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The loss of oil-sector jobs, the result of the Biden administration’s curbs on drilling and exploration, has also hit Starr County hard. Maria Yvette Hernandez, 47, a Republican accountant who nearly upset a 24-year incumbent in the 2022 local election for Starr County judge (an executive position in Texas), says that the loss of oil-sector jobs “is killing Starr County.” The sector has been a boon to the region’s blue-collar man, who “migrates to Pecos, Midland, Odessa and New Mexico” for work: “You’re either transporting, digging up the wells, or testing blowback wells. And you’re making more than teachers with degrees.” A teacher makes “about $50,000 to $60,000 on average. An oilfield worker, a laborer, is going to be making $80,000.” And that’s with “no education, straight out of high school.” Those jobs have been “hit by the Biden administration energy curbs.” Ms. Hernandez reports that oil workers were told by their managers that the jobs would “bounce back” if Mr. Trump won.
The border is a big deal to Starr County. Any sympathy the valley may have had toward migrants has dissipated because “most of them are not from Mexico now, but from 150 other countries in the world,” as Ms. Treviño puts it. Her husband, Benito, 77—who was Starr County Republican chairman from 1986-2004—says it “really bothers” him that “people outside Texas, up north, expect that Hispanics along the border will turn a blind eye to all these illegals because they’re ‘the same people’ as we are. It really bothers me that they’re insinuating that we’re complicit in lawbreaking.”
I heard this sentiment from a few people. Claudia Alcazar, 56—Ms. Treviño’s predecessor as GOP county chairwoman—drove me to her house so I could see a straight line of trampled grass running through her property. It’s the result, she says, of migrants crossing her lot the night before. She keeps guns at home for self-protection and doesn’t permit her teenage daughter in the yard at night.
Dionicio Garza, 56, an evangelical pastor, confirms that “values” played a part in Mr. Trump’s local victory. He exhorted his congregation of roughly 250 to vote for the presidential candidate who better reflects the church’s values, “but never taking the candidate or party by name. We just ask them to watch the rallies on TV and see which candidate reflects our values.” But the way he tells it—in his repudiation of unrestricted abortion, for instance, and of “no-gender bathrooms, while I have three young granddaughters”—there can be little doubt that his flock voted Republican.
