Jorge Borrego, a 30-year-old real estate agent vying to represent Texas House District 118, takes a brief pause before describing his childhood growing up in Central El Paso.
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He smiles as he recalls the one-bedroom, one-bathroom blue house on Brown Street, that he shared with eight of his family members, including his younger sister and mother.
But he also chokes up as he thinks about the harsh realities of growing up in poverty.
“It gave me a lot of perspective,” Borrego said of his upbringing. “If I could do it all as a much younger person, [nothing] is going to be nowhere near as difficult.”
Borrego, a first-time candidate, won the Republican nomination for the Southside state House District in March. He now is going up against Kristian Carranza, the Democratic candidate who had experience working on Texas Democratic campaigns before she challenged the outgoing District 118 Republican state Rep. John Lujan in 2024.
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This piece is part of a two-story series on the candidates in Texas House District 118. Read our companion profile of Democratic candidate Kristian Carranza here.
The highly-competitive House District 118 seat used to be a blue stronghold, before becoming competitive enough to be a toss-up in this November election.
Early in his first campaign, Borrego became entangled in controversy when his own decades-old social media posts exposed his use at the time of homophobic and racist remarks. Borrego recently apologized, telling The Texas Tribune that those were “crude and immature jokes” he made when he was a kid.
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The GOP nominee today points to his formative years growing up in El Paso and his move at 18 years old to San Antonio, as the experiences that helped him cultivate the perspective he needed to build his career and political platform.
While living at the blue house on Brown Street, Borrego recalls his wake up time as 4:30 a.m. every day, early enough to be the first to take a shower. He then left his home at 6 a.m. to take a city bus with his younger sister to go to school. He would drop his sister off first and then transfer to another bus to get to Bel Air High School, located in El Paso’s Lower Valley neighborhood.
Listen: Borrego seeks to keep Texas House District 118 Republican
He got involved in football his freshman year, and he eventually also made his way into wrestling and student council, he said. When asked about what kept him involved, he said anything was better than being in a tiny home with eight other people.
But when the San Antonio Report reached out to his former coach, Manny Medina, he painted a picture of a shy, dedicated student who would eventually blossom into a team leader.
“He was not an extroverted young man,” Medina said. “He came in and was learning everything.”
Medina described Borrego being willing to go the extra mile to become a better player. He was taller than most of his teammates, Medina said, which gave Borrego a slight advantage, but he also learned to work really hard in the weight room.
By the time he was a junior in high school, he was no longer that shy kid.
“He just became one of the [team] leaders,” Medina said. “He just grew a lot, but also while keeping a very ‘stayed humble and hard working’ work ethic.”
Humble beginnings
Borrego’s first years of life started as they do for many fronterizos, or border residents. He was born in El Paso to a teenage mother who in order to keep her baby safe from her own father who was struggling through alcoholism, took Borrego to live with his paternal grandparents just across the border in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México.
Borrego grew up across the U.S.- México border for the first two to three years of his life, learning to speak Spanish first from his grandparents and father who had migrated to the border city from San Pedro, Coahuila. There he waited for the moment his mother would graduate high school and take him back across the border.
“For such a long time I called my mom by her name and my father by his name because that’s what everyone else called them,” Borrego said. “I guess I would have a very typical El Paso upbringing.”
Even when he was taken back to El Paso with his mother, Borrego recalls crossing the border most days after school with them to spend the afternoon with his paternal grandmother. There he would play with his cousins, and by the time he would cross the border again in the evening he would be sound asleep.
Once in El Paso, life wouldn’t get much easier for young Borrego. He was 11 or 12 when his father was sent to prison, he recalls, and his mother bounced between jobs trying to make ends meet.
He describes that period of his childhood as one of the most challenging periods of his life. His mother would get evicted from the rental they shared with his father, leaving Borrego and his mother to bounce around between homes until his mother found them a stable place to live.
“That summer when my dad went to prison I remember laying down on the floor,” Borrego said. “Just thinking to myself in the middle of the night, I just had to ask, ‘God, why did I deserve that?’… it was probably around that age that I [realized] I didn’t want to have that kind of life.”
Finishing school and attending college became a must for Borrego as he was determined to build something better for himself and his future family.
In high school, he played football all four years, and left wrestling behind his junior year after getting a part time job.
“It was more time away from home, which I kind of enjoy,” Borrego said. “When you’re you’re kind of growing up in that environment you’re you’re a little ashamed to talk about stuff like that and so like very few people knew… that I was in a really bad family environment.”
Borrego navigated the college application process almost blindly, with some help from the support system he had built at his high school.
He recalls being accepted to Baylor, The University of Texas at San Antonio and UT El Paso, and ultimately decided to go to UTSA.
“I actually thought San Antonio would be better because I wanted something that was similar enough to El Paso, but a bigger city,” Borrego recalls.
He didn’t seek advice in making this choice, he recalls, but he soon was packing his bags to make yet another trek on his own. Knowing there was no way his family could drop him off at the campus, he recalls being taken to the Greyhound bus station and planning his route to get himself there.
At UTSA, Borrego started as an engineering major and ended up switching to mathematics. His face still lights up when explaining how fulfilling it is for him to solve problems using math, it’s a career he could see himself enjoying.
Later, once he graduated, he thought about the practical use of his math skills and decided to seek a master’s degree in public administration from Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. As he explains it, it was an elective in math education that led him to think about the impact he could have in a different field.
“A lot of people in public policy don’t have a fluency with quantitative figures,” Borrego said. “And I could use that to my advantage and that’s kind of why I landed there and it turned out to be extraordinarily true unfortunately.”
Building a platform
His higher education pathway took him to Austin as part of the The Bush School of Government and Public Service’s research-based capstone project. This served as his introduction to the legislature and what he could do to get involved.
“[Education] is one of the biggest drivers of upward mobility in our country,” Borrego said.
It was through his capstone at Texas A&M that he worked with the nonprofit organization, Down Syndrome Association of Brazos Valley, where he held multiple positions including event coordinator, data administrator and policy administrator.
He eventually became a legislative director for state Rep. J. M. Lozano (R-Kingsville), the then-vice chair of the public education committee, where he said he learned a lot about the legislative process.
“What surprised me is the deliberation,” Borrego said. “A lot of the negotiation gets done not in committee.”
He later also worked for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative nonprofit think tank based in Austin, as the organization’s K-12 education policy director. There he helped create the Education Savings Account program, now known as the state’s private school voucher program, which awarded vouchers to more than 118,000 students during its first year.
According to by the Texas Comptroller in August, 42% of the total students awarded are white, and 36% come from households with total annual incomes at or above the 200% and 500% of the federal poverty level.
Borrego defends the program as a method to level the playing field for families who would otherwise not have access to a program or school. Borrego said Texas has the capacity to do both, fund public schools and offer these vouchers to families who want options.
The challenge as he views it is not in simply getting more funds for public school districts, but having these districts funnel more of their funds into classrooms and into in-demand programs, and away from central office and administrators salaries.
“ESA is a very versatile program,” Borrego said. “People I think unfairly want to simplify it to just being able to use it for private schools, but homeschools can use it, even [public] school districts can use it. School districts are automatically pre-approved providers.”
Borrego now seeks to represent a district that has , the majority of them Hispanic residents between the ages of 18 and 64, with about 24% of adults having a higher education degree.
He credits education as one of the biggest drivers of upward mobility for families like his and has centered his campaign around increasing education opportunity. But he said he also wants to drive cost of living improvements, such as lowering property taxes and increasing housing affordability, as well as improving public safety.
When asked if he was always in alignment with the Republican party, he said there will always be differences in views and that’s what the legislative process is about. But he aligns with the party’s core values, he said, and views on a merit-based society, reverence for the Constitution and prioritizing God and family.
Borrego is now raising a family of his own in San Antonio alongside his wife, Lexie Cisneros Borrego.
At the end of the day, he said he hopes to be the one who adds a different perspective and voice to the Texas Legislature.
“I think more voices like mine need to be included in the legislature… as someone who grew up disadvantaged economically,” Borrego said. “From all segments of life, not just the person whose father was a legislator.”
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The San Antonio Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.