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On Election Day, Christy Martinez-Garcia, the founder and publisher of Latino Lubbock , a bilingual monthly, stayed up late to post results on the magazine’s Facebook page. Local returns weren’t expected to come until 4:30am, so it was a long day. But decisions in statewide races were clear much sooner. Democrats James Talarico, the nominee for United States Senate, and Gina Hinojosa, the gubernatorial candidate, won handily, upending decades of Republican dominance in Texas. Talarico is the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in the state since 1988; Hinojosa, Texas’s first Democratic governor to be elected since 1990, will become the state’s first Hispanic governor. “I was like, ‘Wow,’” Martinez-Garcia told me, “‘we are living history.’”

Lubbock, a traditionally red city in West Texas home to roughly two hundred and fifty thousand people, nearly 40 percent of whom are Latino, remained a Republican stronghold.…