The South Texas Democrat Who Will Sing at Your Quinceañera
On a recent Friday night in Edinburg, Texas, in a ballroom adorned with hundreds of blue and white flowers, the d.j. at Jimena Sáenz’s quinceañera took the mike and implored guests not to leave just yet. It was a few minutes after ten, and the hosts had arranged a big reveal for Jimena, an energetic ninth grader in a glittering powder-blue dress. There were more than a hundred and fifty people in the room, and dozens of them rose from their tables, as a mellow trumpet tune reverberated from the speakers. Jimena spun around to find Bobby Pulido, the famed Tejano singer, who’d materialized on the dance floor in a stiff cowboy hat and a navy blazer. He was there for a brief performance—two songs only, including his wistful ballad “Desvelado,” from 1995—but also to deliver a message, embroidered on a Barbie-pink trucker hat: “MAKE QUINCEAÑERAS GREAT AGAIN.”
“Make quinceañeras great again!” Pulido told the crowd, before scratching his signature onto the brim and handing it to Jimena, who pumped it in the air and shrieked with joy. The d.j. urged the guests, “Familia, salgan a votar por Bobby Pulido!” Family, come out and vote for Bobby Pulido!
Jimena Sáenz cannot vote, but her father, Jorge, a forty-seven-year-old plumber, has been weighing his options. He hasn’t voted since 2012, and considers himself an independent: he voted twice for George W. Bush and for Barack Obama. And although his family had invited Pulido to the party, he hadn’t made up his mind about this November’s midterm election. Pulido, a fifty-two-year-old Latin Grammy winner who’s appeared intermittently on Billboard charts since the mid-nineties, is running for Congress against the incumbent Republican Monica De La Cruz, who, in 2022, flipped Texas’s Fifteenth Congressional District, which had been held by Democrats for more than a century. After Pulido secured the Democratic nomination, in early March, De La Cruz posted a video saying that the election “isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera. It’s about who you trust with your family’s future.”
Abel Prado, Pulido’s campaign manager, remembers thinking, Did she really say that? Which gringo consultant wrote that? Within days, Pulido announced online that he would stop by quinceañeras in his district and perform for his potential constituents; as of early April, the campaign had received more than three thousand invitations. Now Pulido spends weekend nights careening between ornately decorated event halls in South Texas, warming up his vocal cords in his luxury white Chevrolet Suburban. He’s found that the parties are an advantageous—and cost-effective—way for him to meet voters. “They pay for the food, they pay for the place, they pay for the liquor, and you show up, and they’re happy,” Pulido told me.
Standing just off the dance floor, Jorge, dressed in a dark three-piece suit, said that he had been feeling like politics had gotten out of hand. He’d been seeing reports of stalled construction projects in the Rio Grande Valley, owing to federal authorities arresting immigrant workers. “It’s a domino effect,” he said. “For me, it hurts everybody at the end, and not just immigrants.” Pulido’s appearance lasted seven minutes, and he spent a few more obliging selfie seekers before departing for the night. But the Sáenz quinceañera—which Jorge said took at least two years to plan, and cost upward of fifteen thousand dollars—went until 6 A.M. on Saturday, and afterward the family invited guests back to their home to keep the party going. A few days later, I asked Jorge whether Pulido had won him over. He let out an uncertain “Ehhh.” “It’s a two-way street,” he said. “I know the base part of this deal is to try and get you to vote for him and whatnot, but the more important thing is what you bring into the plate.” He’d like to see a candidate who will help immigrants stay here legally, as Pulido has said he would, but he’s distrustful of politicians. “They tell you one thing and then they don’t even do half of what they say—or try to do at least half of what they say,” Jorge said.
Pulido hopes that his status as a regional celebrity will open the door to a lasting connection with voters. People in restaurants stop him for photos; on the highway, cars honk at him—one driver matched his speed so she could wave hello. “Make Quinceañeras Great Again” is an anti-Donald Trump slogan of sorts, but it also captures Pulido’s desire to wrest back a narrative about values—religion, patriotism, and family—that he thinks Republicans have “commandeered.” The rural district he’s vying to represent in Congress, he says, is the kind of place where people’s traditions double as a rebellion against change—“change” being a byword for Democrats. “In L.A., you see a robot on the sidewalk taking food, you know? You don’t see that kind of shit here,” Pulido mused in the car. “People would be, like, ‘What the hell is that?’ It’s just—people here, they just want to keep everything kind of normal. You know, they still like their trucks like that”—he gestured at a massive white pickup on the road in front of us—“and they want to play banda music and have it blaring on the speakers. That’s just the way they want to live.”
If Democrats have a prayer of flipping any House district this fall in deep-red Texas, it will likely be the Fifteenth, a strip of terrain between the borderlands of McAllen and the eastern outskirts of San Antonio. The district, which in 2024 was eighty-one per cent Hispanic, has been held up as evidence of the Latino shift to the G.O.P.: in 2022, De La Cruz, a former insurance agent who burnished her brand as both the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and a critic of Joe Biden’s border policies, won by nine points. In 2024, she won by fifteen. But, this year, Republicans in Washington have worried that Trump’s nationwide gains with Latinos in 2024 might be reversed, or at least diminished, by his crackdown on immigrants. “We’ve got a little hiccup with some of the Hispanic and Latino voters for certain because some of the immigration enforcement was viewed to be overzealous,” Speaker Mike Johnson said during a House G.O.P. retreat in Doral, Florida, in March. In a closed-door meeting at the retreat, James Blair, then a White House deputy chief of staff, urged House Republicans to emphasize the removal of immigrant criminals over “mass deportations,” Axios reported.
“It’s a good time for Bobby Pulido to run, if I’m going to be honest,” Daniel Garza, the president of the Koch-family-backed LIBRE Initiative and a senior advisor for a PAC called LIBRE Action, which turned out the vote for De La Cruz in the last two cycles, told me over coffee, in McAllen. The economy wasn’t as strong as some had hoped it would be, Republican agenda items were stalling in Congress, and Trump’s program of immigration enforcement, which didn’t include options for unauthorized immigrants to get their documents, risked alienating Latino voters. But that didn’t mean that Garza wanted the President to slow down. “I’ve said that—do not apologize for deporting criminals, the people who hate America,” he added.
Pulido has made immigration his cause célèbre. In early March, he’d just arrived in New York City for an event with the centrist political-action committee WelcomePAC when he learned that Antonio and Caleb Gámez-Cuéllar, two teen-age asylum seekers who were part of an award-winning high-school mariachi band in McAllen, had been detained by ICE during a scheduled check-in with their parents and younger brother. Pulido recorded a video calling for their release and accusing De La Cruz of not doing enough to help them. When the Gámez-Cuéllars were released, after a nearly two-week detention—Antonio had been incarcerated at a facility in Raymondville, while the rest of the family was held in Dilley—a friend of the family, Steve Cavazos, asked Pulido’s uncle (also his music manager) if he could borrow Pulido’s fifteen-person tour van to reunite them. Cavazos drove the van, vinyl-wrapped in “Bobby Pulido for Congress” signage, to a Whataburger in Raymondville. Antonio was waiting there with De La Cruz and her team, who had lobbied for the family’s release and picked him up from the detention center. Pulido was not there, but he enjoys recounting the story: “They just went blank, like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ ” (Cavazos, who has known Pulido for years, told me that De La Cruz and her team didn’t react in any visible way.) In a written statement, De La Cruz, declined to say whether she thought Trump’s immigration crackdown had gone too far, but noted that it should be focussed on “criminals and genuine threats to public safety.” “As for who gave them a ride,” she wrote of the family, “I’m just glad they’re home.”
Though he’s scathing in his criticisms of De La Cruz, Pulido, a self-styled conservative Democrat, is careful not to sound like a rabble-rouser. He supports immigration, but says that he doesn’t want migrants “in droves and caravans coming across the border illegally.” He follows Scott Galloway’s new-wave masculinity commentary, is personally opposed to abortion, and told me that he wouldn’t vote for an assault-weapons ban. (He’s hunted since he was a kid, and named his first-born son Remington.) He’s talked about how much cheaper it is for him to get health care on the other side of the border, in Mexico, than it is in Texas, and points out that he and Trump agree that insurance companies have become “too big and powerful.” Of his district’s previous Democratic candidate, the Bernie Sanders-endorsed Michelle Vallejo, Pulido said, “She got the Democratic nomination, but she ran on a progressive platform, in a conservative-drawn district. Square peg in a round hole, maybe?”
There’s also the fact that Republicans have out-organized Democrats in South Texas for decades. As soon as this summer, Garza said, he expected to rev up LIBRE’s operations to campaign for De La Cruz’s reëlection. He hires staff from local communities to train volunteers and activists who can spread the message through a massive voter database that tells them exactly which voters are worth contacting. “So you turn on the machine, right? But who’s the machinist? Es tu gente.” Democratic organizers pointed to LIBRE’s efforts in the region as a formidable engine that they haven’t quite matched, in either manpower or funding. Vallejo recalled that, at one point during the 2022 race, she turned on the local news and watched a flood of attack ads against her that left her wondering why national Democrats weren’t backing her up. “They just weren’t showing up, they weren’t spending the money, they weren’t talking to us,” she said. Juan Carlos Pinzon, the communications chief for the Texas Democrats, wrote in an e-mail that the Party is now funnelling more money than ever—thirty million dollars—into efforts to campaign across the state, with a “strong presence” in heavily Latino counties.
When I mentioned Pulido’s quinceañera tour to Garza, he rolled his eyes. “I get it, making this thing about family y todo, right?” he said. “But you’re more comfortable singing your songs to fifteen-year-olds than you are talking to me about what you’re going to do to lessen the tax burden.” Michael Mireles, the director of civic engagement for LUPE Votes, which endorsed Vallejo both times she ran, in 2022 and 2024, made a similar observation from the opposite direction. “What I would hate to see happen is that the political machine down here creates a template out of Bobby, where the Party is now just trying to find candidates who are appealing to voters outside of policy,” he said. “Then we’re kind of losing the point of the Party, right?”
For Ruben Gallego, the Democratic senator from Arizona, departing from the Party playbook may be a good thing. Gallego has been talking to Pulido about running for office since 2022, when the two spent time together in Texas and their conversation landed on how “we weren’t really doing the right outreach” to Latino men. Besides the name-recognition advantage, Gallego liked that Pulido didn’t “talk like a politician,” he told me recently, as he was arriving in Los Angeles to be a surrogate for the then congressman Eric Swalwell, who was running for governor of California. (Within the week, sexual-assault allegations levelled against Swalwell prompted the candidate to end his campaign and step down from Congress, while denying the allegations. On the day of Swalwell’s resignation, Gallego said that he had never seen his longtime friend engage in “predatory behavior.”) “We’ve been losing the Rio Grande Valley for so long,” Gallego said. “Like, maybe we should actually try something different, right? Why don’t we actually try to go where people are, versus expecting them to come to us?”
Democrats keep having to learn that their likably unpolished candidates might come with unlikably unpolished old social-media posts. Pulido’s opponents have seized on crude and sexist remarks he’s made online in the past, which he says he regrets. During one of our conversations, he described, in detail, an old comment that had resurfaced: he said that a soccer game in which one team was beating the other badly “should be on Pornhub.” I had the sense he was watching my face, possibly for a sign of amusement. “Bad joke, O.K., whatever—you don’t have to laugh at it, right?” he said. “But what does that have to do with health care or the water crisis, or immigration, or any of the other things that people really, really, really are clamoring for?” Days later, the New York Post reported that Pulido had continued to perform for years with a bandmate who was a registered sex offender and who went to prison for indecent contact with an eight-year-old girl. Prado, the campaign manager, said in a statement that Pulido was never “made aware” of the sex-offender status, and that he “would never knowingly associate with anyone with that kind of history”; when his management company learned of the accordionist’s history, in 2021, Prado wrote, “he was immediately fired and that relationship was severed.” Of Pulido, De La Cruz told me, “Voters will ultimately conclude that he’s a silver-spooned celebrity who’s out of touch with our families.”
Many Democrats have concluded that it’ll take a relatively unconventional, homegrown figure to win in a part of the country that has defied their expectations—an area whose residents have variously broken for Hillary Clinton, Beto O’Rourke, and Trump. In Alice, Texas, I accompanied Pulido to a live-streamed interview with a local influencer named David Ramos, who runs a news-and-gossip Facebook page called El Chisme 361, and whose own political affiliations have transformed many times over. Ramos, a voluble forty-year-old bar manager with a brambly beard, from San Diego, Texas, was a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2016, then went to prison for transporting undocumented immigrants—“I used to be an illegal Uber,” he said—and became a Trump supporter after listening to conservative A.M. radio while incarcerated.
Lately, Ramos said, he’s not happy with Trump’s policies, particularly his support for Israel and his Administration’s separation of undocumented families. Ramos likes Pulido because he’s conservative, and because he feels like Pulido is a straight-talker, answering questions without needing to look up information. At one point in the interview, which was streamed to Ramos’s thirty-four-thousand Facebook followers, Pulido asserted that detention centers were profiting from prolonged incarceration of immigrants: “You gotta buy your own water; you gotta pay for your own phone calls. It’s a big business,” Pulido said. “And I can vouch for that, Bobby,” Ramos said. “I don’t know if I told you, but I’ve done time.”
After concluding that interview, greeting some voters, and posing for some portraits, Pulido climbed back into his S.U.V., took off the cowboy hat, and threw on a neck pillow. He was asleep some fifteen minutes later, when his driver (who also used to drive him around on tour) turned the engine over. “We ready?” Pulido said, as he startled awake. A communications staffer informed him that Telemundo would be covering his next stop, the first quinceañera of the night. “Once I get a little nap,” Pulido said, half yawning, “I’m cool.” The driver turned into the venue’s parking lot as Pulido did more vocal warmps, blowing air through his lips. “Are they just getting here?” he wondered aloud. “There’s not that many people.” The staffer interjected that Telemundo was ready for him.
Without missing a beat, Pulido replied, “Give me my hat, please.” ♦
