Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i Texas Highways Magazine

This month’s story on Texas’ only native pepper, the chile pequin, originated from a conversation between our new senior editor, Danielle Lopez, and her father. She started her research by calling her dad, who like many Texans, has been on a lifelong quest to find the perfect salsa. “He started telling me about how his mom would pick fresh pequins that grew around their house in Pharr and bring them in to make a really hot, delicious salsa,” she says. “It’s a very common practice among South Texans. But he joked that we don't see it in restaurants too often because people can’t handle the heat.” Danielle joined our team in June to head up our food coverage, after stints at the Alcalde, KUT, and the Texas Observer. One of…

Sometimes known as the “City of Palms,” McAllen has reinvented itself time and again, yet still remains true to its roots. The town is named for John McAllen, an Irish settler and businessman who donated land along a new railroad in 1904. From its early days as a ranching and farming economy, the city has become an important hub for international trade on the Mexican border. The arrival of maquiladoras, or factories, in the 1980s turbocharged trade. Today, McAllen anchors a sprawling Rio Grande Valley metro area that encompasses the cities of Edinburg, Mission, and Pharr, along with several international bridges, where trucks import and export everything from auto parts to vegetables. Though celebrated for world-class citrus and produce, McAllen’s mild winters also draw winter Texans from the north, and…

I PULL UP TO A RAMSHACKLE wood-plank building on the slower side of the Fort Worth Stockyards on a Saturday afternoon. A sign out front says, “The Texas House of Liquor & Sport.” Don’t be fooled; this is actually a burger joint. But the sign and the rickety facade, like much of the Stockyards, is a throwback to a time when these streets teemed with cowboys, gamblers, ladies of the night, and so much marauding adventure it was known as Hell’s Half Acre. Last summer, native Texan filmmaker Taylor Sheridan shot part of his Yellowstone prequel about a brutal pioneer journey, 1883, on this very block. The sign and the facade are some of the last artifacts of that shoot, a little pixie dust Hollywood left behind. “Can I get…

Inside the “casino room” at Monteleone’s Ristorante in El Paso, a statue of the Virgin Mary watches over dinner guests from atop the mantle. But according to Gary and Laura Monteleone, the owners of the campy Italian restaurant, a different, smaller version of the figurine once sat in her place—a haunted one. Gary found the original hidden in the building’s walls as he prepared to launch the restaurant in 2001. During the years the first statue reigned over the room, the Monteleones say they’d periodically find her turned away, staring at the wall. Each time, they’d place her back in the right position and soon enough she would have inexplicably moved again. But this wasn’t the only sign something eerie was going on. Throughout the years, unexplained phenomenon continued to…

The final months of summer were both the best and worst parts of the year in the Big Bend country during the mid-1800s. In August, monsoons brought rainfall and relief from the Chihuahuan Desert’s blistering heat. Dry creeks began to flow, springs were replenished, and runoff filled depressions in rock formations, creating natural cisterns. Grass for grazing reappeared across arid basins. When September rolled around, the Big Bend was at its most hospitable—which is why the Comanches showed up when they did. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Comanches made the trek each year from their home territories across the Southern Plains. They came to make raids into Mexico to capture horses, and sometimes mules and humans. The “Lords of the Plains” valued horses the most; they needed them for hunting, warfare,…

The so-called Great Chili Confrontation started on Oct. 21, 1967, when journalists H. Allen Smith and Wick Fowler met in Terlingua for a cookoff to decide who could make the best chili. Smith, who lived in New York, had written an article in Holiday magazine titled “Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do,” with a recipe including pinto beans. Fowler—a well-known Texas reporter and creator of the Wick Fowler’s Two-Alarm Chili Kit—could not abide such an assault on the national dish of Texas, where ground beef is the prized ingredient and beans are frowned upon. The two met at high noon to settle the dispute, but the judging ended in a tie, leading to a rematch the following year. As evidenced by this photo of chili judge Floyd Schneider,…

When she was growing up in San Antonio, writer Cat Cardenas remembers picking chile pequin from a lot next to her grandfather’s house. “He would send us over to a little shrub with a couple of empty jars,” the Austin-based writer says, “and we’d collect as many as we could and bring them back to his kitchen so he could make fresh salsa.” Cardenas wrote “Some Like It Hot” (Page 36) as an ode to the pequin, the only native pepper in the state. “I hope it helps people develop an appreciation for the native plants of Texas and the people who have spent years cultivating them and developing so many of the Tex-Mex staples we know and love,” she says. Featured Contributors Rubén Degollado For “Home Before Sundown” (Page…

For thousands of years, civilizations across the globe have used gourds in their daily lives. The plant is not only a popular food source, but throughout human history its versatile shell has been transformed into a multitude of goods, including musical instruments, containers, and drinking vessels. Many artists, like Judy Richie of Kerrville, see gourds as the ultimate canvas. When dried, their shells turn hard and hollow, inviting all kinds of creative experimentation, from sculpting and painting to staining, dying, and carving. Pumpkins are the prize of the gourd family every fall when families transform them with a host of disguises on Halloween. “You can do so many things with gourds,” Richie says. “Once you start working on them, they kind of take over.” In Texas, there is perhaps no…

Ground yourself in the Rio Grande Valley by visiting this Edinburg museum’s exhibits on local history. Last year, the museum reopened its 1910 Jail building after almost a decade of closure and repairs. The building also formerly served as Edinburg city hall, a firehouse, and a police station. The restored building chronicles the history of Abram Ortiz, the only person to be executed in the jail, and houses rotating exhibits. Through June 4, see Borderlands—An Illustrated History by José Cisneros, featuring original artwork by the late El Paso artist. 200 N. Closner Blvd, Edinburg. 956-383-6911; mosthistory.org…

With a baby on the way and $3 left in his back account, Lucas Bradbury huddled in a food truck in San Antonio, tinkering with a secret recipe he planned to sell to customers in less than 24 hours. It was September of 2020, a year full of unexpected moves, and Bradbury was betting on his new creation: a deep-fried chicken sandwich with a slather of aioli and a dill pickle slice, accompanied by a side of creamy macaroni and cheese. His secret? The chicken wasn’t really chicken. Rather, it was a plant-based patty that would become the staple of his rapidly expanding restaurant chain Project Pollo. Since then, Bradbury’s Project Pollo has grown from that humble truck parked outside of Roadmap Brewing Co. in San Antonio to 21 brick-and-mortar…

Originally from Arkansas, Harold Ferguson grew up playing bluegrass music. While working on a cotton farm as a child, he’d run into the house and play the mandolin between picking rows. Ferguson eventually moved to the West Texas town of Wickett—where he later became mayor—and started the Wickett Bluegrass Festival 20 years ago. Though Ferguson died in 2016, the festival continued until the pandemic, for a total of 21 years. After the festival ended its run in Wickett, Ferguson’s daughter, Cyndi Perdue, moved to the Big Bend area, where she discovered an array of music and art. Bluegrass, however, was mostly absent, so she started the Big Bend Bluegrass Association. From Oct. 7-8, the association is hosting the inaugural Big Bend Bluegrass Festival at the Alpine Civic Center, bringing a…

In South Texas, our friends from the northern Midwestern states are called Winter Texans, not snowbirds. Those folks called snowbirds are Yankees from the Northeast and go to Florida. Ray Moore, McAllen Biker’s Heaven We had a chance to visit the Texas Vintage Motorcycle Museum with our car club back in June [“Vroom Room,” September]. I was expecting to see the large American bikes that ruled the 1950s and 1960s. I was amazed to see that the collection featured the stars of the 1970s. The Honda CBX with its six cylinder in-line motor. The Norton Commando with right hand gear shift. The Triumphs, Bultacos, BMWs, and so many more. For anyone who started riding in the 1970s, these machines bring you right back to those times. The exhibit includes regular…

“It’s like a sparkler, spraying embers in the air,” Benito Treviño says excitedly, as he strolls through the grounds of his sprawling ranch in the Rio Grande Valley. “That’s what it’s like when you bite into a chile pequin.” The 75-year-old botanist from Rio Grande City, a town of around 15,000 people about an hour west of McAllen, delights in caring for each of the hundreds of plants that thrive at his Rancho Lomitas Native Plant Nursery. There are the bougain-villeas and scarlet sage, both saturated in color; the sturdy and fragrant lantana; the rare star cactus; and the sprouting seeds he takes methodical notes on. But only the pequin, in all its tiny glory, is part of his weekly ritual. “When my wife calls me for dinner, I’ll walk…

Almost 10 years ago, while on tour to promote one of her cookbooks, Pati Jinich visited the U.S.-Mexico border for the first time. “I was standing at the Rio Grande where Laredo and Nuevo Laredo meet, and I was like, ‘What is this force?’” she recalls. “I could feel the flow of hundreds and thousands of lives that have passed through there.” Born and raised in a Jewish family in Mexico City, Jinich is best known for her Emmy-nominated and James Beard Award-winning cooking show Pati’s Mexican Table, which opened its 11th season on PBS in mid-September. But growing up, Jinich didn’t dream of becoming a chef. “I’ve always been a very good eater, but I wasn’t a good cook,” says Jinich in her distinctive chilanga (Mexico City) accent. Jinich…