Tabla de contenidos para September/October 2021 en The Texas Observer

One of the most remarkable things about Texas justice is how it fails to confront power in any meaningful way. It’s an unyielding beast when it comes to drugs, immigration, violent crime, or so-called election fraud, but when it comes to corrupt politicians, that watchdog tends to roll over and beg for belly rubs. At least that’s what the data indicate. In this issue, Lise Olsen’s intrepid reporting reveals that the Texas Rangers—the agency responsible for investigating public integrity and corruption cases, like officials engaging in theft or bribery—can’t handle the job. That’s not a slight to the Rangers’ abilities but to the system in which the Rangers operate, one created by politicians that allows those politicians nearly full control over what constitutes corruption. Through a series of public records…

$250 MILLION was transferred from the state’s beleaguered prison system to border security in June, a bid by Texas Governor Greg Abbott to finish former President Donald Trump’s border wall in Texas. During his time in office, Trump managed to build about 20 miles of wall in South Texas. The funding would buy Abbott roughly 10 miles of wall on Texas’ 1,254-mile border. $4 BILLION in county and federal funding for flood control projects in Harris County has largely benefitted whiter, wealthier communities, according to a fair housing complaint filed in June against the state’s General Land Office. 51 OF THE 57 Democratic members of the Texas House fled to Washington, D.C., in July in an effort to deny the chamber a quorum during a 30-day special session, blocking a vote on a bill…

Bryan Parras recalls a time in elementary school when he accompanied his dad on a work trip to Nederland, in Texas’ Golden Triangle. The warehouse where his dad organized county workers was “just one open vacant room with a bunch of chairs like you would see in a movie.” Bryan, now 44, remembers running around outside, playing on a mound of sand, while his dad discussed strategy with Jefferson County employees. Meanwhile, Juan Parras, who was there to try to negotiate Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday for union workers, recalls what was happening inside. In the East Texas region long home to the Ku Klux Klan, Juan says the mayor, whom he describes as looking like KFC’s Colonel Sanders, took him in a back room during…

W. Chase Peeler, a researcher who studies music cultures, headed to the farthest corner of West Texas in 2013 to find a remote region where music was in full bloom. He drove through Big Bend, stopped in Terlingua Ghost Town, and discovered a community so musically inclined that it’s said “there’s a musician hiding under every rock.” Case in point: The town of roughly 100 people had a fully equipped recording studio 25 years before it had a school, a water utility company, or a decent grocery store. Peeler, a multi-instrumentalist, fell in love. He stayed more than two years, conducting doctoral research in ethnomusicology, trying to suss out what made Terlingua such a musical oasis. The culmination of his work is On the Porch: Life and Music in Terlingua,…

In the spring of 1959, the Texas Observer published an ambitious series of in-depth reports on the state’s hospitals for the mentally ill, featuring images by noted documentary photographer Russell Lee. The stories revealed the deplorable conditions found in the State Home for Confederates, Terrell Mental Hospital, and Rusk State Hospital: overcrowding, lack of sufficient medical care, overuse of tranquilizers to keep patients subdued, and buildings that were firetraps and falling apart. As a March 28 article noted, “[F]or the other 800 inmates—and inmates they are, the euphemisms do not prevail against locked doors—Terrell has little to offer but drugs, a daze, and death.” Lee was the Texas Observer’s first official staff photographer. His state hospital photos demonstrate one of the trademarks of his career: his ability to document suffering…

With a simple statement, the man from Mar-a-Lago can still make or break political fortunes. Exhibit A: the GOP primaries in Texas. This summer, former President Donald Trump issued his “Complete and Total Endorsement” of two of Texas’ most powerful Republicans—Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton—who both face the toughest primary battles of their careers in 2022. The endorsement was a major coup for Abbott, who hasn’t had the close relationship with Trump that other top Texas Republicans have enjoyed. His already tepid relationship with the party’s right wing soured after his use of emergency powers during the pandemic was perceived as tyrannical. The tumult prompted a pair of hard-line challengers—former state Senator Don Huffines and Florida-man-turned-Texas-GOP-chair Allen West—to attempt to dethrone King Abbott. That’s probably why, after…

San Antonio has a history of electing young, fresh faces to city council—think Henry Cisneros and Julián Castro. In June, voters picked a 26-year-old math teacher named Jalen McKee-Rodriguez to represent the city’s historically Black East Side, making him not only one of the youngest politicians ever elected in the city, but also San Antonio’s first openly gay city council member. With backing from the Democratic Socialists of America and the Texas Organizing Project, he also represents what some see as an emerging progressive block in San Antonio politics. The Observer spoke with McKee-Rodriguez about his election, discrimination he faced as a former city staffer, gentrification in his district, and other issues facing the city’s East Side. You’ve called Barack Obama’s election and Trayvon Martin’s killing eye-opening and defining moments…

A year and a half into the pandemic, millions of Texans have been infected with the coronavirus and more than 54,000 have died. Vaccines brought family reunions and the hopeful, albeit short-lived, promise of a semi-normal summer. But with less than half of Texas’ population still unvaccinated, the more contagious Delta variant of the virus took hold and confirmed cases and hospitalizations surged in July and August. When this pandemic ends, it will leave behind scars far beyond what is captured in those numbers: jobs lost; homes lost; relationships, people, places, ways of life lost. For more than a year, we’ve been following a group of Texans from across the state, chronicling the ways the pandemic has altered their lives in overlapping yet infinitely different ways. The first part of…

4 A.M. IN DEL RIO As the tide drops, navigating the banks of the Rio Grande becomes more manageable. Along the 1,200-mile boundary are points where the United States and Mexico are only feet away from each other, the river easily crossed in the right conditions. In the dead of a cloudy night in June, a group of migrants made their way across the river, across the invisible line dividing the two countries. After fording the river, the group walked toward two Department of Public Safety officers who were parked by a dusty road near the riverbank. The officers were part of a 1,000-member deployment to the border through Operation Lone Star, Texas’ latest effort to “combat the smuggling of people and drugs into Texas,’’ according to a press release…

“Hijo, ya está la comida!” My mom shouted from the kitchen of our family home in Oak Cliff that my huevo con chorizo tacos were ready. It was New Year’s Eve 2020, and I’d been staying at my parents’ house for almost a week so my mom didn’t ring in the new year alone. She’d spent most of the past month and a half by herself. Since November 19, my father had been at Dallas’ Parkland Hospital trying his best to fight the damage COVID-19 had done to his lungs. For the entirety of December, a machine had been breathing for him while tubes lodged down his throat helped feed him and suck bile from his lungs. In the kitchen, my mom stood over the hot stove and flipped a…

EL PASO In El Paso, the operators of the local zoo are raising the fences around the spider monkey exhibit, KDBC reports. The construction, which will raise the fences from 3 feet to 5.5 feet, comes after a woman hopped the fence to feed the monkeys, which is prohibited. “It only takes one person to ruin everyone else’s experience, so we are making alterations to prevent this from ever happening again,” the zoo supervisor said. LUBBOCK If you’ve lost your llama in Lubbock County, pipe up. KLBK reports that the local sheriff’s office found the brown-and-white camelid wandering through town. The office distributed a public notice that if the owner doesn’t speak up soon, the llama will be sold at a public auction. AUSTIN Texas’ capital city is entering a…

PAUL ANDERSON’S RED-BRICK law office faces North Street in Nacogdoches and fits right in with the rest of the offices and cafes along the small city’s main street. The interior reflects Anderson’s flamboyant personality: It’s painted scarlet and features abstract paintings by his law partner along with swords from his days competing internationally as a black belt in kendo, a Japanese martial art. For years, Anderson lived in Houston, where as a citizen he battled developers who had built homes atop toxic waste buried in his neighborhood. He owned a kendo studio and often bested sparring partners in competitions where opponents often leveled bamboo sticks at his throat. But then he went to law school and moved to the sleepy East Texas college town of Nacogdoches, where he expected a quieter…

Wade at night into the gently lapping surf at Boca Chica Beach, an undeveloped stretch of sand about 20 miles east of the Texas border town of Brownsville, and ahead you’ll see nothing but Gulf waters meeting sky—endless, dark but for the stars and languid whitecaps. A pensive, ancient view to make you feel small and the world enormous. Turn around and everything inverts. Beyond a smattering of working-class Latino families, gathered around bonfires and pickup trucks on the beach, looms something brimming with novelty, brightness, and ambition: the South Texas launch site for SpaceX, where one day a 400-foot rocket may leave Earth en route to Mars. Just 1,500 feet from the water’s edge, amid rolling sand dunes and acres of tidal mud flats, rises a launchpad of towering…

The Freedman’s Memorial Cemetery is empty on a sweltering weekday in June, the gated park tucked between Lemmon Avenue and Calvary Street contained by the three-lane frontage road that edges the moat of the North Central Expressway. The sound of traffic dominates the space—a dull, uneasy roar, the sound of an industrial fan, an airplane landing. An arresting, life-size bronze sculpture of an African woman—the Prophetess, the keeper of memory—stands at the entrance. She holds a harp in her left hand, her right palm open and extended outward in invitation. In 1869, a group of freed slaves purchased an acre of land on what was then the outskirts of Dallas for $25. The land included what had been a slave cemetery. As other Freedmen settled around the cemetery and purchased…

Everything happens in timebut Time still sometimeswants a body a stalk like an asparagusa golden eyethat opens slow and misty maybe a scar or twoto prove its memories the mirror of a quiet poolor nakedness before another Time dreams a trunkand leaves and branches reaches down beneath the darkfor some kind of hold Before this world startedTime drank heavilyof empty and of dark It gladdened Time’s heartwhen first it came uponstarshine on the waters and found things watchfulto observe its changesand keep it companyuntil they had to go Its favorite travel spot so faris right here in the Holocene It likes the insectsand going to the movies The bad news iseven Time feelsit’s moving faster now What can be next when the whole showbecomes a windowclosing too fastfor Time’s taste…