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The chosen seven strode across the U.S. Capitol rotunda before the eyes of history and a live television audience. It was late in the afternoon on Wednesday, January 15. On their way to the Senate to formally deliver impeachment charges against Donald Trump, six of the impeachment managers appointed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi walked in pairs. The seventh followed by herself.

To be among that group was an opportunity to take center stage in a landmark moment of American politics, to burnish one’s oratory gifts from the well of the Senate live on prime cable news in the political equivalent of American Idol.

No surprise, then, that Democratic House members from across the country intensely lobbied Pelosi, coveting such a shot at political stardom.

But the one Texan to earn Pelosi's nod, the one who walked alone that day, didn't ask for the job.

A veteran Houston politician mid-way through her first term in Congress, U.S. Rep. Sylvia R. Garcia has repeatedly told reporters she did not lobby for the post. Instead, Pelosi approached her, grabbed her hands, pressed Garcia on why she had not sought the assignment and asked if she would accept the post if it was offered.

“If I’m called upon, I’m ready to do it,” a Garcia aide recounted Garcia telling the speaker.

Now as the president stands trial before the Senate, Garcia is literally at the center of the country’s latest three-ring throw-down.

“It’s been a very personally exhausting and emotion-filled week,” Garcia told reporters on a Sunday conference call.

The first Texan ever to serve as a presidential impeachment manager was a virtual unknown in national politics, a quiet freshman not noted for flash or self promotion, one who hasn't logged hundreds of hours on cable news shows like others on the impeachment team.

But back home in Houston, the 69-year-old is a political giant, and even some of her closest allies find themselves forgetting that she only recently finished her first year in the U.S. House.

Garcia got to Congress, and landed in this impeachment role, through quiet competence, resilience amid the rough and tumble nature of Harris County politics and an ability to develop key relationships with friends and rivals alike, according to interviews with over a dozen Texas Democrats.

She made history as one of the two first Texas Latinas to serve in Congress. Born in 1950, Garcia grew up in Palito Blanco the eighth of ten children. The town is about an hour west of Corpus Christi, and was so small at the time that her immediate family constituted about one-fifth of the town’s population.

She met one of her closest early political allies, former Houston Mayor Kathy Whitmire, at the 1973 National Women's Political Caucus convention in Houston, when Garcia, was a recent graduate of Texas Woman’s University in Denton. Garcia went on to law school at Texas Southern University, a historically black public university, and spent the 1970s deeply enmeshed in the feminist movement and the push for the Equal Rights Amendment.

In 1977, Garcia attended the National Women’s Conference, also in Houston. Widely considered the pinnacle moment of the second wave feminist movement, Garcia’s fellow attendees included Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Rosalyn Carter, Coretta Scott King, Barbara Jordan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, future Texas Gov. Ann Richards, tennis star Billie Jean King and future Houston Mayor Annise Parker.

Whitmire was on the ascent in Houston politics and became the first female mayor in 1982. Garcia was central to her campaigns and to her kitchen cabinet, serving as an adviser and helping rally the Hispanic vote.

“She was always someone I could count on to look at an ethical question and give me good advice,” Whitmire said of that time.

Whitmire appointed Garcia to a slew of positions. But Garcia is best remembered for her tenure as the director and presiding judge of the Houston court system. It is that role senior House Democrats and their staff point to as the foundation for Garcia’s role in impeachment.