Four Myths About Politics in the South Valley of Doña Ana County

The South Valley of Doña Ana County has always been something of a mystery to Las Crucens, to say nothing of people North of I-40.  Rumors, sometimes confirmed, of lap-dancer videos and blackmail, political bosses buying or selling votes, or the city being taken over by the state, have plagued the image of Sunland Park for many years.  Anthony has not suffered from a black image, but perhaps even worse, has been all but completely ignored as a vital corner of the county, a black hole somewhere under the freeway on the way to El Paso.  Part of the problem is that Texas and New Mexico blend into each other without official notice:  the river is not often the dividing line, all the way to Sunland, and Anthony Texas is across the street from Anthony NM.  Santa Teresa lies somewhere in the misty clouds of the contemporary US-Mexico border imaginary, sometimes aggrandized as the biggest economic development project in the state, sometimes consigned to the trash heap of failure, water always being a prime but murky motivator.

I will leave painting a more realistic big picture of the DAC South Valley for another time, and confine myself here to putting some perspective simply on the electoral value of this region.

Where is the South Valley?  Definitions are always arbitrary, but for heuristic purposes I have counted 20 of the 120 DAC voting precincts as comprising the South Valley.  I start with Mesilla, but not Mesilla Park, throw in Tortugas and Pecan Valley, and then go South, without including Chaparral (which I consider, culturally, to be a piece of Otero or El Paso County that drifted into the waters of DAC by mistake).  Chaparral is worthy of discussion, but that will also come later.

Myth No. 1:  The South Valley is where Chope's is, and then you hit Sunland Park and the Racino, surrounded by pecan farms, lightly populated.  Not very important politically.  A counter-myth (see below) is that without the South Valley Democrats would be wildly outnumbered by Republicans in the county, so it is vital to the Democratic Party.

The Truth:  The South Valley contains a little more than one fifth of the population of the county.  It contains, to be exact, about 21.5% of the registered voters of the county.  Is that important?  Read on.

Myth No. 2:  People don't vote in the South Valley. They don't register, and if they do they don't go out to vote.  Politically, they are weaker than their potential numbers

The Truth:  Turnout numbers in the South Valley are almost exactly what you would expect, given voter registration numbers.  In the 2016 presidential elections, the South Valley comprised 21.7% of the county's registered voters, and provided 20.7% of the number of votes cast in the county for president, a very small under-vote.  Voter turnout in the South Valley is not significantly different from the rest of the county.

Myth No 3:  Without the South Valley Democrats couldn't win races in DAC.

The Truth:  Democratic performance is clearly stronger in the South Valley than in the county as a whole.  For example, Hillary took the South Valley with 68% of all votes cast for President (remember this includes Gary Johnson and Mickey Mouse); The rest of the county--not counting the South Valley--gave Hillary only 50.0% of the vote.  Stated slightly differently, one-on-one with Trump, Hillary won with 73% in the South Valley.  In the rest of the county Hillary got 56.3% of the Hillary-Trump vote.  So, in that race, the South Valley outperformed the rest of the county by about 17 points.  Seventeen points is certainly enough to make the difference in many cases between a candidate winning the county and losing.

Myth No. 4:  People in the South Valley are first generation Mexicans, who only speak Spanish and aren't citizens so that's why (see myth no. 2) they don't vote.

The Truth:  The US Census shows about 15% of Doña Ana County were born in Mexico.  And out of the entire Hispanic population in the county, about 22% were born in Mexico.  In the Gadsden Independent School District (roughly the DAC South Valley) 97% of the student population is Hispanic, and 33%% of all students are English Language Learners, "unable to communicate fluently or learn effectively in English…"  So only about one third of the parents are likely to have been born in Mexico or, possibly, in El Paso, where Spanish is essentially a native language.  In any event, as we saw in Myth No. 2, above, voter turnout among registered voters is virtually the same as the rest of the county, in spite of the high number of Spanish speakers among voters.  Speaking Spanish at home, in other words, is not a hindrance to the propensity to vote or otherwise exercise citizenship.

Incidentally, in spite of the large number of english languag learners, Gadsden Independent School District student performance lies in the top third of all 89 school districts in the state, in comparison with the Las Cruces School District, whose students perform deep into the bottom half.  This is a remarkable achievement for one of the most impoverished districts in the state.