But fear is a powerful suppressant, and as his daughters sought to get their friends to vote for their dad they learned that the local, statewide and national climate, combined with the new voter-ID law, was adding to the atmosphere of anxiety. ‘‘I have a lot of Spanish friends, and their parents were like, ‘What is the form going to ask me?’ ’’ Del Toro’s daughter Wendy, 25, a juvenile-probation officer, told me over the phone in November. ‘‘The word they used was ‘intimidated.’ ’’ A common question, she said, was whether they were going to be asked about their citizenship status; even though they were citizens, they were apprehensive about being seen as ‘‘illegals.’’ Their children were almost as uneasy. ‘‘They didn’t know what you need — they were like, ‘I can’t vote because I don’t have a driver’s license,’ small things like that.’’ (Confusion over new voting laws can be as powerful a deterrent as the provisions themselves; a recent Rice University study suggested that the Texas voter-ID law deterred voters from going to the polls in numbers that may have caused one former United States congressman, Pete Gallego, to lose his seat in 2014 — even though many of them actually had the proper ID.)

Election tallies showed that Del Toro had a slight lead over Morrison in Pasadena’s early voting period, which ran for eight days before Election Day, but Morrison beat Del Toro in the final tally, with 61 percent of 4,100 votes.

Von Houte and Ybarra each won their races, keeping their four-member opposition to the mayor intact. But even under the mayor’s new council plan, a fifth and deciding seat had come tantalizingly close to switching over. An ExxonMobil research technician and voting rights activist, Celestino Pérez, nearly beat the mayoral ally Bruce Leamon. Isbell’s opponents had considered Leamon’s to be the next of the Isbell-friendly districts to lean their way under the old plan. On the new map, it became slightly less Hispanic. Pérez came within only 34 votes — close, but not enough. Still, Ybarra said, ‘‘The change is coming.’’

7. ‘Just watch the faces’

On a sunny morning in mid-November, 1,636 soon-to-be Americans streamed into a vast school auditorium on the outskirts of Houston, by the Bush Intercontinental Airport, most of them from Mexico and Central and South America, but others from India, Pakistan, Iraq — a total of 115 countries. They were there for a naturalization cer­emony held monthly. Before it began, the presiding federal judge, Alfred H. Bennett, was called to the entrance of the building to administer the oath of citizenship to a Hispanic woman who had gone into labor upon walking through the front door. She was ‘‘about to dilate,’’ the judge told me afterward, ‘‘so it was a pleasure to do her so she could go to the hospital and deliver a strong baby girl.’’ Before heading to the podium to conduct the ceremony, Bennett, who is black, instructed me: ‘‘Just watch the faces more than anything else, the joy.’’

After the ceremony, as the new Americans, some in tears and others smiling broadly, waited to file out of their seats by section, Claudia Ortega-Hogue, wearing a blue blazer and a large yellow button that read ‘‘Register to Vote,’’ ran up the aisles handing out registration cards and pens. Then she ran back down them just as fast, collecting the completed forms. Ortega-Hogue is a vice president of the Houston-area League of Women Voters. For many voting rights groups, naturalization ceremonies have grown in importance, as Texas has imposed stringent new training requirements for volunteer registrars, as well as criminal fines for paying people based on the number of people they register, making it harder to run registration drives in traditional places like shopping malls and street fairs.

Ortega-Hogue, some of whose family qualified for citizenship under the Reagan amnesty, has been helping to register voters at the Houston naturalization ceremonies for about eight years. ‘‘For me, this gives me energy,’’ she told me, a stack of completed registrations in her hands. As the freshly minted Americans left the hall, immigration officials handed them their naturalization certificates. Those documents could become important to voting if Texas Republicans pass a proposed new law attaching ‘‘proof of citizenship’’ requirements to voter registration. In 2009, the Justice Department argued that a similar program in Georgia had led to the wrongful removal from voting rolls of thousands of voters — a disproportionate number of them minorities — as potential noncitizens, when they were in fact full-fledged Americans. When the Ohio secretary of state, Jon Husted, a Republican, investigated possible noncitizen voting in his state after the 2012 election, he found that noncitizens cast 17 ballots out of more than five million — or less than 0.00001 percent.

After the naturalization cer­emony, I stopped back in Pasadena for a quick lunch with Del Toro, at a Mexican restaurant on the Spencer Highway called the Don’Key. He was planning to run again, he told me, as we ate tacos. When I mentioned the ceremony I had just attended, Del Toro told me he was naturalized in the same building. At his ceremony, he recalled, the keynote speaker was Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a black congresswoman from Houston. ‘‘She was talking about something that impressed me,’’ Del Toro said. ‘‘She say, ‘They are going to say something bad about you, they are going to criticize you — doesn’t matter, still do what you want to do.’ That was it for me.’’

He remembered that after the ceremony, he was handed his first voter-registration application. It wasn’t much to look at. Black and white and printed on sturdy paper, it could have just as easily passed for an income-tax form. Del Toro filled it out then and there. Finally, he was a real citizen. He shrugged and tilted his head. ‘‘It made me cry a little bit,’’ he said.