Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2023 i The Texas Observer

President Joe Biden promised to end the cruel, Trump-era policy of tearing immigrant kids away from their families. But as Contributors John Washington and Anna-Catherine Brigida’s investigation documents in our cover story, family separation is alive and well in this country. As one advocate told the reporters, “We said, ‘Never again,’ but here we are.” And in the next installment of our series on Texas rivers and the threats that endanger them, “Drifting Toward Disaster,” Contributor Kathryn Jones wonders how much longer the Brazos River can provide what a skyrocketing state population is going to need. With midterm elections behind us, progressives in Texas have yet another session of the Legislature to dread. Senior Staff Writer Justin Miller takes inventory of the damage while Contributor Ernie Morán offers a postelection…

For what feels like the hundredth year running, Democrats in 2023 will hold no positions of structural import in Texas state government. As such, the party is left only to decide what sort of opposition it will be—loyal or defiant, supplicant or obstructionist, scheming or strident? Enter Trey Martinez Fischer. On December 7, House Dems elected Martinez—who’s served 10 terms in the lower chamber representing a majority-Latino swath of San Antonio—to chair the party caucus in the 88th legislative session. Martinez beat out Austinite Gina Hinojosa along with Williamson County Representative John Bucy, who withdrew before the vote. Over two decades, Martinez has established a reputation as a legislative brawler, unafraid to derail GOP bills with aggressive parliamentary maneuvers. He will succeed Chris Turner, an Anglo lawmaker from a diverse chunk…

Democracy is a word on a lot of lips lately, but I’m not sure what it means: The right to vote? Freedom of speech? All of it together forms this numinous enterprise of democracy that we can’t see or touch. But we can see and know workers, who to me are the fabric of democracy. Over the decades, I’ve done studio and commercial photography, photojournalism, landscape pictures, and art photography. My dad and I used to do crime scene photos for the Fort Worth Police Department. Here and there, I’ve also worked for the excessively affluent million and billionaires who seemed to know little about us mid-level workers. Their cultural currency was built on watching people’s behavior in the presence of great wealth. But for the most part, us Byrds—I’m…

In the fall of 2021, a national reporter from Politico was in Austin writing another profile of Beto O’Rourke as the El Paso Democrat geared up to follow a failed presidential campaign with a run for governor. The reporter asked Mayor Steve Adler whether it was a sustainable political strategy for Texas Democrats for O’Rourke to keep running for statewide office again and again—in 2022 and beyond. “Why not?” Adler said. “Just for a while.” At the time, the logic was clear. No one else had the name recognition, the fundraising abilities, the talent, or the political will to run against the state’s incumbent Republican Governor Greg Abbott. If not Beto, then who? But after a dismal defeat by 11 points in November, O’Rourke probably does not hold the key to breaking…

EL PASO UPS has thrown the higher education plans of dozens of El Paso High School students into disarray. The young people had just taken the SATs and handed their answer sheets to school officials, who handed them to UPS. En route to the College Board, the papers flew out of an unsecured truck. UPS and the school district salvaged most of the exams, NPR reported, but 55 unfortunate students’ work was lost to the wind. TERLINGUA An opportunistic black bear has been helping itself to leftovers in dumpsters outside a barbecue joint and a taqueria, leaving steaming scat behind. Neither noise from business owners nor rubber bullets from a sheriff’s deputy have deterred the ursine gourmand, so state officials have resorted to shooting the poor creature with paintballs, reported…

Elections have consequences. This political bromide is overused for a reason—it’s reliably true. And this year, the fallout for vulnerable Texans could be particularly destructive. After something approaching a blue wave swept across Texas in November 2018, a chastened Republican majority in the Legislature kept its focus in the 2019 session on serious policymaking—school finance and property tax reform—while largely forgoing their typical red-meat fare. Republicans thwarted expectations of another Democratic surge in November 2020, and the next year the GOP ignored the problems laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis, instead focusing on passing as much right-wing legislation as possible over the course of a regular session, plus three painful specials. The final outcome was ugly: Abortions were effectively banned by threat of bounty, handgun permits…

On August 17, 1982, LGBTQ+ Texans celebrated “Gayteenth,” as activists called it at the time—a reference to Juneteenth, which commemorates news of slavery’s end reaching Texas. On that day in Dallas, a district court judge ruled in favor of plaintiff Don Baker in Baker v. Wade, declaring our state’s sodomy law unconstitutional. Baker, who lost his job with the Dallas Independent School District after coming out on TV, had sued the state for violating his right to privacy and equal protection under the laws. “I want gay people in Texas to understand that this is their victory—that they should internalize this and feel good about themselves,” declared Baker, who became a figurehead of the struggle to decriminalize queer relationships. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision. The Supreme…

When Dagoberto Gilb came to serve as writer-in-residence at the University of Houston-Victoria and found a literary center, he was assured he’d only have to teach one course per semester. “I had a contract, an agreement whose validity all academics take for granted based on academic traditions and guarantees that are honored across the country,” Gilb told the Texas Observer. After eight years and under new leadership, the university asked Gilb to teach two more classes. Gilb sued for breach of contract and discrimination in state court, characterizing this as part of a campaign to “bully and force [him] into either retirement or a complete alteration of his agreement with UHV.” “When the president of the university was responding in his communications with Dago, instead of saying ‘Professor Gilb,’ he…

Watching the national media’s reaction to last fall’s midterm elections made my head spin. While the cable news pundits and legacy media headlines spoke of the failure of a “red wave” to materialize, we here in Texas had to swallow the fact that our neighbors had chosen to reelect a governor who took no meaningful action to shore up our energy infrastructure after more than 200 fellow Texans died in an ice storm; who made guns easier to carry after the mass shootings in Sutherland Springs, at Santa Fe High School and the El Paso Walmart and leading up to the Uvalde elementary school tragedy; and whose version of “securing the border” meant sending busloads of migrants to faraway states with false promises. Oh, and we also reelected an attorney…

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned almost 50 years of legal precedent last June by stripping away the constitutional right to abortion, Destiny Adams was horrified. She foresaw devastating consequences for her community in Wolfforth, a tiny West Texas suburb of Lubbock with little access to contraception. She couldn’t stand by and do nothing. “Women that aren’t prepared to have a child should have the right to say, ‘Hey, I can’t give this child the best life it could have. I need an abortion,’” Adams told the Texas Observer. “It shouldn’t be anyone else’s choice except for the mother.” At Tumbleweed + Sage Coffeehouse, the bustling little shop Adams owns across the street from the Frenship High School football stadium, she started distributing free reproductive kits including Plan B pills, pregnancy…

In a part of Houston famous for its giant live oaks, museums, and million-dollar homes, 3900 Yupon Street looks out of place. With its bland brown brick facade, it could be just another building that schoolchildren throw balls against during recess. But the Rothko Chapel—next to a stone pyramid sculpture balancing a broken obelisk at its apex—has inspired both bewilderment and meditation in its visitors for more than 50 years. Outside the chapel, dusk had hit the humid city. Inside, the crowd sat, prayed, and cried. The occasion was an event titled “A Time of Remembrance.” Fifty or so visitors contemplated cycles of life and death in one short hour on November 2. Open to the general public, the gathering included reflections by hospice workers, a Vedic priest, and a…

There’s a temptation to see itas deterioration,a shift from perfection,the descent of long daysto long nights, darkness intrudingon the morning, low clouds obscuringthe sunrise, now a matter of faith. It creeps in, gradually,then all at oncelike the drizzle that has fallenthroughout the night, until now:the moment sleet becomes snow,gray suddenly turning white,the sky no longer falling but floating. Matt Byars is a husband, father of four, and native of Lubbock, where he teaches at Lubbock Christian University.…