"Chiquita, Pero Picosa!": De La Cruz Tells Rockport Crowd Her Redrawn District Could Decide House Control

U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Texas, campaigned before local supporters at Jayroe's Bistro here this week, telling the crowd that her race in the newly redrawn 15th Congressional District will help decide control of the U.S. House this November.

De La Cruz was introduced by state Sen. Adam Hinojosa, R-Corpus Christi, who represents Senate District 27 and told the audience he had worked alongside her since before her first campaign. Hinojosa, elected in 2024 as the first Republican to hold his Senate seat since Reconstruction, said mid-decade congressional redistricting had shifted Rockport out of U.S. Rep. Michael Cloud's district and into De La Cruz's.

De La Cruz, first elected in 2022, told the crowd she had no political background before running for Congress, describing herself as a mother of two, a business owner and a former State Farm insurance agent in the Rio Grande Valley. She said she got involved in politics after becoming frustrated with government regulation of small businesses and cited the 2019 "Trump train" movement in South Texas as her entry point.

She said she was later summoned to the White House, where she said President Donald Trump asked South Texas Republicans to expand their gains through redistricting. The resulting map, she said, gave her district an 80 percent new voter base and was designed to help Republicans hold the U.S. House by a narrow margin.

De La Cruz described her seat as the top target nationally for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and said internal polling conducted a few months ago showed her leading her opponent by one percentage point. She did not name her Democratic opponent during her remarks but accused him of being associated with a registered sex offender and of holding what she called "communist socialist" views, without offering further detail or evidence. She pointed to a Democratic Socialist candidate's recent win in a Michigan election as evidence of a broader leftward shift nationally.

De La Cruz also addressed transgender rights and law enforcement funding, framing the November election as a choice between what she called conservative values and "socialistic ideology."

She closed her remarks with a personal story about her son, who she said told her he had come to understand her time in Washington after watching congressional proceedings on C-SPAN. She urged attendees to make additional phone calls and canvass their neighbors ahead of the election, saying, "Chiquita, pero picosa," a Spanish phrase she translated as "we're tiny, but we're mighty," in reference to smaller counties in her district.

The 15th District includes Aransas County and stretches from the Rio Grande Valley to the Corpus Christi area under the current congressional map.