HOUSTON — It was a brief but telling glimpse of the new Texas.

On a visit to Dallas in March, President Obama stood in a country and western club, Gilley’s, and jokingly plucked a black-felt cowboy hat off the head of an exuberant supporter and tried it on. The hat in question belonged to someone who evoked Texas’ future as much as its past, a Mexican-American man named David Espinosa, a native Texan and school board member from the Dallas suburb of Grand Prairie.

Yet here, under the surface, was the old Texas, too. Mr. Espinosa’s Grand Prairie school district is 65 percent Latino, but the seven-member school board is majority white. Mr. Espinosa is the board’s lone Latino.

Only one thing about Latino political power in Texas is certain: It’s complicated.

Texas has the second-largest Hispanic population of any state — roughly 10 million of the state’s 27 million residents are Latino, second only to California’s 15 million Hispanics. There are more Latino elected officials in Texas than in any other state — 2,536 at the local, state and federal levels, nearly double the number in California, the state with the second-largest amount.