When representative Greg Casar won his election in 2022, he became the first Latino to represent the Texas capital city of Austin in the US House of Representatives. 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.
