By admin 
This November, Bobby Pulido is trying to flip a Republican congressional seat blue, right on the Texas border. That would be reason enough to talk to him. But he was famous way before politics—Pulido is a Tejano star, a 1990s teen idol, a Tejano Backstreet Boy before there were the Backstreet Boys.
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He’s also a lifelong resident of the Rio Grande Valley: “My dad was a migrant farmworker, and so was his dad. We don’t come from generational wealth,” he said. “Latinos and Hispanics in South Texas are the embodiment of the American dream.”
Over the years, he has watched friends and neighbors pivot from the Democratic Party to the GOP. Donald Trump’s inroads with Latino voters were one of the surprises of his 2024 victory, as he carried places like South Texas’ 15th District. But Pulido thinks those gains are temporary, and that Democrats have a chance, with sensible policies, to retake the district and Congress.
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For him, immigration enforcement is a top priority. “President Obama did crack down on it, that’s a fact,” he said. “But I think under Biden, it got really out of hand.” With Trump, he says, “We went from ‘Let them all in’ to ‘Kick them all out.’ And neither one of the two things work.”
On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Pulido about what Democrats misunderstand about South Texas and whether he’s singing the right tune for Congress. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: I was wondering why you would run for office. You’re a well-known Tejano singer. You probably don’t need to do much of anything if you don’t want to.
Bobby Pulido: I was a political science major in college. I was a Texas Boys Stater in high school. Government and social studies and Texas history were my favorite subjects. I wanted to do this.
You’re running in Texas’ 15th District, a district that Donald Trump won by nearly 18 points in 2024. Redistricting may have made it a smidge Trumpier, but it relies on the Latino vote remaining in the GOP’s favor. And my assumption is that part of the reason you got into this race is that you were beginning to see signs that that was not going to hold. I’m curious what those first signs were to you.
I was talking to lots of people during this cycle—even the cycle before, as it was going right since ’23. Lots of my friends were voting red. And, listen, I’ve always been a blue-dog Democrat.
I was going to ask about that, whether you always considered yourself a Democrat.
I always have.
You have all these things that don’t read as Democrat. You’re known for long-range shooting. You named your eldest son Remington, after the rifle. You’re not a traditionally coded Democrat.
That’s based on a newer version of what a Democrat is. See, I never changed. I’ve been the same type. All the people that used to vote Democrat are like me, and they started voting red. When I would talk to them, the one thing that jumped out at me was that they didn’t like the leftward shift on a lot of Democratic policies.
Like what?
Oh, jeez, like guns. Listen, we’re on the border. My district covers 11 counties, and 10 of the counties other than the Rio Grande Valley are rural. Firearms are not viewed the same way in the city as they are in the country.
How are they seen differently? As sport and protection?
Both. It’s an independence. When you’re out in the country, first of all, there’s no traffic. You’re not dealing with a lot of people to begin with. You can drive faster if you want to. I’m not advocating for speeding, but you’re not bound by the confines of traffic, where you have a stoplight at every block. It’s a different way of life. And yes, there’s less things to do. When you’re out in these rural areas, the thing where you go out the most, to get dressed, is to go to church on Sunday. A lot of the sports that you practice, whether that be hog hunting, coyote hunting, or just hunting, they’re associated with firearms. Down here in the Valley, the No. 1 fundraiser for Democratic events are skeet shoots. I can’t make this up. You shoot, and there’s sporting clays. Gun sports are a way of life.
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I saw an old interview with Chuck Schumer talking about: “We’ll take the city vote over the rural votes because I’ll take those 2-to-1.” That was a huge mistake. I’m insulted by hearing him say that, because if I look down the road, in 2030, California and New York are going to lose congressional seats to Texas and Florida, because people are moving out to the rural areas because it’s cheaper to live. As a Democrat, if we want to make people’s lives better and not let these batshit crazy people like Trump get in there, we’re going to have to moderate on some issues to understand rural folk a little better.
What happened was when the Green New Deal was promoted—the oil and gas business, it’s probably one of the best-paying jobs in my district, and it got really politicized, where it was like, “They’re going to take away your job.” That’s how it was being sold: The Democrats were going to take away your jobs. You’re not going to be able to provide for your family.
So when did you see it turn back? You’re saying you saw a lot of your friends flip or maybe express more GOP-coded opinions in terms of how they were voting. When do you see that change back to maybe thinking there was an opportunity here?
It wasn’t a switch. I was talking to people, and they would say, “Look, Bobby, I’m voting Republican, but you’re my kind of Democrat. I would vote for you because you’re not batshit crazy.” Because they painted Democrats as very radical, and it worked.
How much did immigration play a role? Even back in February, I was looking at Politico, for instance, writing about your district specifically and talking about how Republican Monica De La Cruz, your opponent, was all of a sudden like, “Oh, no, I need to moderate my opinions here,” because people in her district were.
Well, here’s the thing: Immigration is really a two-tiered issue down here. One thing is the border, and the other is enforcement in the streets. There’s a difference. The border got really chaotic with asylum-seekers. Now, the diaspora in the Rio Grande Valley and South Texas in general is Mexican, Mexican American. Mexican Americans cannot claim political asylum because you’re in a neighboring country. So, historically, most of the people here, their grandfather or their great-grandfather crossed the border illegally, undocumented, and they ran away from the Border Patrol and had to figure out life on their own. And it was like, hey, I’ve got to cut yards, I’ve got to do whatever I can to provide for my family.
Yeah, you talked about your grandfather being like, “I was so proud I never took a penny from the government.” So you’re talking about the same kind of spirit.
That’s exactly right. That was the spirit of my grandfather, and that’s the spirit of this region. We’re proud people. Probably our forte is that we work really hard and we’ll figure it out.
What you started seeing is when the asylum process started getting overwhelmed, it was catch and release. An asylum-seeker would not run away from a Border Patrol agent—they would run to them and say, “I want to declare political asylum.” It was backlogged, so they would fly them in-country to wherever they wanted to go. I want to make clear that it’s not my view, but the sentiment I was hearing often was: “I see everybody here at the airport flying wherever the hell they want. My grandfather couldn’t do that.” And it really pissed people off.
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Well, a lot of Latinos at the border work in enforcement too.
That’s true. There’s a lot of people working in Border Patrol and law enforcement, and they were really angry with the Biden administration. That had a lot to do with why the shift happened so big. And what’s happening now, with the enforcement in the streets, is I’ve got Republicans who go: “My gardener’s gone, and I can’t find anybody to cut my yard or clean my house, or build houses.” There was a housing bill that Trump refused to sign that went in because, after the 10-day period, it became law. That makes no change down here if you don’t have a workforce. There’s not a building in the Rio Grande Valley that was built without immigrant labor. Not one. I don’t care what anybody wants to tell me. I will argue that to the day I die.
I think that a lot of people might make the assumption that a Latino population might look at images of people on the street being captured by ICE, what we’re seeing now, and have a very emotional reaction to it, which I’m sure they are as well, but you’re really framing a lot of the concerns as economic.
It’s both. I will tell you, I’ve led with the humanitarian thing. It breaks my heart to see the things that are happening. And here’s the other thing: People don’t really understand us down here, but the Rio Grande Valley is a lot of mixed-status families. Recently, a friend of mine, a three-time Trump voter, 65 years old, eighth-generation Texan from an oil and gas family—I was there years ago when he met his now wife, who was an immigrant. They came over, she overstayed her visa, they met, they fell in love. They have an 8-year-old American daughter. He’s trying to get her papers, and there was a technicality in there—she had crossed over and not said it and is getting deported. My friend is going to have to leave the country, and potentially, like he says, die in a country that’s not his. The thing that people are not really taking into account is it’s affecting everybody here. This is not us vs. them. It’s affecting our community.
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