Texas Originals

Irma Rangel

May 15, 1931–March 17, 2003

Irma Rangel was the first Mexican American woman elected to the Texas House of Representatives. Her insistence that, as she put it, you "can do great things if you focus on helping others" is a fitting summary of her decades of service.

Born in Kingsville in 1931, Rangel chose education as her first career, teaching in Texas, California, and Venezuela. In 1969, she earned a law degree and embarked upon a second career in politics.

Convinced that Mexican American women needed greater representation in government, she ran for a seat in the Texas House in 1976 serving a region in deep South Texas. She won that election and held the office for the rest of her life. In 1993, she became the first woman to lead the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.

Rangel focused her remarkable political acumen on education and social welfare. In 1997, she accomplished her core legislative achievement, the Top Ten Percent Plan, which expanded accessibility and increased diversity in the state’s public universities.

In 2001, she helped establish the College of Pharmacy at Texas A&M–Kingsville, which was the first professional school in South Texas. Upon her death in 2003, the school was renamed in her honor.

Reflecting upon her career, Rangel once said, "I couldn't be something other than what I had been born to be."

For More about Irma Rangel

Given her commitments to higher education and South Texas, it is no wonder that Rangel’s alma mater, Texas A&M University–Kingsville, played a significant role in her career. Rangel often gave back over the years and pointed to A&M Kingsville, formerly Texas A&I University, as a model for what could be accomplished by supporting first-rate public universities in South Texas. Rangel’s legislative records are housed in the South Texas Archives there.

An oral history interview with Rangel from 1996 is available online through The University of Texas at Arlington library website.

If Kingsville was her birthplace and home, Rangel’s long career in state government meant that Austin was her home-away-from-home. Due to her passionate commitment to policymaking and higher education, it makes sense that there is an Irma Rangel Public Policy Institute in the Department of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. The institute supports research on topics of special interest to both Representative Rangel and the state of Texas, including education, immigration, welfare reform, and economic development along the Mexican border. To round out matters and highlight Rangel’s attention to mentoring young women, there is also an Irma Lerma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School in Dallas.

When she ran for election in 1976, Rangel claimed that she didn’t know she would be the first Latina in the Texas House. Once elected, she worked especially hard because, she worried, "If I didn’t succeed, they were going to say, 'All Mexican American women are failures.'" Aware of her place in history, Rangel refused to fail, and she participated in many oral history projects and interviews in order to document her perseverance and success. Such interviews from a range of Mexican American leaders are available in the Tejano Voices archive created by José Angel Gutiérrez at The University of Texas at Arlington. From 1992 to 2006, Gutiérrez compiled nearly two hundred interviews from Tejano leaders who had struggled against discrimination in the years after World War II, and many of these are available online. 

Selected Bibliography

Acosta, Teresa Palomo, and Ruthe Winegarten. Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Briseño, Veronica D. "In Recognition of Representative Irma L. Rangel: Legislator and Role Model." Texas Hispanic Journal of Law & Policy, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1998): 3–5.

Coronado, Irasema, Sonia R. García, Patricia A. Jaramillo, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, and Sharon A. Navarro. Políticas: Latina Public Officials in Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.

Jones, Nancy Baker and Ruthe Winegarten. Capitol Women: Texas Female Legislators, 1923–1999. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Márquez, Benjamin. Democratizing Texas Politics: Race, Identity, and Mexican American Empowerment, 1945–2002. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014.

Listen to the audio

Portrait of Irma Rangel.