Kaye Koonce

One night, when James Talarico was still a baby, his mother packed their things into a little Ford Escort (this is so Texas!) and drove to the hotel where she worked. His father had become violent again. Tamara asked the hotel manager if she and her baby could stay in one of the rooms. The manager agreed, and they stayed at the hotel until Tamara found a small apartment in East Austin. Sadly, there was no room for a nursery, so she put James’s crib in her closet. Then she decorated it with toys and pictures. Years later, when James told the story, he said his mother was proud of that closet. As far as she was concerned, she had made her son a nursery. Tamara was a preacher’s daughter from Laredo. She had left home at 19 and moved to Austin, where she met James’s biological father. James was barely a year old when she left him. She later met a man named Mark Talarico, who adopted James and gave him the last name that appeared on the Texas ballot. Isitoshe, At church in North Austin, they knew him as Jimmy. A pastor who met him when he was in kindergarten remembered him putting on puppet shows with another pastor. Years later, James was back in a room full of children, this time as the sixth-grade language arts teacher at Rhodes Middle School on the west side of San Antonio. You may have heard him say in his speeches “if you can be a middle school teacher, politics is easy….” When James ran for the Texas House in 2018, he talked about the families of the children he had taught. When he ran for the U.S. Senate, he shared an old photo of himself with his mother. It was taken in that little East Austin apartment, back when the two of them had just started over. On Tuesday night, in the same city where his mother once asked a hotel manager for a room, James Talarico walked onto a stage as Texas’s senator-elect at the age of 37 The last time Texas elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate, Tamara’s little boy had not been born yet. May the day break