Personal adversity, compassion drive Luz Elena Chapa in tough District Attorney race

By her own telling, the leading candidate to become Bexar County’s next district attorney isn’t a great debater. She’s never been a prosecutor, and it took her three tries to pass the bar exam.

That hasn’t slowed down 52-year-old Luz Elena Chapa, whose battles with adversity have long made her a rising star in a Democratic Party that wants to see more compassion in the justice system.

As a young girl, Chapa’s early interactions with that system involved witnessing ugly custody fights between her immigrant mother and alcoholic father.

“It was a struggle to collect child support, and it was a struggle for my father to follow through with his visitation schedule, and so we were constantly in court,” she said in a May 13 interview at the Guerra Law Firm.

In the judge’s chambers at age 8, Chapa decided that she would put everything she had into helping mothers like hers.

“Naturally, I wanted to go to law school to represent single mothers and help them collect child support,” Chapa said.

The oldest daughter in her large family would grow up to do just that.

She left El Paso to pursue an undergraduate degree at St. Mary’s University, spent a year in D.C. as a legislative correspondent for then-U.S. Rep. Frank Tejeda (D-San Antonio), and returned to St. Mary’s University for a law degree.

“I took the bar three times,” Chapa said in the interview. “The first time was a dry run because I had so much anxiety as a young kid. The second time, however, I studied my a– off for three months and it was devastating.”

Saddled with debt and panicked about her future, Chapa said her mom sat her down.

“She said, ‘You’re trying to pass this exam for me, and you need to pass this bar for yourself,'” Chapa recalled. “Being the eldest Latina, you know, we do take a lot of responsibility.”

Chapa practiced civil litigation, first in El Paso then Corpus Christi, before she and her then-husband eventually returned to San Antonio to open up their own firm.

Then in 2012, she unseated a Republican to win a seat on the San Antonio-based Fourth Court of Appeals — the youngest appellate judge in Texas at the time, and the highest a Democratic judge can go in a state where Republicans have controlled every statewide judicial post for decades.

Chapa had planned to stay there, until a red wave swept Democratic appellate judges, including her, out of office in 2024.

But when District Attorney Joe Gonzales announced his retirement plans last year — and the most likely successor, Judge Ron Rangel, took a pass on the race — another door appeared to open.

Chapa was working as a visiting judge in Bexar County and had no experience in criminal law. But she started meeting with current and former prosecutors, nonprofit leaders and other political kingmakers to see if such a race could be possible.

Among the perspectives that stuck with her, Chapa said, was from a judge who recalled former District Attorney Sam Millsap coming to the role with no criminal experience, “and he was one of the most beloved, beloved district attorneys [Bexar County has ever had].”

She started to see herself in the role.

Credentials under attack

Six months later, Chapa is weathering some intense criticism about whether she’s cut out for the job.

The district attorney is the county’s chief prosecutor, responsible for maintaining the public’s faith that serious criminals will be put away for their crimes.

Up against seven Democratic primary opponents who came up through that world, Chapa has at times struggled to sell her qualifications.

On a debate stage before the primary, Chapa fumbled a question about how she’d get up to speed on criminal law, circling back to issue a mea culpa about her performance later in the night.

“I admit, I’m not the world’s best debater,” she said on the Feb. 3 debate stage chock full of seasoned prosecutors who seized every opening to weaken the presumptive frontrunner.

They’ve attacked her as soft and naive, and painted her lack of experience as a potential danger to public safety.

“I think it’s very important that you realize that someone here is recommending somebody take over this office who has absolutely no experience in being in a DA’s office, or in leading a DAs office, or even trying a case,” said Jane Davis, a career prosecutor who oversees the Juvenile Division at the DA’s office and is now in a May 26 primary runoff with Chapa. “I think that’s terrible.”

Chapa acknowledges the District Attorney race has been a shocking contrast to her past campaigns.

After a heated disagreement with Gonzales at a March 21 Democratic gathering, she said she was even “verbally attacked and berated” by the incumbent district attorney who nearly resorted to “physical aggression” — a characterization he refutes.

“It’s a completely different culture,” Chapa said of running for chief prosecutor in the May 14 interview. “It’s very desensitized, hardened, and that’s something that was really striking to me early on in this primary.”

But she still believes there’s a path for someone like her to succeed.

“People in this county are not doing well economically, and that leads to frustration, leads to potential addiction, leads to domestic abuse, leads to mental health deterioration — and all of those are core issues that are not being addressed fully,” Chapa said.

Chapa wants to reshape a DA office that’s been under so much stress, she believes its employees have lost sight of their responsibilities to victims.

“They don’t know how to interact with people who are at their worst and have suffered significant trauma,” she said.

In a role that oversees roughly 600 people, she says strong leadership — not courtroom experience — is the most critical need to turn around low morale and persistent staffing issues.

“I’ve never maintained that I was a former prosecutor. I’ve owned the fact that I’ve been an outsider,” Chapa said this week. “Based on how broken the DA’s office is, it’s going to take an outsider to fix all of the problems, because I can see things through a different lens.”

The case for compassion

To many of her loyal supporters, Chapa’s compassion is indeed a selling point.

With the Alamo as a backdrop, the young judge was surrounded by yellow and blue pinwheels the first time Michele Autenrieth Brown first heard Chapa open up about her family’s struggle with mental health.

The year was 2015, and both women were volunteers at the mental health nonprofit Clarity Child Guidance Center, which carefully staked one yellow pinwheel in the ground for every four blue ones — representing the 20% of children who will experience an emotional, behavioral or mental illness before age 18.

That day, Chapa spoke publicly about her younger brother Michael, whose schizophrenia rocked her family long before it was diagnosed, causing out-of-character behavioral issues in an otherwise bright and loving teen.

“It really hit home that someone so high-profile was standing up and telling their family story at a time where there was just so much stigma around mental health,” recalled Brown, who later worked as a staff member at Clarity while Chapa served on its board.

In the coming years, Chapa’s candor would grab the attention of many advocates and policymakers who want to see the county solve big problems when it comes to mental health and domestic violence that’s uncommonly prevalent in Bexar County.

Now, as the county chooses a new DA, local leaders who lined up behind her are hopeful she can use some of that experience to address the many societal components of crime and safety — not just locking up hardened criminals.

Chapa’s years of service on nonprofit boards built connections with powerful private sector leaders who could help with some of the county’s long-unfunded needs, like a diversion center to keep mentally ill people out of the jail.

“We’re one of the only major cities in Texas that doesn’t have [one] …. but I’m really hopeful that Luz Elena, with the experience she has, will be able to do something about this,” Brown said.

She’s also won over progressive allies who value her humanity over traditional courtroom experience.

Leading up to the March primary, Chapa raised more money than any other candidate, and ended with a convincing first-place finish.

“She’s a person of integrity who you can talk with — that regular people that need to meet with the district attorney can meet with, that’s why I’m supporting her,” said Rosie Castro, a civil rights leader who supported Gonzales years ago and is now backing Chapa’s campaign.

“You can’t tell me that she won’t know how to prosecute, and besides, she’s going to have a large staff to be able to do that work.”

Reforms under scrutiny

Eight years ago, progressives spent big electing Gonzales with similar dreams of reform — only to watch his ideas enrage conservative state leaders who are now trying to siphon power away from so-called “rogue” DAs.

Now in a sign of the shifting political landscape, the first-place finisher in the Democratic primary has run away from some of those ideas, which once seemed central to her political identity.

As a 22-year-old law student, Chapa was arrested by a police officer who she’d stopped to ask for directions. The officer cursed at her in response, and when she asked for badge number, put her in handcuffs for alleged jaywalking.

Chapa cried so hard that her mascara clouded her vision, and her hands went numb as she sat handcuffed on the curb.

Decades later, she’s now the unlikely champion of law enforcement officers who’ve long resented Gonzales’ policies — and who are running ads to help her defeat one of his section chiefs in Davis.

Chapa said she talked about the old arrest during her endorsement interview with the San Antonio Police Officers Association, and she and the union were in agreement, “There are some bad apples.”

“I’ve heard the current district attorney say that I’m a mouthpiece for law enforcement, and that couldn’t be farthest from the truth,” Chapa said in the May 14 interview. “I’ve always said that whether a law enforcement officer is wearing a blue uniform or a green uniform, if there is evidence of a crime, they will be held accountable and prosecuted to the furthest extent.”

But her runoff with Davis could be a turning point for Democrats in a county where national progressive groups pumped $1 million into Gonzales’s campaign as part of a justice reform experiment in 2018.

This time such groups have largely stayed on the sidelines, while Democratic leaders have embraced a candidate vowing to hew more to the rule of law.

“In order of cities disliked by the Republican leadership, Austin is No. 1, and San Antonio is like No. 2,” said state Sen. José Menéndez (D-San Antonio), one of Chapa’s earliest supporters. “If we don’t have someone who understands the balance of victims’ rights and criminal justice and law enforcement, … I think we could get caught up in the crosshairs.”