This is the first book in political science to focus specifically on the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and Latino racial exclusion, and is thus an important new treatise about the limitations of U.S. democracy and systematic disempowerment of minority voters. Latinos and the Voting Rights Act analyzes Texas legislative politics and federal court proceedings, during that state’s long period of federal VRA oversight between 1965 and 2013, with a focus on recent litigation. Henry Flores’s empirical, historical, and legal analysis is enriched by his personal experience as expert witness in two transformational voting rights lawsuits, one of which challenged Texas’s 2011 legislative and congressional redistricting, the other of which involved efforts to block the state’s restrictive voter identification law (Senate Bill 14), also passed in 2011. Informed by his own courtroom experiences and deep understanding of Texas political history, while incorporating both quantitative and qualitative methods, Flores outlines a promising new approach to the puzzle of racial intent, giving practical advice for scholars, litigators, and advocates, as well as theoretical and methodological insights to guide future research.

It is impossible to understand recent voting rights litigation in Texas without knowing the context of that state’s unique history of racial segregation and disfranchisement in which Mexicans, as much as African Americans, have been the excluded “other.” Flores tells a compelling story of white racial power in Texas—and of the organized black and Latino resistance that has always challenged it. Two weeks before Brown v. Board of Education, for example, the Supreme Court ruled for the Latino plaintiff in Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475 (1954), finding that Texas jury trials were unconstitutional because they systematically excluded Mexican Americans as jurors. Hernandez formally extended Fourteenth Amendment protections to Mexican Americans, establishing them as a protected group under federal law. In subsequent years, beginning with White v. Regester (1973), Latinos in Texas used their status under Hernandez to bring more than two hundred voting rights lawsuits against the state, and Flores reports that between 1975 and 2013, Texas saw more Section 5 (preclearance) objections under the Voting Rights Act than any other state. In effect, the author argues, the Texas political system, dominated by conservative white officials suspicious of Mexican American and African American political empowerment, had a long history of manipulating electoral rules, district lines, and voting requirements in order to preserve white control over every aspect of the state’s political institutions.

The book, however, does more than simply tell the story of racial bias in one state’s political history and legislative process. Through a multimethod analysis focused on Latino voting rights, and detailed explication of recent court rulings, the author provides a contemporary narrative and theoretical counterpoint that complements existing literature, such as Morgan Kousser’s (1999) Colorblind Injustice and Bernard Grofman and Chandler Davidson’s (1992) Controversies in Minority Voting. As in those seminal works, Flores marshals evidence from political behavior, social history, and legislative politics. The book contributes to the voting rights canon by explaining how an otherwise elusive racial intent, motivating legislative action, can be demonstrated through application of hybrid social-scientific/legal analysis, following a schema defined by the U.S. Supreme Court—with a set of 11 investigative areas now known as the Arlington Heights Factors. In deciding a 1977 case about racial bias in housing—Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Development Corporation—the Court ruled that in order to prevail on complaints of racial bias, plaintiffs must prove racially discriminatory intent, not simply that outcomes have discriminatory effects. To guide federal judges in future instances, the Court listed categories of evidence that would constitute proof of racial purpose. No single factor could be sufficient, but the cumulative picture painted by multiple factors would show the existence of racial intentions and justify finding for aggrieved plaintiffs.

In their initial form, the Arlington Heights factors called for evidence about disproportionate direct impacts; communications demonstrating racial purpose; circumstantial evidence, including historical records; disparate social impacts, including inequitable costs; disparate patterns, unexplainable except by racial differences; historical background; decisional chronology; significant departures from normal procedures; departure between stated (nonracial) goals and actual outcomes; official records with explicit racial commentary; and other factors, or alia, including for example, prior litigation.

From this framework arises the key innovation of this book: Flores’s application of the Court-mandated Arlington Heights principles, adapted for social-scientific use. It is one thing to satisfy scientific standards of proof, as used in political science, and quite another to convince federal courts that laws were adopted or amended with deliberate racial intent—even when that intent is masked behind code words, what Flores calls “racial shields,” the euphemistic explanations of legislative intent, devoid of explicit racial content, which have come to define discrimination and segregation in post–Civil Rights American politics and law. The main difference is that courtroom disputes over evidence, meaning, and impact frequently feature evenly matched legal contestants, expert witnesses all around, sharp cross-examination under oath, rules of evidence and significance defined by centuries of precedent and interpretation, and the presence of a single authoritative judge, or panel of judges, around whom, and at the discretion of whom, arguments and evidentiary judgments revolve. Latinos and the Voting Rights Act provides guidance for social scientists, explaining how in general, more demanding evidentiary standards of constitutional litigation can facilitate rigorous hypothesis testing, and generate robust findings about the existence of racial bias in public policy. These are critically important contributions in the nation’s current political context, in which a wide range of racially disparate outcomes, in virtually every area of social policy, are facing new challenges on the streets and in the courtroom.

Flores, however, also argues that racially disparate outcomes, and the nature of racial intent that fosters them, function differently for Latinos, as compared to African Americans. Yet the American jurisprudential system, and its key voting rights and racial bias decisions, are grounded in a dualistic black–white model of race relations. Similarly, much of the social science literature on race and race relations is based on historical and social analysis of the black experience, even when those experiences are significantly different for Latinos. Latinos, the author argues, have a different history, experience different types of discrimination, and are perceived and treated differently than any other racial group. He identifies two levels of Latino identity—one based on survey data, in which respondents choose among several ethnoracial categories (defined by researchers or officials) and another, deeper form, a political and legal identity, which, he says, separates full citizenship from partial citizenship.

For Latinos, many of whom are racially mixed, conventional racial categories fail to capture important differences of culture, immigration status, and class, which are subjectively more meaningful and politically more salient. Yet courts have rarely acknowledged such distinctions. In the recent Shelby County v. Holder (2013) decision, for example, which undermined the evidentiary foundations of the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirements, the Supreme Court imposed national standards based on purported improvements in the black political experience, ignoring conditions in Texas, whose historic suppression of Latino voting and officeholding was never considered in Shelby, even as that decision has already begun to unravel civil rights protections achieved only after exhaustive recent documentation of continuing racial bias.

For its detailed discussion of key courtroom debates, rich history of Latino voting rights and discrimination in Texas, and theoretical and methodological contributions, Latinos and the Voting Rights Act is likely to become an essential reference for scholars and practitioners of voting rights politics and litigation for many years to come.