Dramatic reshaping of district 35 will make it harder for candidates of color to win, civic groups say
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.
