Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2019 i The Texas Observer

Underground History Thank you for your continued, urgent reporting on human rights, criminal justice, and politics in Texas. “Where the Bodies are Buried” (July|August) is moving, insightful, and sheds light on an important Texas tragedy and the continued efforts by residents working to recover the memories of the victims and reflect on the long legacies of violence. I hope your reporting will help bolster their efforts. ¶ Some of the descendants of the Porvenir massacre and other cases of anti-Mexican violence are working to have death certificates issued for their loved ones. If we find some success, it might also be something that can bring resolve for the descendants of the Slocum massacre and perhaps generate more support for identifying the remains of those victims who are still unidentified. Monica…

This summer, Texans recoiled at a viral video of a San Antonio teen licking a pint of Blue Bell ice cream before returning it to a grocery store freezer. Governor Greg Abbott was outraged, going so far as to call the teen a “despicable criminal." (Though as Texas Monthly pointed out, Abbott stayed silent during the 2015 Blue Bell listeria outbreak that killed three people.) Which of the following is not a real Blue Bell flavor? a. Mardi Gras King Cake b. Raspberry Rodeo c. Cotton Candy d. Southern Hospitality ANSWER: B. Blue Bell does offer a limited-edition Raspberry Fudge Brownie flavor, however.…

DONALD TRUMP IS A PRIVATE PRISON KIND OF GUY. America’s two for-profit titans of incarceration—GEO Group and CoreCivic—pitched in $500,000 for his inauguration. Almost immediately after Trump took office, his Justice Department reversed an Obama-era move to partially phase out federal use of the companies, sending their stocks soaring. As of August, a record 55,000 immigrants languished in detention, mostly in for-profit facilities and many in Texas. Yet, somehow, the future looks murkier than ever for the poor prison profiteers. Here’s a recent sampling of headlines from Seeking Alpha, a news service for investors: “Bank of America stops lending to private prison operators,” “Democrats’ lead in polls highlights political risks,” and “More shun U.S. private prison financing.” Such bearishness results from a recent spate of high-profile repudiations, the fruit of…

Visit texasobserver.org/strangest-state for more “Strangest State” and links to original stories. Got a local oddity or some small-town news to share? Tips are welcome at cahalan@texasobserver.org.…

STATE OF TEXAS 2019 An unprecedented number of first-time female candidates ran for office in Texas in 2018—and lost. Now, many of those women are running again. EARLY ON NOVEMBER 7, 2018, GINA ORTIZ JONES drove home after conceding to U.S. Representative Will Hurd, a Republican from Texas’ 23rd Congressional District. A first-time candidate, Jones had outraised the sitting congressman by more than $1 million, but it hadn’t been enough to sway the swing district, which sprawls from San Antonio to El Paso along 820 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. At 2 a.m., she got a call from her campaign manager—maybe she hadn’t lost. With all precincts reporting, Jones was up by nearly 300 votes. Although Hurd declared victory the next morning, she withdrew her concession and went about making…

Though Reynolds is a vegan, his musical appetite might best be described as omnivorous. WALK INTO COMPOSER GRAHAM Reynolds’ East Austin studio, and the first thing you’ll notice, perhaps surprisingly, is the books. There are two whole walls of them: floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with hundreds of music books, naturally, but also cookbooks and novels, comics and zines, science fiction and history. On the stifling July afternoon when I visited, a coffee table was crowded with the work of Maria Sibylla Merian, a German entomologist and illustrator who lived during the late 1600s. Merian, one of the first scientists to directly observe and document butterfly metamorphosis, was a pioneer in an era when insects were commonly described as “beasts of the devil.” Reynolds is reading everything he can find about her,…

THE TERM “Remain in Mexico” WHO'S USING IT The Trump administration Every few years, a pithy new phrase describing border goings-on enters the political lexicon. Who can forget some of the greatest partisan hits, like “spillover violence,” “chain migration,” or, a favorite ditty of the Donald, “anchor babies”? While the latest term to take hold doesn’t have quite the same fearmongering vibe, “Remain in Mexico” appears to be going mainstream. This is partially because it has roots in an official Trump administration program that requires asylum-seekers entering the United States from our southern ports of entry to return to Mexico and wait there for a long-scheduled immigration court hearing. Say a person applies for asylum in Laredo. After being detained for a few days in an infamously cold Customs and…

TITLE/ORGANIZATION Leader of Mass Resistance Houston THE CAUSE Ending “assaults on the traditional family, school children, and the moral foundation of society.” NOTABLE ACCOMPLISHMENT Shutting down drag queen story time events in Houston and Leander ALLIES Houston Area Pastor Council, Steve Hotze MONEY QUOTE “We don’t want to see drag being marketed to kids, no matter how watered-down it is.” THE BACKLASH STARTED SOON after the Leander PublicLibrary announced Valeri Abrego as one of the readersfor its mid-June Pride-themed story hour. Conservatives trying to stop the event began scouring the internet for the raunchiest photos they could find of Abrego and circulating them throughout the Austin suburb. A mother, grandmother, and longtime member of Austin’s drag community, Abrego had been scheduled to read books to children as her hypermasculine alter…

ONE OF THE FLATTERING (AND TERRIFYING!) parts of starting a new job is that all of a sudden, people seem interested in you and your thoughts. It usually starts with the simple stuff. Who are you? Oh, man, where to start … but for these purposes, I’m Andrea Valdez, the new editor in chief of the Texas Observer. Where are you from? When I’m in Texas, I say Houston, but when I’m in the world, I claim the state. Where did you work before? I spent two years running Wired magazine’s website, and prior to that I spent 10 years at Texas Monthly, but I really love talking about that one summer I baked fancy dog treats. Then it gets a little deeper: Why did you take this job? That’s…

THE SECRETS WE KEPT By Lara Prescott KNOPF $36.95; 369 PAGES When I taught American literature at a Soviet university in 1980, I managed to bring along some books that were banned by the Kremlin: Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Slaughterhouse-Five. I passed the limited copies on to my students, who would stay up all night reading in order to hand them off to a classmate in the morning. Reading material was so precious that a month-old copy of Newsweek was hoarded as a treasure. By contrast, many of my students in Texas could read anything, but—even before the advent of the internet and its distractions—preferred to read little. It reminded me of something Philip Roth said after returning from a trip to Prague in 1984, when the…

They say that the Appalachians are the oldestmountain chain in the world, and that our HillCountry through gorgeous Central & SouthwestTexas in the river canyons we live in or look north to,are part of that same Appalachian chain. There weretectonic plates that nudged each other and literallybroke some of the hills in half. I have ridden mymule at the top where the hill had split thousandsof years ago, or millions, on a path between twojagged swaths of flint that follow the top of the cedarscrub’s big tough gorgeous hill. I have followed Leeand Ray there, getting bruised and trailing blood butthat is the price you pay to overlook Silver Lake onthe Moody Ranch which more mountain lions havewalked than men have…My family broke just likethat. There was some hiccup in…

TEXAS LAWMAKERS LIKE TO DECLARE THEMSELVES leaders on criminal justice reform, but this session they mostly did nothing about it. During the 86th Texas Legislature, a barrage of misinformation from police groups killed bipartisan efforts to reform Texas’ marijuana laws, which remain some of the harshest in the country. Still, there’s a silver lining to lawmakers’ failed attempts at pot reform: They may have kinda, sorta, accidentally decriminalized it across large sections of the state. That’s because when lawmakers legalized hemp this session, they unintentionally changed the legal definition of marijuana in a way that makes possession harder to prosecute. Under the new law, which went into effect in June, cannabis with less than 0.3 percent concentration of THC, the psychoactive ingredient that gets you high, is legal hemp, while…

“It’s not often we see such shoddy animal husbandry.” ON JUNE 6, AN INSPECTOR WITH THE U.S. DEPARTMENT of Agriculture’s animal-welfare division made a macabre discovery. At a sprawling animal research facility in South Texas, 25 captive monkeys had not been fed for six days. They were in such bad shape that two of them had to be euthanized. In her report, the inspector concluded that the “lack of food was due to a miscommunication between employees” at Covance Research Products in Alice, a rural town about an hour west of Corpus Christi. Covance, a multibillion-dollar company that tests pharmaceutical products on primates, is a repeat offender of the federal law that sets standards for the treatment of animals in research laboratories. USDA inspectors have found the company’s Alice location…

There are a lot of Trumpfans in Texas, but the state GOP knows it needs to keep some distance from him to win over voters in the suburbs and other places they lost in 2018. FOR TEXAS DEMOCRATS TO DO WELL IN 2020 AND POTENTIALLY secure the state House and a number of additional congressional seats, they need to organize themselves effectively—and have a lot of things line up just right. The jury’s out on the first part: The motley crew of candidates who have stood up to challenge U.S. Senator John Cornyn in the largest statewide race doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence. But elsewhere, encouraging signs are piling up. ¶ The most obvious problem Republicans have is the president. He’s in a shockingly weak position here. A…