Table of contents for May/June 2021 in The Texas Observer

Predatory Lending This is so wrong (“Payday and Car Title Lenders in Texas Won More Than $45 Million in Pandemic Aid,” February 2, texasobserver.org) and impacts people who are already economically vulnerable. Take the time to call your state Representative and voice your opinion. Lucretia Irrera VIA FACEBOOK THEY PREY ON PEOPLE IN NEED. … THEY ARE SIMPLY predatory and unscrupulous and cause far more harm to their victims than any benefit. They should be eliminated. Charles Raley VIA FACEBOOK UNTIL MY WIFE AND I GOT OUR CREDIT SCORE OVER 720, WE would receive almost daily calls asking us to apply for credit cards with interest rates close to 30 percent. Letters in the mail as well. If we wanted any type of loan, it was going to be a…

During Winter Storm Uri in mid-February, millions of Texans lost power and water. Nearly 200 died from hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, and other causes, according to the Houston Chronicle. About three-quarters were people of color, half were seniors, and at least six were children. Since the last near-blackout in Texas, in 2011, total pay for ERCOT executives and directors increased by 50 percent from about $5 million to $7.5 million. Over the past decade, ERCOT and the Texas Public Utilities Commission, which oversees it, declined to require winterization at power plants because the Legislature didn’t mandate it. Texas industrial plants emitted more than 3 million excess pounds of pollution during the winter storm, according to an independent analysis by environmental groups. In March, Governor Greg Abbott announced he was lifting…

TO SEE HOW TEXAS BENEFITS FROM INTERNATIONAL kleptocracy, you could take a trip to South Padre Island, where you’d find “premier beachfront condominiums.” Here, one of these luxury condos, valued at $640,000, was seized by the federal government after it learned that its owner, an official from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which borders South Texas, had purchased it with cash stolen from Mexican taxpayers. You could travel just north of San Antonio, where an official from Coahuila, another Mexican state bordering Texas, purchased a self-storage facility but forfeited the property as part of a settlement connected to allegations of money laundering. The U.S. later sold the property for $11.4 million. Then there are the opulent homes in Sugar Land, Brownsville, Laredo, McAllen, and Austin. All these places, all these…

In 1979, Robert Bullard and a team of 10 graduate students spent weeks poring over city records, library archives, and microfiche, searching for landfill locations in Houston, a sprawling 557-square-mile city home to nearly 1.5 million people. There was no Google or geographic information systems, no iPhones or laptops. To find a landfill, Bullard and his students had to follow the paper trails of permits, deeds, and licenses. The project took over Bullard’s living room, eating up his weekends and holidays, too. “Once we put together a list, we had to go, physically, and find the sites and verify that they existed,” recalls Bullard, who was then and is now a professor at Texas Southern University, among the state’s most prominent historically Black colleges and universities. “I told my students,…

THE STORY OF LOT, THE FAMOUS ONE, IS A story for men. In it, Lot is given a divine warning that his city, Sodom, and its neighbor, Gomorrah, will be destroyed for their inhabitants’ wickedness and he and his wife and two daughters must flee. Lot is warned not to look back when they do—but his wife and daughters are not. As they leave the city, Lot’s wife, who is not named in the Bible, takes one last look at her home. God transforms her into a pillar of salt. Lot does not look back. Why wouldn’t God warn the women about the demise of their city? And why wouldn’t Lot warn his family of women about their potential fate? These questions run through God Spare the Girls, Kelsey McKinney’s…

Today an abandoned housecrumbles in the brush at Esperanza.No more caretakers.No more foremen. A rusty roof of corduroy.A gate on one hinge.A porch of broken chairs.Empty, yet— stuffed with stories.A single shoe, collapsed at the heel.A rotten backpack.A green blanket quilted with burrs. Names proclaimed on the walls and raftersI was here. I walked here.I made my way in the dark.Near the stove, a list carefully penned. 1/3/89The Castañosfrom Coahuila:Nino, Sambo, Aldaco: centroLimón, Luís, Kine, Javier, and Martín: barrio100% KREYZY. Loco. I picture them resting in the kitchen with its cracked floor.Savoring shade. A roof. Water. A toilet.Sharing beans folded in tortillas.Napping in the day. Walking north at night.Those Castaños. 100%. Happiest on a tractor named Mabel, Lucy Griffith lives on a ranch beside the Guadalupe River. Her debut poetry…

Picking Up the Slack “THIS IS LIKE THE HUNGER GAMES!” some version of this exclamation, often peppered with curse words and red-faced anger emojis, is a common refrain in a now-defunct volunteer Slack group I spent a few hours in each week this spring, working alongside tech types trying to #disrupt a broken COVID-19 vaccine-distribution system. The group saw tens of thousands of people come through searching for their shots, monitoring the platform’s auto-updated appointment trackers, and seeking assistance from dozens of volunteer schedulers who navigated public and private systems to find vaccines for people with low computer literacy or unreliable internet access. Of course, it shouldn’t be this hard to get a lifesaving vaccine. For anyone. But this pandemic year, combined with our Texas deep freeze in February, has…

The polar vortex that hit Texas in February plunged the state into frigid temperatures for days. But Texas is a place of weather extremes. Which of the following about extraordinary Texas weather is untrue? a. An invisible line called the 98th meridian bisects Texas into wetter and drier halves. b. The state’s “drought of record” lasted for seven years and occurred in the 1950s. c. A hurricane that struck Galveston in 1900 was the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. d. The towns of Tulia and Seminole share the record for the coldest temperature ever recorded in Texas: –23 degrees. ANSWER A. The line that divides the wetter and drier halves of the state is the 100th meridian.…

AMARILLO // A rare cloned horse raised in Amarillo is heading to its forever home at the San Diego Zoo, KAMR reports. The endangered Przewalski horse named Kurt was born after his father’s DNA was frozen for 40 years. The veterinarian who raised Kurt hopes that the horse will be able to boost his species’ numbers in California. WACO // Ted Nugent, the draft-dodging, Trump-loving rock musician, is auctioning off some of his prized belongings in Central Texas. Among the items the 73-year-old Nugent is selling are vintage guitars, vehicles, and bow hunting gear, KWTX reports. He calls the items “the coolest stuff available to mankind,” adding, “My outrageous, adventurous lifetime has accumulated way too much stuff than anybody could reasonably put to use.” BRAZOS COUNTY // A dog and…

“IT JUST SO HAPPENS WE BE TEXIcans,” says Mrs. Jorgensen, an older woman wearing her blond hair in a tight bun, to rough-and-tumble cowboy Ethan Edwards in the 1956 film The Searchers. Mrs. Jorgensen, played by Olive Carey, and Edwards, played by John Wayne, sit on a porch facing the settling dusk sky, alone in a landscape that is empty as far as the eye can see: a sweeping desert vista painted with bright orange Technicolor. Set in 1868, the film lays out a particular telling of Texas history, one in which the land isn’t a fine or good place yet. But, with the help of white settlers willing to sacrifice everything, it’s a place where civilization will take root. Nearly 90 years after the events depicted in the film,…