While the state’s 89th Legislature is in session, The Texas Newsroom will be helping you get to know the people behind the politics. This story is a part of an ongoing series profiling Texas’ lawmakers in their own words.
Sen. Adam Hinojosa’s win in November was part of one of the state’s biggest stories out of the 2024 election. He’s a Republican from the Rio Grande Valley, which had long a Democratic stronghold.
But last year, many districts there flipped from blue to red. In fact, Hinojosa is the first Republican to represent Texas Senate District 27 since the Reconstruction era.
Hinojosa, 48, is the youngest of five and was born in Brownsville.
“We moved out of the Rio Grande Valley when I was still a baby,” Hinojosa said. “My dad was working as a private investigator at the time, so he moved out of there into Houston. So we lived in Houston until I was 8 years old, and then we moved to Austin for a couple of years.”
Two years later, when Hinojosa was 10, they moved to Corpus Christi. There, his father started getting involved with local politics. He’d write letters to candidates, inviting them to sit down with the entire family.
“It said, hey, we’re a family of seven,” he said. “We’re not a PAC, we’re not anything like that, but … we’re inviting you to come meet us and just give us your position on why you’re running and what your motivation is, what you intend to do.”
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Over time, his father got more involved in politics and eventually started a successful political consulting firm based in South Texas.
But politics isn’t the only thing that runs in the family. Hinojosa also inherited an inclination for music.
“My dad was a trumpet player — great trumpet player until he had to have some surgery to remove part of one of his lungs. So that stopped his music career,” Hinojosa told The Texas Newsroom. “My grandfather was a recording artist in Mexico. And so my mom’s side of the family is very, very musical. My mom’s a phenomenal singer.”
Hinojosa himself can play the piano, saxophone and bass guitar. In his 20s, he got recruited to play bass in a cover band in Corpus Christi. Royce Albrecht started out as his bandmate. Some 20 years of friendship later, Albrecht is now Hinojosa’s chief of staff.
“We just actually, over the past couple weekends, brought our guitars to say we still need a little time to play some music,” Hinojosa said. “It’s always a very comforting thing — stress relief.”
But back to politics: Despite being around it from such an early age, going into politics wasn’t the obvious choice. Hinojosa thought he’d be a cardiologist in college and took music classes on the side.
He later pivoted. In 1999, he graduated from the Del Mar Regional Police Academy and passed his state certification test for law enforcement.
Hinojosa said he was “ready to get commissioned by anybody. And I got some offers, but decided to go into business with my family instead.”
His family owned several businesses at that time on top of his father’s consulting firm, including a retail jewelry store. But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and his father passed away, leading to the closure of both businesses.
“We were looking to diversify a little bit. And because COVID impacted the hospitality industry so, so hard, a lot of businesses were looking to just get out,” Hinojosa said. “We had an opportunity to pretty inexpensively get into restaurants.”
The family now runs several restaurants in Corpus Christi.
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Speaking of the pandemic — right before it started, Hinojosa married his wife, Victoria. They met when she was working as a bank teller. And he says he married “up.”
“She had access to my bank account, could see that there was no money in there, and that I was not very well-to-do,” he said with a laugh. “And so that’s how I knew it was real love.”
She brought along three children, and they recently had another together. In just five years, he went from no kids to four.
“That was a bit of a transition,” he said. “But, I had a good upbringing, so [I was] harnessing the lessons that my father taught me — but then also trying to learn and do better than where I felt he maybe could have done things a little differently.”
Hinojosa isn’t up for reelection until 2028. But thinking ahead, he said he is up for anything.
“As long as I feel I’m being productive and able to produce results, then I feel like that’s God’s sign that I should stay here,” he said. “And if not, I’ve got a beautiful family I can go back to and businesses I can go back to.”
Most of all, Hinojosa said he feels honored he gets this opportunity to represent his constituents.
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