Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2018 i The Texas Observer

IN RECENT YEARS, THE TEXAS DEPARTment of Public Safety has spent more than $15 million on two high-altitude surveillance planes. Typically flying at more than 2 miles above the earth, the planes are impossible to spot from the ground, leaving Texans in the dark about whether they’re being watched. The planes, according to the manufacturer, are capable of tracking people and vehicles from several miles away and transmitting high-definition video overlaid with powerful mapping software in real time to analysts. By analyzing flight logs and tracking data, the Observer, in partnership with The Investigative Fund, found that from January 2015 to July 2017, during Operation Secure Texas, DPS flew these high-tech planes hundreds of times over wide swaths of Central and South Texas. The majority of the flights were concentrated…

WE WERE ALL GATHERED IN the auditorium of Beaumont’s Millard Elementary School when the windows began rattling, a strong enough vibration that 71 years later I remember the moment. Though I could not tell you the names of my third-grade teacher or more than one or two of my classmates, I distinctly remember feeling a tinge of fear not unlike what I experienced when I heard the sirens signaling a practice air raid during World War II. Two small planes were knocked out of the sky, and a 15-foot wave carried a barge 100 feet inland, bringing it to rest on the smoldering wreckage of a fire truck. I remember, too, how we all turned to look out the windows and saw only the placid blue Texas sky on that…

Draylen Mason, 17, was one of two people killed by a package bomb during a string of attacks across Austin in March. The principal bassist in the Austin Youth Orchestra, he had recently been accepted to the University of Texas at Austin’s prestigious Butler School of Music. Street artist Mike Johnston created this mural on a utility box in East Austin, where Mason was a third-generation resident. Johnston told the Austin American-Statesman, “This is maybe one very small way people can say he’s still here and his memory will live on.” Photo by Morgan O’Hanlon. See more photos from Eye on Texas at www.texasobserver.org/eyeontexas. CALL FOR ENTRIES: Seeking Texas-based documentary photography. Please send inquiries to eyeontexas@texasobserver.org.…

ON A MONDAY MORNING IN LATE APRIL, MARCIA LAMB’S 6-year-old son, Braeden, is running around the playground at Austin’s Zilker Park, making the most of an unusual reprieve from school. Braeden and Marcia drove from Corpus Christi that morning to participate in a “Sex Ed Sit Out,” a nationwide event to protest the “sexualization” of kids. The Austin sit-out and picnic was organized by Lamb’s sister, Caryl Ayala, who is cofounder of Concerned Parents of Austin, a conservative group that opposes what it calls the “radical sex ed and LGBT agenda being introduced in schools.” Along with three other parents, Lamb sits in a lawn chair underneath a shady tree and explains why she’s picnicking for sex ed-free schools. “They’re normalizing choices that are against my beliefs and what’s clearly…

WHILE ALL EYES ARE ON BETO O’ROURKE’S BID TO UNseat Senator Ted Cruz, the race to take over O’Rourke’s El Paso congressional seat has gotten much less attention. Veronica Escobar, the El Paso county judge, decided to step down from her post and run. Positioning herself as a progressive reformer who cleaned up county government corruption, she garnered Beto’s backing as well as support from national Democratic groups. Escobar handily won the primary, which, in this deep-blue district, almost certainly means she’ll win the general. If she does, Escobar will make history as the first woman to represent Texas’ largest border city in Washington, D.C., and, alongside state Senator Sylvia Garcia of Houston, likely the first Latina elected to Congress from Texas. The Observer sat down with the El Paso…

IT TAKES THICK SKIN AND A GENEROUS SPIRIT to appreciate the Museum of Street Culture. When I visited on a sunny April morning, I was on display to a group of homeless people who stared at me as I observed the art. The homeless sat on the sidewalk right in front of me, their backs slumped against the walls on which were mounted the photographs I was there to see. I felt the urge to look down and make eye contact, but resisted, afraid I wouldn't know what to do with the looks that would be returned. Instead, I stayed fixed on the photos — black-and-whites of homeless people — and considered how they mirrored the environment in which they were presented. Several dozen homeless people milled about on Park…

WHEN THE TEXAS GAY RODEO Association was founded in 1985, most of its members were still in the closet. Tim Smith, the organization’s president, says many competitors felt safer performing under aliases. “Used to be, they wouldn’t even allow us into venues, and we’d have to find a spot wherever we could,” Smith says. “But now convention centers have even started inviting us, because they see the business value.” For three days in late April, more than 100 men and women from across Texas and at least nine other states gathered at Mesquite Arena in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite to compete in the association’s 33rd annual Texas Tradition Rodeo. They ranged in age from 18 to 72 and competed in 13 events, from bull riding and calf roping to…

LAST SUMMER, LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR DAN PATRICK WAS NECK deep in a dehumanizing and convoluted political brawl over the ability of transgender people to use the appropriate bathroom. It was the kind of thing that seems to give the former talk radio yakker his greatest thrills — and he lost. Ever since, Patrick has been uncharacteristically quiet. He’s dipped into primary races and national politics here and there, but mostly he seems content to let others grab headlines for what might be the first time in his career. In the interim, observers have described the birth of a “loose coalition” of moderates, teachers and business groups who are gunning for Dan. Is Patrick on the back foot? Just before the Republican primary this year, Patrick gave his own answer to that…

“THIS PARTICULAR EMPLOYEE HAS BEEN PULLED OVER THREE TIMES IN SEVEN DAYS. SO I THINK IT WOULD BE EASY TO SAY HE IS BEING TARGETED FOR HARASSMENT.” On a Friday morning, two days before Christmas 2016, Marianna Treviño-Wright decided she’d had enough of the Texas Department of Public Safety’s latest “border surge.” The longtime executive director of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Treviño-Wright sat down at her desk, next to the baby turtle terrarium and the butterfly kites, to write an angry email to the local DPS captain. “My employees are being repeatedly stopped for a variety of reasons,” she wrote. “They are being questioned in the morning, when arriving at work and opening the gate. … They are being pulled over on Military [Highway] and on Schuerbach [Road]…

Mica flashes below the boatas if the beer-can studded sand is seededwith glass, diamonds, and lightunder the random tire and shoe.At water’s edge, late summer lavender bends in a breeze.Shining boys stand on the ruins of railroad footings,framed by the green hip of a mountain. Oneby one, they leap from that altaras they’ve jumped for generationsuntil the last boy falls through air—standing on pointe—and disappears.Laughing and yelling their way to shore,the boys walk over rocks in bare feet,bent like old men. The resting paddlereleases drops that swell and rings multiplythen vanish in that mirror, becoming river.It doesn’t matter what you believe,this is what you know. Chivas Sandage grew up in Houston and lives part-time in San Marcos. She’s writing a book about the 2012 double shooting of a lesbian teenage…