FOR "LA MENTIROSA" MAYRA FLORES, THE BIG LIE BECOMES BIGGER

By Juan Montoya

Here we go again with Mayra Flores claiming that "we worked in the cotton fields" when her family immigrated from Burgos, Tamaulipas to South Texas in the Rio Grande Valley in 1992, six years after she was born there in 1986.

Her pitch to voters is filled with folksy homilies such as "Honest work for honest pay," and "Biden-Harris are destroying the American Dream." In one ad she states that while she briefly occupied the U.S. House of Representatives District 34 seat, you could buy the same amount of groceries during her six-month stint at the House than you can now under Vicente Gonzalez today, two years later.

She assumed office on June 21, 2022. She left office on January 3, 2023, but her ads overlook that fact and say that the price of taco ingredients rose during Gonzalez term which started in January 3, 2023. 

This is, of course, bullshit.

Look at the taco ad at right. 

Yes, taco ingredients probably rose – just like everything else due to the pandemic and resultant supply line issues.

 But even more telling is the deception in the small print. It says that the price change occurred from May 2021 to May 2022, a month before she took office (June 21, 2022), seven months before Gonzalez beat her and took office on January 2023. 

They reflect price changes that occurred in a period that included the last two months of Filemon Vela's tenure there. In fact, the position was left vacant after Vela resigned from March 31, 2022 –June 21, 2022. 

In other words, the ad is deliberately deceiving by blaming her opponent for price hikes that occurred before he, or she, took office.

I believe in truth in advertising and I must confess that I find her claims that "we worked in the cotton fields, honest work for honest pay" personally offensive. You see, I was just 12 or 13 ( in 1966 or 67) when I picked cotton along Military Highway and the machines started taking over the harvests. The cotton pickers were used to pick the cotton that was left on the plants after harvesters trashed them. "Pepenando," we called it. If there was little money to be made before, there were slim pickings after the machines came in. Like many other Mexican-American families in South Texas, we joined the migrant stream to harvest crops in the Midwest.

This was  before 1969, and I may be stretching it. If anyone worked in the fields after that, it may have been the thinners, who came in and "thinned" the plants to allow them to grow. The thinners labored the whole day bent over wearing knee guards and their fingers were turned dark green at the end of the day after pulling the tough, young shoots. Soon thereafter even that was mechanized.

Mayra was born in Burgos in 1986. She says she came to Texas and then to the Rio Grande Valley six years later in 1992 and graduated from high school (at 18) around 2004. By that time, the cotton crop was thinned and harvested through mechanization since at least 1970, easily 16 years before she was even born. 

In her earlier ads, she claimed that she had picked cotton in the Rio Grande Valley while she was in San Benito High school (from 2000 to 2004) to pay for her shoes and clothes while she was in high school.

Those claims – after they were challenged – have been dropped for the more generic "we worked in the cotton fields" claim that I would also challenge as false.

That lie, as I stated, is offensive to me as it is to other South Texas residents who really worked picking cotton in the fields. In the case of people claiming to have received medals (such as a purple heart) they would be accused of stolen valor.

In Mayra's case, it is a case of stolen labor and stolen cultural work ethic. It is ours, not hers.