HOUSTON (AP) – Gene Green gets the question at many of the town hall meetings he holds in his overwhelmingly Latino congressional district. Essentially, “What is someone like YOU doing in a place like this?”
After a quarter century in office, the 69-year-old Democrat is used to it.
“As an Anglo running in a predominantly Mexican-American district it’s not my first term,” Green, who initially won his Houston-based congressional seat the same year Bill Clinton was elected president, said at one recent event. “Even in 1992 it was, ‘How do you think you can get elected?'”
Home to 2.3 million people, around 44 percent of whom are Latino, Houston is America’s largest Hispanic city without a Hispanic member of the U.S. House.
Traditionally low voter turnout among Hispanics helps account for that anomaly, but another key reason is Green, who is white. He has never lost a district drawn specifically to empower Hispanic voters and today is nearly 80 percent Latino.