Tabla de contenidos para November/December 2022 en The Texas Observer

As Texas’ population booms and climate change bakes the land, the state’s lifeblood—its rivers—are drying up. In this issue, we inaugurate “Drifting Toward Disaster,” a series that takes a hard look at how regulators, big ag, and big business have long failed to protect the state’s rivers. In the first installment, contributor Dylan Baddour looks at the Rio Grande, which has been drained by development on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border. The Texas Observer is also proud to publish the 2021 winner of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference’s Ten Spurs Award, a reported narrative by journalist Kim Horner. And we’re co-sponsoring this year’s contest. Elsewhere, contributor David Martin Davies re-examines the 1976 unsolved murder of civil rights leader Frank J. Robinson, whose suspicious death was ruled a suicide—all evidence…

Cities and farmers in Central Texas used to pump groundwater from the Edwards Aquifer much more freely—draining local springs and rivers and depriving several endangered species of a habitat. In the 1990s, the Sierra Club sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on these creatures’ behalf. As lawsuits dragged on, a drought arrived, and the court called on a young researcher named Todd Votteler to shepherd the aquifer through the crisis. He hastily slapped together a management plan, and somehow, the region pulled through. The litigation created the Edwards Aquifer Authority and spurred San Antonio—then entirely dependent on the aquifer—to diversify its water supply sources. As climate change distorts the water cycle and Texas’ population and industry swell, this recent history is perhaps a preview of things to come, with…

This piece was produced in partnership with Texas Public Radio. Listen to the Texas Public Radio podcast series, “The Ghost of Frank J. Robinson.” Dorothy Redus Robinson didn’t believe in ghosts, but she always said she knew her husband was murdered because his ghost told her so. In an interview recorded when she was 85, Robinson said she was sitting on the edge of her bed days after Frank J. Robinson’s funeral when she saw him again. “It looked like he came to the hall and stood at the bedroom door, and he said, ‘Dear, it’s a lie,’ and I said, just as plain as I’m talking to you, ‘You don’t need to tell me, I know you didn’t kill yourself.’” Dorothy said she was wide awake by the time…

In 2021, Jesse Freidin began traveling across the country to photograph transgender youth for a photo project called “Are You OK?” He’s been to more than half the states in the country, meeting with dozens of trans kids. In August, Freidin made his second visit to Texas. In the intervening year, legal and policy-based attacks on LGBTQ+ people in the United States have reached feverish heights. Governor Greg Abbott even launched child abuse investigations into parents who seek gender-affirming healthcare for their kids. Though nonprofits like Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union have responded with multiple lawsuits against the policy, which has been partially blocked in court, it still left many families fearing for their safety. Kai Shappley, a trans girl known for her outspoken activism, fled the state…

Big-city traffic and a resolution on New Year’s Eve of 2020 led Pflugerville resident Kelsey Black to become a bookseller. An avid reader, she disliked the hour round trip required to get from her suburb of 65,000 to downtown Austin to browse a bookstore. “OK,” she told herself, “I think it’s just going to be easier for me to … start my own bookstore.” Turned out, it wasn’t easy at all, “but it’s OK because I have now found my calling,” Black said. The Book Burrow began as a pop-up and online business and finally, on August 6, opened as a brick-and-mortar store. She said the 200-square-foot space has become a haven for those who don’t feel like they fit in elsewhere, drawn by the store’s motto: “Embrace your weird.”…

Republicans’ moralizing, “anti-woke” crusade has entered the arena of fiscal governance, and it’s likely to cost taxpayers, pensioners, municipalities, and everyday Texans a big chunk of change. Last fall, new state laws went into effect that prohibit governmental entities from engaging with financial institutions that the state deems to be anti-fossil fuel, antigun, and, thus, anti-Texas. These laws, passed overwhelmingly by the Republican-controlled Legislature, are the latest and most expansive in a suite of legislation that makes the state the ultimate arbiter of all that is good and bad. In effect, the power of the purse is weaponized to protect the interests of the conservative cause and punish its enemies. Namely, what the right has cast as the Woke of Wall Street—the big banks and investment firms like Citigroup and BlackRock…

CHISOS BASIN No wild buffalo have roamed Big Bend country for decades, yet locals and tourists kept reporting encounters with a bison bull near the Chisos Basin in August. The bull, some say, is possibly an escapee from Bruce Ranch, a family-owned outfit with domestic herds near Marathon, the Big Bend Sentinel reported. AUSTIN Can you get an A in Taylor Swift? In the fall 2022 semester, the University of Texas at Austin is offering a course on the megastar’s discography. With so many fine Texas musicians around, why does Swift, a native Pennsylvanian, merit academic attention? As English professor Elizabeth Scala told KXAN: “I want to take what Swift fans can already do at a sophisticated level, tease it out for them a bit with a different vocabulary, and then…

One thing about Mo, a limited series that debuted on Netflix last month, is that it’s fast. Think diction-of-“Mattress Mack” fast. Fast in doling out gags that at minimum will redden your face and dramatic beats that address the tragicomic reality of people who call the United States their second home. Minutes into the pilot, the lead character, Mo, a semi-autobiographical role played by Houston comedian Mohammed Amer, is placed on a riches-to-rags journey where he goes from a senior staffer at a cellular shop to a jobless Palestinian immigrant. Having no work permit is the reason cited. But what can he do when the only way to get it is to have his asylum case heard, though it’s been stalled in immigration courts for 22 years? Both heartaches and…

A longer version of this essay won a Ten Spurs Award from the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in 2021 and will be published in this year’s Ten Spurs Journal. The Texas Observer is helping sponsor the Mayborn’s writing contests this year. Joe lived on a grassy area at the edge of the parking lot of the Creative Arts Center of Dallas. All the regulars at the community arts school knew the handsome, slender, gentle man in his 70s with the gray beard, who often could be found tinkering with the tools he scavenged or resting on a cushion on top of a concrete block. Joe would greet them with a big smile and raise two fingers in a peace sign. Students and teachers would bring him something to eat or…

As he watched a couple load ice chests into their car at a gas station, something didn’t sit right with Roland Gutierrez. The pair were likely on their way to the lake to enjoy the late May sunshine in San Antonio—a normal way to spend the day, he knew. But Gutierrez, the state senator for District 19, couldn’t help thinking how surreal it is that life continues after a tragedy. He was on his way to Uvalde just days after an 18-year-old had opened fire on a classroom at Robb Elementary School, killing 19 students and two teachers. “I was thinking how sad it is that … we move on with our lives,” Gutierrez said when we met at his San Antonio law office in September. “It’s not an unnatural thing.…

Aheavy monsoon season hit the Chihuahuan Desert in September. It flooded city streets in northern Mexico, overflowed some Mexican reservoirs and sent raging water down the Rio Grande through snaking canyons on the West Texas border, which months before had run totally dry for the first time on record. In the Mexican state of Chihuahua, a massive area with a flourishing commercial nut export sector, residents rejoiced. Just a few weeks before they had drifted so near the brink of disaster that they had caught sight of the terrible hazards ahead. In mid-August, Chihuahua’s largest reservoirs had dropped to critical levels after years of widespread drought. The largest city in northern Mexico, Monterrey, had been rationing water to its 5 million people all summer. Yet Mexico owed water to Texas.…

Ana Chandler points south to a dip in the Davis Mountains. Often, when she and her husband are sky-watching, “Omega Centauri appears in that notch,” she said. Omega Centauri is a globular star cluster—millions of stars so crammed together that their light merges. It’s just one of a skyful of reasons the Chandlers moved from Central Texas to this spot between Fort Davis and the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory. Six or eight nights a month, weather permitting, the Chandlers open the roll-off roof of their observatory and focus 25-and 30-inch reflecting telescopes on whatever objects are on their current list. They are visual astronomers, Jim Chandler explained. They actually look through eyepieces rather than attaching cameras and other equipment to capture images and data. “There’s just something about billion-year-old…

Here lean against mewhile I lean against the windowtrying to steady the world.Something jittery as the day begins,a hesitation, a catch in its step,its uncertain breath. My friend the librarianalways told me that the worldwas more than anyone deserved,more trouble and more beauty.She said she never understoodwhy she felt responsible for it,as if she needed to give ita good spin every morningto keep it going, to stopthat wobble that she felt. And then what, I asked her.“Just hold on,” she said,“hold on with everything I have.” Telling me thatwas like handing it to me.As when she handed me a bookshe thought I might like, or oneshe thought I ought to read. Monty Jones, who lives in Austin, is the author of a book of poems, Cracks in the Earth, published…