When asked to define “boredom,” the first word to come to Representative Mary E. Gonzalez was “nonexistence.” This tireless crusader, for better agriculture and civil rights, is a self-professed overachiever currently working on completing her Ph.D., even as the representative of one of the fastest growing sections of El Paso.
From her humble rural upbringing as the oldest of 11 on a farm in Clint to her rise as one of the most polarizing political figures to come out of Texas mostly because of her over-publicized pansexual identification, her life has been a struggle to bridge perception with reality.
In hindsight, did your upbringing on the farm benefit you in your political career?
I’m a Democrat, but most Democrats come from urban areas when you look at who gets elected to the state legislature. But here you have me: this hybrid rural-urban person, who grew up partially in the city, but mostly in the country, who understands how to castrate a pig and understands crop rotation with this agricultural component, which is really important in a state like Texas. Now, you get to request to be on your committees, and I requested to be on the Agriculture and Livestock Committee. Why? It’s important to my district and it’s important for a Democrat to know what’s going on, and I’ve grown up with it my entire life. You have to imagine that they only know what they’ve ever read about me. I show up in these very urban outfits, these big hoop earrings, my hair is all flowy and the idea of me being a cowgirl is so far removed from the physical representation that I have.
So, politically it’s given me a niche to create some level of awareness in the Democratic Party. Think about it: what happens to a county when they cease to produce vegetables? They go to the next county to get it. And if that county stops? They have to go to the next one and then to the next state, next they’d have to go to the next country. The problem with that is that we don’t know what the next state or country is putting into our fruits and vegetables. The best way for us to have healthy lifestyles is to know what’s happening with our food, having direct access to it. If we continue to put agriculture out to the margins, we’re putting our food products out to the margins.
The second way it helped me is that if gave me something to talk about with Republicans. They. All. Love. Their. Beef. And they love talking about their steers. And who can talk to them about it? Mary Gonzalez. It builds a bridge, it humanizes me beyond what they had read before about me.
You were tweeting from the Senate floor during the famous Wendy Davis filibuster. Can you describe the scene that day?
I was there in and out the whole day. I left to go to class for a little while, but it was probably one of the most amazing experiences in my life. You’re inspired by someone who’s doing this amazing thing and you can see the injustice in their faces. The Republicans were consistently breaking rules to pass this legislation. It was really powerful.
But as frustrating as it was, it continued to light that spark of why we need to have more Democrats in office. When they were breaking rules that blatantly, it was so awful.
During that following special session, you spoke on the floor giving a speech that gained you a lot of praise on social media. Can you share some of the things you touched on in your speech?
The frustrating part about this bill is that it’s not just an abortion bill, it’s an omnibus bill. It covers everything: from abortion centers, to doctor’s privileges to FDA compliance. The amount of things in this piece is extreme and far-reaching. Now, what my main concern was, and I repeated this over and over again, is that women have a legal right to have an abortion, whether or not you believe in it.
It would close all abortion clinics but five across the state. This state has 27 million people and to limit them to five, is completely outrageous. You’re basically forcing women to: A. turn to black market measures or B. go to Juarez, Mexico to get an abortion. I’ve already had experiences of family members dying because of having illegal abortions in Juarez. The problem is people, specifically men on the House floor, they talk about this situation in an isolated bubble. One of the things that I’ve learned on the House floor is that I don’t know the experiences of Rep. Trent Ashby, or the people who live in his district nor do I know the experiences of Rep. Harold Dutton from Houston and the people in his district. I only know the experiences of people in my district. So I stood up there and told them that what you’re doing is basically telling women in my district to travel over a thousand miles to have a safe, legal procedure or go to Juarez where A. there’s still violence and B. you have to have a panel of a doctor, a lawyer and a priest in order to give them an abortion. You’re clearly making it inaccessible to them. Out of all the components in the bill, the one about the closures is the one I had the biggest problem with.
The second thing that I spoke of, which is what most people responded to on Twitter, is that I got really offended that the supporters of the bill wouldn’t even allow for a rape and incest exemption.
The problem is when they talk about these women who need this exemption in the abstract, it was really aggravating because when you talk in the abstract, it’s really easy to discredit or ignore. So I wanted to humanize it. So I told my story, as a survivor of years of child sexual abuse. And I’m not even going to lie, I gave my speech, I walked off the floor, I went into the kitchen where the cook is my friend, thank God, and I cried.
The public hears one thing. There’s a whole different conversation happening with members on the floor and that’s what’s most irritating. It’s what they really say that’s not being recorded. So, people don’t understand that I had to tell my story. But did I take that risk because there was that much on the line? Yeah. But no one will ever know how much of a personal sacrifice that is to tell that personal story.
What’s next for you?
My immediate plans are that I’m finishing my Ph.D. I have this amazing project and I’m so excited. I have all this energy to write. Also, I’ve launched my own consulting company so I’m trying to get that off the ground.
Are there poems, songs, movies or other works of art that every time you experience them, you get this reaction of, “It gets me every time?”
“In the Time of the Butterflies” about the Bolivian sisters who sacrifice their lives for revolution. Really powerful. I think movies and poems that talk about struggle are great. “This Bridge Called My Back” (edited by Moraga and Anzaldua) talks about the struggle of living with another perspective. “Frida,” a story about a queer artist. One of the things I struggle with the most is being different people in so many different spaces. In some spaces I’m this queer, Chicana activist. In other spaces, I’m this Clint cowgirl. Those two worlds don’t really intersect, so I’ve got to decide which world I’m in now, and that’s the hardest part. It’s a feeling of wanting to be both but never getting to be both.
Wouldn’t you say that being in the House gives you chance to be both? To legislate for both of those sides of you?
I guess you’re right. The only space I’ve ever been able to be completely be myself is the House, which is ironic because it would probably be the least likely place I could be to be all of myself.
TXT: JOHN DEL ROSARIO | PHOTO: CHAD W. ADAMS