A popular Texas blogger paid by Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez's campaign is attacking Republican opponent Rep. Mayra Flores as “Miss Frijoles” and a “cotton-pickin’ liar”, according to the NBC News.

Mayra Flores won a special election in June and currently replaces former Democratic Representative Filemon Vela in representing Texas’s 34th District in the House. Vicente Gonzalez now represents Texas’ 15th Congressional District and challenges Flores for the 34th District, once the seat he currently holds became more Republican after it was redesigned during redistricting.

Nicknames considered offensive and prejudiced appeared for the first time three days after “Gonzalez’s campaign wrote a $1,200 check to The McHale Report blog June 24 for ‘advertising services’, according to the Democrat’s Federal Election Commission finance report”, according to NBC.

Flores then made a post on Twitter criticizing Democratic Representative Gonzalez: “My far-left opponent, Vincent Gonzalez, hired a local blogger to run hateful & racist ads against me! But I love frijoles & I grew up eating frijoles. I am not embarrassed of my upbringings & frijoles w/tortillas de harina is simply the best. Here's to Miss Frijoles 2022 #TX34”. 

The allegation that Gonzalez hired a blogger to attack her, made by Flores on Twitter, was denied by both the Gonzalez campaign and blogger Jerry McHale. “They both told NBC News that the timing of the attacks was coincidental, that the congressman didn’t pay for any of the inflammatory posts, know about them or have any control over them”.

The timing of such attacks would come shortly after a spokeswoman for First Lady Jill Biden took to Twitter to apologize after criticism of her speech that cited “bodegas” and “breakfast tacos” to praise Latino diversity in a UnidosUS event. Condemning her comments, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists said, “We are not tacos”.

“The controversy, which illustrates the blurred lines between paying political bloggers for advertising and advocacy, is the latest flashpoint in the wild and rugged politics of Texas 34th Congressional District, a majority-Hispanic seat that runs along the state’s southeast border with Mexico and has become a national proving ground for GOP outreach to Hispanic voters”, as NBC points out.

Two years before the victory of Mayra Flores, who became the first congresswoman born in Mexico, then-President Donald Trump widened the margins of preference in that district, among many other districts and counties with the most Latinos in the country, since 2016. Of the achievements, Trump did not win in the 34th District and Democrats consider that Flores’ victory in Texas election was possible because the party preferred not to invest too many resources for a special election.

In the current context of political disputes and the conquest of the Latino electorate, the attacks were condemned by Republicans and Democrats. The blogger in question is known for his posts with racist, coarse and bigoted language and, according to NBC, Representative Gonzalez had already hired McHale last year by paying $1,000 for advertising on his blog.

“Chuck Rocha, a Texas Democrat who is one of the nation’s top Latino-outreach consultants, said the McHale blog's comments about Flores were clearly offensive: ‘I find it racist as a Mexican. All of those things are derogatory, no matter what your party is’”, according to the NBC.