be taking power in this legislature."

When we think about organizing, there's the power of institution and the power of inspiration.

So the power of institution is like some of the work that we're doing here, where we -- How many people can we register?

How many people, if we talk to them this many times, how many can we expect to turn out?

You need that kind of power to organize, but you also need the power of inspiration, which is the power of a story.

And there are the young girls, in their quince dresses with their tiaras.

The message there is we are the hope and future of the state.

-Michelle made history as the first East Texan to represent in the Miss Texas Latina pageant.

She believes pageants are a great opportunity for Latinas to shine.

-My actual own design.

I designed this, but she created.

I never grew up doing pageants, but I always wanted to.

However, in my mind, I always had an idea of what the perfect pageant girl looked like -- blonde, tall, beautiful, super skinny, porcelain skin.

And so, um, I never really thought that I fit that description of beauty.

I was the first ever Miss Longview Latina.

I became Miss Southwest.

Through that process, I learned to love myself being a Latina.

And so I think that we need to stop maybe siloing ourselves.

I think that's the issue, a lot of people silo themselves, and maybe we should just focus on what being an American is, which is not just the American dream, but we're a melting pot, baby.

And even within the Latino culture, we're the most diverse.

We got Afro Latinos, we have European Latinos, we have Mestizo Latinos like myself.

You know, we have all kinds of Latinos.

-In her role, both in pageants and politics, Michelle seeks to inspire young Latinas to succeed.

-One thing I really learned, whether it's participating in pageants or doing politics, is if you think you're not going anywhere, you're probably not.

But if you fail and you keep trying and you keep trying, that is the definition of success.

-It's official.

Latinos are now the largest ethnic group in Texas, but despite their growing political power, many Latinos still don't vote.

Cecilia Balli wanted to find out why In 2020, she and her team conducted a major study as to Texas Latinos and voting.

-So a lot of them are new voters.

Their families are not.

They don't come from voting families.

So they're making sense of politics on their own.

Another reason is that some voters are just there -- their values fall on various parts of the spectrum, so they might be socially very liberal or progressive, and but they're driven more by their, um, economic and fiscal values that align more with the Republican Party.

So some in the middle are what we would normally call more of an independent voter whose views could map on to either party.

And then there's others that, you know, just, the parties haven't engaged Latinos very deeply or authentically.

So there isn't a sense that there's a real relationship with a party.

We spoke with one young man in San Antonio who had even driven to a polling location once or twice, and then once he was there, he didn't get off and he drove off, and he had a hard time articulating why he didn't.

But it's when he was there he doubted, he wondered if his vote was going to make any difference.

And it also sounded like he didn't feel like he belonged there.

You have to invest in building the electorate over time, and it's going to be hard work because you can't activate an electorate around one election.

You can't.

By the time you do that, folks will tell you that they're going to come out and vote, polls always show that a higher percentage of the Latino population has said they're going to come out and vote, and then the election happens and the number is lower.

We have to do the hard work of building those communities of voters.

And then a lot of the nonvoters you hear them, they don't come from families that have voted traditionally, they're not surrounded by a lot of voters.

And so they can be very conscientious people who are engaged in their communities in other ways.

It's more about who has a strong political identity, who has that habit of voting, and who feels like voting is for them.

-Those feelings of hopelessness, of feeling disempowered, of feeling like I didn't know what was going to come next.

I know what I'm going to do, and that's to organize.

-In November... -Crowd: We'll remember.

-In November... -We'll remember.

-In November... -We'll remember.

♪♪ -The first time that I was eligible to vote and that I voted was in the 2016 election.

I remember, uh, it was it was a different feeling for me 'cause nobody in my family before that was eligible to vote.

I felt like a grown up, I guess.

I was like, "Ooh, I can vote."

Um, but I also felt as a huge responsibility because I was the only one in my family who was eligible to vote.

So I really saw it as I'm the voice for my family, and therefore I'm going to use my voice to let it be known that we deserve to be treated with dignity, that we deserve a candidate that will represent our values and our interests in our community.

-Bueno, sí sale cuando -- hasta el siguiente año.

-Yeah.

Pero no se van a...

I am the daughter of immigrants.

My mother is an immigrant from Mexico and my dad is an immigrant from El Salvador.

-Starting in the 1980s and lasting 13 long years, El Salvador endured a bloody civil war.

Over 500,000 fled the violence to seek asylum in the United States, including Esther's father.

-My mom came here when she was about 15 years old.

She still finds it very hard to talk about crossing the border, because it's something that was so traumatic.

It's not a day trip.

It's not a road trip.

My dad became a citizen and then this year will be the first year my whole family is eligible to vote.

-In November, all four of us, including my little sister Catherine, who just turned 18, will be voting, and we'll be casting our ballot together.

-The thing about the Latino community is there's always also new Americans, of new Americans, of, you know, of Latino Americans who are migrating here.

And that's the new community that you have to mobilize.

Sometimes those communities can be mobilized more easily than a third, fourth, fifth generation Mexican American who's already been exposed to generations of people.

-We were taught Texas was the promised land, that all of the dreams of America's future were taking shape here.

We were taught that, you know, the heroes of the Alamo were the exemplars of Texas greatness.

For many Mexicanos, Mexican Americans, Chicanos, Chicanx, folks of Tejas, we were unaware that we were actually a part of a much bigger story, a bigger story that began from America's other origin story, a hundred years before Plymouth Rock.

But we were never taught that story, that we had this other origin as an American story of a meeting of Indigenous in Espanol that would produce a culture in Mexico unto itself, the Mestizo culture that emerged in Mexico.

But then that world that was left behind after the partition, after the emergence of the Texas-Mexico border and then later the US-Mexico border, that we lived in this borderlands contact zone.

That story we were taught about Texas as having achieved this glory turned out to be a deception.

In fact, the story of Texas is really about who we're becoming and the promise that we can still become something broadly affirming our human values without borders, without border restrictions.

But the border has always been open.

The landscape that our ancestors crossed north and south is part of that legacy.

How you tell the story of your connection to Indigenous legacy, we're taught about our connections to European cultural legacies, but we were never taught about this other part of the story.

-I feel like I had this great gift as a child, but growing up in between two worlds, you know, one that was white and one that was brown and one that was poor and one that was middle class and one that was Mexican and one that was American, it really taught me that even though there were these differences in between those two communities, that people are ultimately all the same.

For me, Mexico is where I spent my childhood.

It's my family, it's my heart.

It's, in many ways, my second home.

-¡Hola, ya llegamos!

¡Mira!

-Millions of Latinos in Texas have strong ties to Mexico.

It's about family, it's about culture, it's about roots.

And Texas is very much connected to that culture and history.

-¡Hola!

-¡Hola!

-For me, I want Santi to grow up with that same culture and understanding of love, of humility.

Dale besito, Santi.

-Así que ya vimos a toda tu familia.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -This was always where we would come back, where we would have our birthdays, where we would have celebrations.

This is a lot of my childhood was spent here.

[ Cumbia music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Laughter ] Even though our family in Mexico is extremely poor, there is always enough food for one more guest.

There is always enough space for us to be there.

To grow up with that understanding of where you come from helps, you know, where to go and where you're headed.

[ Laughter ] You know, as Latinos, we live in the duality of many of us being newly arrived to this country, and many of us having existed in this country before the United States was even constructed as an idea.

♪♪ -Starting from Brownsville all the way to Laredo to El Paso, the Texas-Mexico border runs over 1,000 miles.

The majority of the population in this part of Texas is Mexican American.

-You can look at it as like a point of contact or a point of origin for where all of Mexican culture in the state of Texas, and by some measures, even the nation originates from.

All of those things have a defining characteristic in how people go about their day, their consciousness; politically, culturally.

This is the border.

The border is more than just a fence line, it's more than just poor people or people that are desperate, trying to cross to make a better life for themselves.

-These are our neighbors, these are our family from just across the river.

We're also just so used to people from the United States going to live in Mexico because it's cheaper, and then people from Mexico coming to Laredo to work because they can make more.

And so you see the connection, you see them going back and forth just trying to live and live peacefully.

Whatever side you're living on or working on, you know, we see that interchange.

-America is at a breaking point with record levels of illegal immigration.

And today we got a firsthand look at the damage and the chaos the border catastrophe is causing in all of our communities.

-The border has been a hot button issue for many political cycles over decades.

Today, it's being described as a violent place of chaos.

-The idea that it is a bloodbath, I think, is more of a projection of the blood that is eventually spilled because of their policies, right, I think that's more of what they mean when they say bloodbath, but they don't want to be upfront about it because nothing that people themselves are doing is causing any blood spill.

But razor wire does.

Walls do.

Guns do.

-They just come and look, have some meetings, but they don't actually do real policy work, right?

Like, how are we going to make immigration better, smoother?

What are -- You don't see the congressmen that come for the circus.

You don't actually see them going back and initiating policies.

I think that they just try to hype up whatever looks best for the media.

-I think both sides kind of kick the can down the road and hope that it gets fixed one day, but that's never going to solve our issues.

And I think until both parties can focus on that, immigration quite literally is a part of the puzzle that we need to solve some of our labor issues.

But I am a Latina at the end of the day, and I am an immigrant who, um, went through the process but knows how important it is for more people to be able to go through the process.

-Today, with a population of over a million, the Rio Grande Valley has a long tradition of political engagement, and most candidates running for local office are Latino.

-There is active organizing here, just like if you go to Austin or San Antonio, which has obviously much larger blocks of organizing.

Well, it exists in the Rio Grande Valley, too.

They are trying their damnedest to be heard.

-I try and engage younger people.

You know, there's city elections, there's the primary.

Democratic primary, there's the runoff.

And so there's all these different elections that we just got to promote, that it's not just one convincing them about the importance of voting, it's two informing them about the opportunities to vote.

-The Rio Grande Valley has historically voted Democrat, but Republicans are actively making inroads in the Latino community.

-You can be very proudly identified with your Mexican ethnicity and your culture, so to speak, and vote Republican.

Interestingly, in the Rio Grande Valley, you know, some of the Trump rallies, they were playing Tejano music or folks had these banners that said "Tejano Trumper."

I do think overall what we're seeing is more of, um, folks wanting to be engaged and saying, "You can't assume that because of my skin color, I'm going to vote a certain way."

-We have to earn those votes.

We have to earn that trust.

And the only way to do it is to show up in person and listening to them and listening to them in English, listening to them in Spanish, in the same way that that some, I think, are writing off the Rio Grande Valley as turning red and as Democrats in the past have written it off as, "No, this is solidly blue.

You don't have to worry about it."

I don't want us to make any of those mistakes going forward, we have to go out there and contest and run and win votes by talking, listening, meeting with people and showing them the respect that they've earned and that they deserve as our fellow Texans.

♪♪ -Latinas in Texas are stepping up and leading the way for their communities to have a voice.

They're part of a Texas legacy of Latinas who became leaders in the fight for social justice.

-...America's future is Texas.

♪♪ -Laredo, Texas, the early 1900s -- Jovita Idar chose to confront the growing violence against her community through the power of the pen.

-She was a journalist.

There was a Mexican-American female journalist that was a strong voice for the border very, very early on.

Her family ran a newspaper in Laredo, and then she had her own newspaper with a different name later, and was penning articles that were very critical of the treatment of Mexicans on the border.

-These efforts set the tone for the rest of Jovita Idar's work.

She felt duty bound to promote civil rights, including women's rights and education.

"Educate a woman..." Idar often said, "...and you educate a family."

-Later, she became a teacher and then helped as a nurse during the Mexican Revolution.

And so she had many roles, like a lot of women that we know who kind of were leaders in the community in different ways, in education and advocacy and journalism.

-Her writing angered the Texas Rangers so much that they showed up at the newspaper building and destroyed the printing press.

-Jovita's story has become a, I think, an exemplary of all of these lost legends, and Jovita came from those roots.

-From 1910 through 1920, Mexican American communities along the Texas-Mexico border lived through some of the worst state sanctioned racial violence.

-We've seen efforts to suppress that history, to suppress the telling of the story about, for instance, the scourge of lynching of Mexican individuals in the early part of the 20th century.

Maybe as many as 5,000 Mexicanos -- Mexican Americans and Mexicanos -- either killed, extrajudicially, or lynched.

We've seen the postcards that advertised those murders.

That story itself had been lost, and we owe it to a group of historians in the last 20 years who uncovered that story and brought it back.

-Texas became a land grab.

English language laws and intimidation forced many Mexican Americans off their lands.

The tragic events of this decade led to a search for justice, and in 1929, the League of United Latin American Citizens, LULAC was formed to fight for civil rights.

-Latinos have been racialized as another, and we get treated as a race, as a different race, but we're not, on paper, identified as a different race.

There were generations of very light skinned Mexican-Americans in South Texas who were still sent to segregated schools, and the skin color known was not going to help them move into other spaces.

For generations in Texas on the census, Latinos were -- or Hispanics were told, you know, "You have to mark white.

That's what you are."

But because people mark white on paper doesn't mean that they identify as white and that they live their lives as white individuals.

To what degree race shapes your day to day life is different for different people.

-In 2023, the United States Treasury released the Jovita Idar quarter, the ninth coin in the American Women's Quarters program, celebrating the accomplishments and contributions made by women.

-Jovita Idar is an icon for Laredo.

We also have a park named after her, and as you walk along the park, there's stories written about her so that more people -- our youth, our children -- can learn who Jovita Idar is and hopefully share that message with people that aren't from here because her story is so iconic.

-In the 1960s and '70s, Mexican Americans, inspired by the Chicano civil rights movement, created their own political party.

It was called Raza Unida -- The united people.

-We can see how the Raza Unida Party as a vision emerges.

That there wasn't ample response coming from the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.

They felt disenfranchised by both, and they wanted another way.

Raza Unida was very effective in organizing the vote and getting the vote out.

And throughout South Texas there were electoral victories.

The real vote population is in rural areas, and we've seen that for Anglo voters.

Present day Texas is largely governed on the basis of a large rural Anglo participation in voting.

Ultimately, this fractious debate within the Raza Unida split the party.

-Within the party, there was a divide to focus a heavy effort on organizing the rural Chicanada.

So the rural Chicano communities against those who wanted to organize, principally the urban communities.

Even playing within American electoral political protocols, Raza Unida discovered there were all of these barriers.

-Our people are awakening... -By the late '70s, things began to disintegrate.

-Our own history of civil rights struggle in Texas is not taught in the schools.

And so we don't know that story.

And we don't -- We are not able to place ourselves in a larger story of people fighting for civil rights.

When we talk to a lot of voters and nonvoters in doing this research, very, very few, maybe a handful out of 100, referenced our role in fighting for civil rights.

It's not a story that's known and so then you're not identifying with that past.

-The 1980s and '90s brought Latinos closer to gaining political power.

Voting rights activist Willie Velasquez led the first 1 million voter registration drive.

The election of Henry Cisneros as mayor of San Antonio was a watershed moment.

-I mean, we can see so much of today's politics, though, in terms of a certain kind of response to a fear of of the onset of Black and brown majorities.

You know, in Texas already, we commonly hear reference to the fact that we've become a majority-minority state, that there are more people of color in Tejas than not.

Uh, the term majority-minority is so indicative of these underlying biases.

You're still a minority.

Your majority-minority, but you're still a minority.

The way we see our legislature populated, you would never expect the kind of skewed presence that we see in the Texas Legislature, both the Senate and the House, in terms of the absence of Latinos, the absence of African Americans, the absence of Asians.

It's still a predominantly Anglo enclave.

♪♪ ♪♪ -This memorial outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, is dedicated to the 19 children and two teachers killed during the deadly mass shooting on May 24, 2022.

-There are so many young people that I've listened to who said, "Hey, Beto, when I was, you know, barely a kid first coming into consciousness, I saw this massacre at Sandy Hook.

A little bit older, there was the massacre at Parkland.

There was a massacre in El Paso, there was a massacre in Midland.

There was a massacre in Sutherland Springs.

There was a massacre at Santa Fe High School in southeast Texas.

After every single one of these thoughts and prayers, politicians giving speeches, you know, prayer vigils, people going to the Capitol to testify, but nothing ever changes.

Beto, why should I vote?

It doesn't seem to make a difference or to matter."

♪♪ Look at what those in power have done following Uvalde And to never propose -- not a single change that could prevent that from going forward.

How these parents have lived through that amazes me.

And yet here they are advocating for my children and children across this state, knowing they'll never get their own children back.

Holding public leaders accountable for their actions, advocating for legislation -- Simple things like could we raise the age to buy an AR-15 to 21?

Could we have a red flag law in case someone is bragging that he's going to go in and shoot a school up, as the Uvalde shooter did prior to entering Robb Elementary?

Could we have a universal background check?

These are not earth-shattering proposals.

They're supported along a bipartisan basis, and these parents are going out there reliving and retelling the stories of their children's murders in order to compel public lawmakers to do the right thing.

-Every day...

I try to let you know with signs that I never went away.

-What they have done is take matters into their own hands by becoming politically involved.

♪♪ -On social media, you get a... -As national, state, and local elections emerge, the ground game to engage and turn out young Latino voters is ongoing.

-The votes are out there.

The registered voters are out there.

They're not being turned out in the way that they should be.

And a large part of that is because they don't understand, really what's at stake.

-My body!

-My choice!

-My body!

-Abortion is one of the most important issues to young people.

It is undoubtedly going to play a huge role in electoral politics in 2024.

To see the shift in young voters, nationally, since Dobbs overturned Roe v Wade is astounding.

-Texas is one of 14 states with a total abortion ban, and strict laws of enforcement have been passed.

-Now, it's not a political issue.

Now it's not about what your priest says or what your dad said or how you grew up.

Now it's it could be physically dangerous for you or your loved one to be pregnant in Texas.

That's different.

That's totally different.

-My body!

-My choice!

-I think that that is a big issue for Latinas.

I think it's going to be a big issue and a growing issue for everyone as people start to see just how extreme and dangerous these bans are.

-It is going to turn out young voters.

It is going to turn out young women in particular, who are afraid and who are terrified of what is happening not only in Texas, but nationally.

That is going to be the deciding factor for a lot of voters, especially a lot of voters in the state of Texas.

-I believe that you lose until you win.

And so for me, when I think about 2024, I also think of 2034.

You know, how are we every day doing the work to build more community, bring people on board?

Um, because sure, I'm a Democrat, but I don't want just a blue Texas.

I want a Texas that is compassionate and caring to all of its people, regardless of who's in charge.

-The work is always worth it.

We have always got to try.

The right response is to take action.

And whether that's joining us, registering voters, whether it's making sure you yourself are registered and casting that ballot, whether it's running for office, whatever it is, get out there, do it, and get it done.

It will make it that much more likely that we get there that much sooner than we otherwise would.

So we cannot mess this up.

And it's on every single one of us to meet the moment and to come through.

-More and more Latinos on the ballot.

More and more Latinos getting out to vote.

It's happening, and it's exciting to see.

And they're not just running because they're Latino, they're not just running because, "Oh, we need more representation," they're running to win and to make political change.

And that's what's exciting.

-I think there's a much greater fight, as certainly as we come up to the to the election in 2024.

And I don't plan on giving up.

I intend on serving the rest of my term on city council, fighting for conservative policies, being fiscally responsible.

I'm sure that I will keep on fighting for what I believe is right.

-I don't want to be the first Hispanic person elected to the city council, I don't want to be the youngest since 1963.

This bench was actually paid for by a grant.

I don't want to be that.

I want to be the catalyst point that helped other Latinas say, "If she can do it, so can I."

So I would encourage and implore you to whatever side it is, but I hope it's conservative, that you will choose to be involved politically, that you'll register voters, that you'll go knock the doors.

Stop saying we can't do stuff and start doing things so that we can make an impactful difference in this country, because we can, we will, and we are the fastest growing population.

-The story of what's happening today in the borderlands is going to be as powerful in the future as the story of Ellis Island is for so many people in the last 100 years, about the story of the emigration out of Europe into the United States.

You know, at one time I used to think about the Rio Grande as our Berlin Wall, but more and more I think about the Rio Grande as our Ellis Island.

You know, it's the passageway into something -- something new about the way of being American.

-After years of struggle, Cristina finally teamed up with the largest youth vote organization in the nation.

Today, Cristina is the president of NextGen America.

-Right now, I lead NextGen America, which is the country's largest youth voting rights group.

And so at this organization, I was able to bring the resources and expertise of the country's largest youth vote organization here to one of the largest states in the country.

And we're also one of the youngest states in the country.

-You need to register to vote?

-No, I'm already registered.

-Okay.

Do you have your up-to-date card?

-But they're remaking the party into the party that is willing to tackle the climate crisis, to the party that's willing to talk about abortion rights, to the party that's willing to tackle the student debt crisis and gun safety.

What was considered out of bounds or too unrealistic has now become central to the Democratic Party.

And that's, you're welcome, thank you to young people.

-As immigrants, the Ramos family struggle hard for Esther to get an education.

Esther finally earned her master's degree in Latin American Studies and today works to help unaccompanied migrant children and youth.

At 17, Maggie joined Jolt.

Today, she continues to help bring change for her generation through the power of the vote.

-I'd like to ask everybody to stand and repeat after us.

We are Texas!

-We are Texas!

-And we won't back down -And we won't back down.

[ Cheers and applause ] -I think one of the things I've learned along the way is that so many young Latinos often feel like their Latino story is not Latino enough.

And so I just want that other people to understand there's no right or wrong way to be Latino.

That as long as you love your people and come to this work trying to honor everything that our parents and those that came before us did, and those that are going to come after us.

You're doing the work the right way.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪