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President Obama travels to Texas on Thursday for the second time in as many weeks. He will talk about job training and economic opportunity, but he may have a political opportunity on his mind as well.

Obama lost Texas by more than 1 million votes last year. But Democrats believe their fortunes in the Lone Star State may soon change, thanks to demographics and a new organizational push.

New numbers released by the Census Bureau on Wednesday highlight the rising political power of Latinos in the United States. In the 2012 presidential election, 1.4 million more Latinos voted than did four years earlier; the number of non-Hispanic white voters shrank by more than 2 million.

Political demographer Ruy Teixeira of the left-leaning Center for American Progress says Latinos' voting power would be even stronger if more of those who were eligible to vote actually did so.

"There's a lot of upside potential for the Latino vote. There are just going to be more of them, and second, there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of turnout rates," Teixeira says.

According to the census figures, turnout among Latinos who were eligible to vote last year was just 48 percent, 14 points lower than the turnout for non-Hispanic whites. Latino turnout was considerably higher in swing states, though. These numbers aren't as precise, because of smaller sample sizes, but the trend is clear: 52 percent of Latinos turned out to vote in Colorado, 62 percent in Florida and 67 percent in Virginia — all states where the Obama campaign invested heavily in Latino mobilization and won by narrow margins.

"I think it tells you you get what you pay for," Teixeira says. "We know there's this sleeping giant of the Hispanic electorate. So if you don't do anything, or you just do the average amount, you'll get your average turnout.

"But there's a potential there to put more effort, more mobilization, more money, more time, into getting the Hispanic voters to the polls, and it should produce an increment in their vote."

Jeremy Bird, who was national field director for Obama's re-election campaign, told volunteers in a video message this winter that their job is not finished.

"Where do we go from here?" he said. "One of the answers to that is Texas — a state at a political crossroads."

In Texas, Latinos account for nearly 40 percent of the population. But voter turnout among Texas Latinos is even lower than in the rest of the country. Bird said his team knows how to change that, and he has kicked off a long-term effort dubbed "Battleground Texas."

"Over the next several years, in every single community, in every single neighborhood, our team of volunteers and organizers will be knocking on doors, registering voters, and engaging Texans to make sure that they not only turn out to vote on Election Day, but they become more politically active in the day-to-day electoral process," he said.

Some Texas Republicans are skeptical that Democrats will be competitive in their state anytime soon. Gov. Rick Perry called it the biggest pipe dream he's ever heard of. No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas since 1994. And Democrats fare even worse among non-Hispanic white voters in Texas than in many other parts of the country.

Still, the census data do show that big changes are possible over time. In 1996, turnout among African-Americans nationwide trailed white turnout by nearly 8 percentage points. Blacks began to close that gap even before the first African-American president was elected. And last year, black turnout actually topped non-Hispanic whites' for the first time on record.

If the fast-growing Latino population shows anything like that kind of improvement in turnout, and if Democrats manage to hold on to many of those new voters, Teixeira says it won't be a question of whether Texas turns purple, only a question of when.

"2016 — my guess is probably a bit too soon," he says. "2020 — I think it starts to look a lot more doable."

By 2020, Latinos are expected to outnumber non-Hispanic whites in Texas — and neither political party can afford to take them for granted.

Mother's Day is this Sunday. While some people are racking their brains to think of the perfect way to show their love and appreciation for Mom, a group of distinguished women recently flipped that script and wrote about the most profound gift their own moms gave to them. Their essays are collected in the new book What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most.

The book springs out of editor Elizabeth Benedict's personal experience. The last gift she received from her mother was a black wool scarf, embroidered at each end with yellow, pink and blue flowers. "She bought it at the assisted-living facility where she lived. And as soon as I began wearing it, people started commenting on how beautiful it was," Benedict tells Tell Me More host Michel Martin. "And after she died, I wore it all the time in the winter. And I was literally confused by how I could feel this attachment to the scarf and having felt so much distance from my mother."

Benedict went on to wonder about the experiences of other women, such as activist and MacArthur "Genius" Cecilia Muoz. "I lost my mom about five years ago, and it felt like a wonderful opportunity not just to pay tribute to her, but also to reflect on what she gave to me, what she gave to us," says Muoz. "In my case, I come from one of those big sprawling immigrant families and my mother was very much at the center of it."

Muoz is the daughter of Bolivian immigrants. Her parents married in 1950, and they planned to stay in the United States for just one year so her father could finish his engineering education. But when they decided to return home, their families told them to wait because of a poor economy and political situation.

Muoz received a wok from her mother, whose relationships with everyone in the family largely related to food. She was a homemaker and accomplished chef. She even sold cosmetics. "It's funny because we didn't see her as a working woman at the time because this is like one of those companies where you do makeup parties, essentially. ... She was terrific at it, but she designed it so she could also be there to take me to music lessons and take my brothers to debate practice, and you know, be a traditional mom in the same way she managed to do all of that," Muoz says.

Now that the activist is juggling an intense job and kids of her own, she understands why her mother was washing the kitchen floor at 11 p.m. or doing laundry at 6 a.m. Muoz does the same thing, she says.

The book includes many other diverse voices, like television host and minister Lillian Daniel, former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, Slate's Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick, best-selling novelist Lisa See, and even NPR founding mother Susan Stamberg. Benedict says she wanted a real range of experiences so the book would feel like the actual world we live in.

"I started with the idea that I wanted people to write about an object. And if I had said to all these people, 'Write me a story about your mother,' I think I wouldn't have gotten anything because people would've freaked out," Benedict says. "But I think being able to focus on one object and tell the sort of beginning and middle and end of that object and how it radiates and reverberates really allows people to get to the core of the relationship."

The objects are not diamond rings, fancy cars or houses. They're modest: a photograph, quilt, cake pan, plant, bottle of nail polish, even a cracked vase. "These are not gifts that have a lot of financial value, but the value of the gifts accrues over time," Benedict says. "The value comes from the relationships themselves, and how people process the relationships, and how people move through their lives with their mothers in life and in memory."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

"Guccifer," the hacker responsible for introducing the world to former president George W. Bush's artistic side, appears to have leaked the opening chapters of Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell's newest novel. Killing Monica is a frothy roman a clef about the author of a popular series starring the fashionable "Monica" and her off-and-on lover "Charleston" (clear stand-ins for Sex and the City's Carrie and Big). This leak is an odd choice for "Guccifer," who has thus far targeted the Bush family, Colin Powell, and other members of the political and business elite.

"I travel to Manhattan over the 59th Street Bridge / Not feeling groovy, 4:50 a.m." — poems written by New York City taxi drivers.

Ian Buruma writes about Imelda Marcos and political theater for The New York Review of Books: "Filipinos have a word, palabas, meaning show or farce. Much in the Philippines is palabas, including, alas, much of its politics. The Marcos dictatorship (1965–1986), corrupt, kleptomaniacal, and sometimes brutal, was full of palabas. Power was gilded with show — grandiose speeches, carnivalesque campaigns, huge artistic projects, endless pageantry and absurdly extravagant parties."

According to a report in Publisher's Weekly, a struggling USA Today offered buyout packages that were accepted by several of its books staffers, including critic Carol Memmott and Deirdre Donahue. (Carol Memmott is the wife of Two-Way blogger Mark Memmott, a former USA Today reporter and editor.)

For The New Republic, Alexander Nazaryan dissects the recent spate of celebrity imprints appearing at big publishing houses: "That the publishing world — buffeted by the forces of Amazon and apathy — has turned to celebrities for salvation is not surprising."

Mosin Hamid, the critically acclaimed author of books like The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, has the dubious honor of being named "Hottie of the week" in Pakistan's Express Tribune, by virtue of his "boyish smile."

During World War II, the Nazis plundered tens of thousands of works of art from the private collections of European Jews, many living in France. About 75 percent of the artwork that came back to France from Germany at the end of the war has been returned to their rightful owners.

But there are still approximately 2,000 art objects that remain unclaimed. The French government has now begun one of its most extensive efforts ever to find the heirs and return the art.

French law states that at art pillaged during World War II must be publicly exhibited, if its condition permits, so that it can be recognized and claimed.

"Up until now, France put the maximum information at public disposal and waited for reaction. For people to come forward. Now we're proactively tracking down the descendants and families of those who had their art stolen," says Thierry Bajou, who is coordinating the French government's efforts.

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