Lina Hidalgo’s Political Rise
“There’s an earnestness to her,” the progressive activist Ross Morales Rocketto says, of Hidalgo. “People mistake that for being naïve—and they make that mistake at their own peril.”Photograph from Alamy
On a recent Wednesday morning, Lina Hidalgo, the chief executive of Harris County, Texas, visited the Greater Pure Light Church, in northeast Houston. In front of the church—a sand-colored building with colonnades and a white steeple—a half-dozen people awaited Hidalgo, who arrived in a Chevy Tahoe with a pair of security guards. A petite woman of thirty, with an orb of black curls and a no-nonsense demeanor, Hidalgo rose to fame in 2018, after narrowly defeating Ed Emmett, an eleven-year incumbent, who is four decades her senior. Critics questioned whether she had the experience to lead Texas’s largest county, with a population of more than four and a half million and a budget of five billion dollars. During her first eighteen months in office, she has reimagined the role of a county executive, managed multiple crises, enacted progressive reforms, and gained popular support, all the while fending off a steady stream of criticism of her youth, ambition, gender, and ethnicity. The pandemic dominated Hidalgo’s tenure and mired her in political controversy for more than a year, but she has emerged from it as one of Texas’s rising Democratic stars.