Inhaltsverzeichnis für July/August 2022 in The Texas Observer

The story of abortion rights in America is a Texas story. At press time, the Supreme Court had yet to rule on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a draft opinion of which leaked in May portending the demise of Roe v. Wade—a Texas case brought by a Texas lawyer on behalf of a Texas woman. To look forward, we have chosen to look back at the dark era in which abortion was outlawed. In this issue, Staff Writers Justin Miller and Michelle Pitcher dig into the state’s historical archives to illluminate a system of institutionalized terror against women, a time when police raided suspected abortion centers and women risked death, prosecution, and public humiliation to obtain reproductive health care. Editorial Fellow Laura Morales takes readers to the campus of the…

Michelle Vallejo, a 30-year-old congressional candidate and co-owner of a McAllen-area pulga, would like to be the rain on Republicans’ South Texas parade. Running to represent Congressional District 15—a top pickup target for a GOP hungry to gain ground along the Texas border—Vallejo emerged from a crowded March Democratic primary while running as the field’s most progressive candidate. In late May, she declared victory by a mere 30 votes in a runoff against a moderate opponent; as of mid-June, unofficial recount results confirmed her victory. Vallejo was recruited to run by a local progressive organization, LUPE Votes, and she signed onto a platform that includes Medicare for All and a $15 minimum wage. On the Republican side, voters nominated Monica De La Cruz, a well-funded, second-time candidate and border fearmonger,…

In the quiet but growing border community of Mission, a flag above Fire Station No. 3’s front desk advertises the community’s historic claim to fame as a citrus-growing powerhouse: “Mission Fire Department: Home of the Grapefruit.” The small firehouse is kept scrupulously clean except for traces of diesel fumes that have settled on the walls of the parking bay, on lockers full of protective gear, and on door frames leading into living quarters. This station is one of five in this city, where approximately 70 firefighters serve a population of 85,000. Behind the front desk, there’s a makeshift shrine to Ignacio “Nacho” Cantu, a Mission firefighter who died of cancer at just 36. In the hall, a bulletin board holds photos of other local firefighters, at least seven of whom…

“Everyone knows it’s good luck, if inconvenient, when a bird shits on you.” On an April afternoon, writer and activist Marisol Cortez read this line from a Ross Gay poem to a small audience in the grass of San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park, part of an event dubbed “Words for Birds and the Trees They Live In.” Cortez’s choice of poem was political. Behind her, hundreds of egrets and cormorants swooped around a stand of trees by a bend in the San Antonio River. A few daring people walked quickly under the birds, but stone picnic tables—plastered with white droppings—sat unused by parkgoers. These migratory birds’ nesting habitat is in danger. Five years ago, San Antonians approved funding to improve Brackenridge Park, a roughly 350-acre green space in the heart of…

In today’s era of school massacres carried out by gunmen armed with military-style weaponry, elected officials have—in the absence of bona fide gun control—turned to what they call “school hardening” as a solution. The ensuing demand for high-tech security mechanisms, social media surveillance, facial recognition cameras, rapid-response mobile alert systems, more drills and training, more police in schools, and more teachers with guns has made school security into a $3 billion growth industry nationwide. After the 2018 high school shooting in the Houston exurb of Santa Fe, Governor Greg Abbott convened roundtable meetings, and his advisors issued a report detailing “solutions that will make our schools and our state a safer place.” The report largely promoted several security reinforcement measures, some mental health policies, and a sprinkling of moderate gun-related measures…

LYTLE A man was confronted by an H-E-B manager on Mother’s Day when he tried leaving the store without paying for a $15 floral arrangement, police said. In his rush, the man left a shih tzu inside a shopping cart, according to a report from the Lytle Police Department. When officers checked for a microchip, they learned this dog did not actually belong to the suspected flower thief, the Star-Telegram reported. AUSTIN Do the Texas Longhorns and the Dallas Cowboys have some of the worst fans of any team? USA Today recently published a ranking of fans they consider “worst” and dinged followers of both Texas teams for being all hat and no cattle—in other words, those fans’ boasts seem to perennially exceed their teams’ actual abilities. DALLAS So, it’s definitely…

The women whom my daughter, photojournalist Ilana Panich-Linsman, photographed in 2021 could be anyone—your neighbor, college professor, doctor, or mother. They are women who sought, with great difficulty, to terminate pregnancies as young women between 1958 and early 1973, when abortion was mostly illegal in the United States. Nine of these procedures took place in the U.S. and one in Nogales, Mexico. They were high school girls or young college students; two married right out of high school. Almost all the women are now mothers and grandmothers. Among them are businesswomen, an immigration lawyer, a retired physician, a former Peace Corps volunteer, a professor and leader in the reproductive justice movement, and a writer and filmmaker. Most of the women in this series understood a half-century ago that they would…

A lost world sits at the bottom of Roy Creek Canyon. Nestled in the Texas Hill Country, beneath chasm walls 200 feet high, grows a secret forest of tall timber, live oak and sycamore and century-old cypress, clustered around a spring-fed creek and rushing clear green waterfalls. The walls are high enough to keep the valley at a half-remove from the flow of solar time, the mornings coming late, the evenings early, shadows creeping out from their base to cloak the forest. High enough that, in 1941, the canyon’s owner John Hunnicutt complained to a young Red Adams that the place was a money pit, a hole to swallow unwary livestock, and he’d just as soon be rid of it. Red and his best friend Herschel Black decided they liked the…

I’ve never been one to mince words, and I certainly won’t now that the Supreme Court seems ready to end our right to choose. This country hates women; Texas hates women; and Republicans have made it perfectly clear that they don’t care if we die. They don’t care if we die at the hands of abusers or from poverty or from poor healthcare, and certainly not from dangerous pregnancies, childbirth, and unsafe abortions. In fact, they want women to die from unsafe abortions to build a culture of fear around abortion. They need women to die to further their agenda. We aren’t simply collateral damage—we are the target. Abortion is healthcare and abortion saves lives. And let’s be honest, every pregnancy is a potential risk to a woman’s life. I…

Peter Stout’s buoyant presence cuts a sharp contrast to his grisly work as head of the Houston Forensic Science Center. Defying the typical laboratory white, Stout is dressed in hues of blue with bright teal armadillo socks peeking out of brown Oxfords. His independent crime lab, dubbed the country’s worst in local and national news reports in the 2000s, separated long ago from its roots within the Houston Police Department. Under Stout’s leadership, it has transformed from a failed forensic lab with a leaky roof, staffed with under-qualified employees who lied about their credentials, and caused wrongful convictions into one of America’s most independent and respected public crime labs. The lab’s daily churn includes analyzing evidence from some of the city’s worst crimes: murders, shootings, rapes. Stout doesn’t forget that…

On June 10, 2019, Governor Greg Abbott signed a law to legalize state hemp production and sales as soon as the Texas Department of Agriculture adopted rules to regulate the potentially lucrative new industry. In the ensuing race to score the state’s first licenses, several hemp enthusiasts forked over tens of thousands of dollars for insider advice from Todd M. Smith, a lobbyist and the longtime number-one political advisor to Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller. Smith cultivates a tough-guy persona. “I AM Danger!” he once tweeted. “I don’t tolerate losing or fools—especially fools that lose.” Smith and Miller, a real life rodeo cowboy, have been a team since the Stephenville Republican first won a Texas House race in 2000. Miller has given Smith—his top client—$1.5 million of the $6.6 million…

These days the Kemah Boardwalk is a glitzy, overbuilt amusement park where competing pop songs blare from speakers and the smells of fried fish, children’s sweat, and Houston’s overripe air waft over throngs of visitors. But I have never heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Galveston Bay” played there—a tune that unlocks a shocking secret about this popular tourist trap. California-based journalist Kirk Wallace Johnson was driving through the Sierra Nevadas in December 2018 to fish in a river when that “Springsteen song came on about a white shrimper planning to kill a Vietnamese refugee in Galveston Bay over turf. It was such a strange premise for a song that it stuck with me,” he writes in an author’s note to his resulting book. Johnson knew he had a book when he learned…

WHAT I REMEMBER OF UVALDE IS THEIR DEBATE TEAM,A GIRL WITH A SNAKESKIN BRIEFCASE. THE NAME, AJEWEL IN THE MOUTH, LIKE OTHERS—GUADALUPE, BANDERA—REDOLENT OF SKY, SPACE, HEAT, THE SENSE OF A JOURNEY, ROADS TURNING AND TURNING. WHAT I SAW WHEN I LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW OF THE CARWAS AN EXAMPLE, IN LANDSCAPE FORM, OF ALL I COULD DO AND BE. I RARELY THOUGHT ABOUT MY PARENTS’ GUN, ZIPPED IN ITS HOLSTER,INVARIABLY LOCKED IN A GLOVEBOX. SOMETIMES, WHEN I WAS SCARED AT NIGHT, LISTENING TO WIND OR COYOTES,I CONSIDERED ITS USELESSNESS. OTHER PEOPLE KEPT THEIR GUNS CLOSE AT HAND, OR HUNTED.WE ATE THEIR VENISON IN HUNTING SEASON. GUNS WERE FAR FROM MY MIND WHEN I DECIDED TO COME BACK,PREGNANT WITH YOU, AFTER YEARS LIVING ON EITHER COAST. PEOPLE WOULD SAY TEXAS?…