BEEVILLE — To hear Leticia Van de Putte tell it, her long-shot campaign for lieutenant governor is all about IOUs.
In nearly every stump speech, the Democratic state senator from San Antonio builds to an emotional finish by recounting her maternal great-grandmother Porfiria Estrada’s plea to God more than seven decades ago.
“She made the promise that if her sons returned from World War II safely that she would go from her house to her church on her knees in thanksgiving,” Van de Putte recalled at a rally in her hometown last week.
Like many Hispanics, Estrada believed that you have to hold up your end of such a bargain, or “cumplir la promesa,” as Van de Putte tells audiences, splicing English with Spanish phrases.
When sons Juan “Johnny” Estrada and Nicolas “Nick” Estrada — Van de Putte’s great-uncles — completed tours of duty, respectively, in Europe and the Pacific theater, Porfiria Estrada made front-page news in the San Antonio Light.
The May 8, 1945, edition has a photograph of her in the midst of a six-block crawl to her Roman Catholic parish in San Antonio, assisted by Van de Putte’s mother, Belle, and Belle’s sister.
“The neighbors were coming and putting towels [on the sidewalk], sheets and things so she wouldn’t get her knees dirty and bloody,” Van de Putte said. “But she did. And she went in thanksgiving.”
The senator said that last year, 61 percent of the more than 5 million public school students in Texas were on free- or reduced-price lunch programs. For many, English is a second language.
Van de Putte said her promesa is to raise young Texans’ educational attainment.
“That is so Texan that we want the next generation to have better opportunities than we did,” she said.
Follow Robert T. Garrett on Twitter at @RobertTGarrett.
