Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2020 i The Texas Observer

IN 1974, WHILE HE WAS AN UNDERGRADUATE AT THE University of Texas at Austin, John Henneberger started volunteering with a community group in Clarksville, a former Freedman’s Town near downtown Austin. The neighborhood, which was then still predominantly black, lacked basic infrastructure like sewers and sidewalks, and a proposed crosstown expressway threatened to wipe it out entirely. Until he saw the conditions in Clarksville, Henneberger says, he had always assumed the government treated its citizens equally. He was appalled by the blatantly racist response from local government when community members tried to organize. That sense of injustice has fueled his work ever since. In 1988, he and fellow organizer Karen Paup co-founded the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service, known today as Texas Housers, to advocate for low-income Texans—and help…

On a rainy Wednesday morning in January, Keidreana Sims and Kristin Johnson are headed to their first day of work at Sterilite, a plastics factory about 30 miles south of Dallas in Ennis. The sisters are excited: The warehouse job pays $13 an hour, with a potential raise to $14 after a few weeks of good attendance. They check their phones every few minutes, nervous about being on time for the 7 a.m. orientation. “I like warehouse jobs,” Johnson says. “And warehouse jobs are far out.” Neither Johnson, 22, nor Sims, 20, has a car—they can’t afford one. So before they could start at Sterilite, they had to figure out if they could even get there. Just finding the job presented logistical hurdles. To get to a staffing agency in…

OUTSIDE A BIG, STATELY HOME in a Midland suburb sits a pocket-size tiny house. Curious passersby peer inside the model, picking up flyers and bottled water from a folding table beside it. Manning the table and warmly greeting onlookers are John-Mark and Briana Echols, the owners of both homes. Victoria, a local realtor sporting an immaculate beehive hairdo and a rhinestone-encrusted peacoat, walks up to John-Mark with a handshake and a wide smile. “This one’s 113 square feet,” he tells her, gesturing to the model home. “But the ones we’re gonna build out there will be about 200.” John-Mark ushers Victoria inside the tiny home for a tour, and she can’t quite mask her shock. “Wow,” she says, turning in a full circle to take in the entire interior. She…

2020 CENSUS Counting Them Out THE 2020 CENSUS, WHICH OFFICIALLY KICKS OFF ON April 1, will almost certainly reshape the face of politics and power in Texas. State legislative districts, as well as their congressional counterparts, will be redrawn; federal dollars for everything from highways and wastewater services to Medicare and food stamps will be reallocated. This is why it’s imperative to obtain accurate population counts. To do that, the census follows a fairly basic principle: People are counted at their primary place of residence. For a city like Port Arthur, which sits along the hurricane- and flood-prone Gulf Coast, that could spell trouble. In the past three years, Hurricane Harvey and Tropical Storm Imelda flooded large swaths of Southeast Texas and displaced hundreds of residents. “[Certain neighborhoods] in Port…

Early last year, Regina Daniels decided it was time to buy a house. She’d been renting a three-bedroom apartment off Antoine Drive in Houston’s Acres Homes neighborhood, an area she’s loved ever since her family moved there when she was in high school. “It’s homey,” she says. “Neighborly.” Unincorporated until 1974, Acres Homes was originally marketed to black Houstonians as “a bit of genteel country,” named for the acre of land you’d get with your house. Though it’s just 20 minutes northwest of downtown, the neighborhood is quiet, sheltered by stands of pine trees and the occasional farm. But the rent at Daniels’ apartment was about to go up again—she was already paying $1,200 a month—and she was tired of moving her three kids to a new place every time…

“UGLY,” MARIA NICANOR says, “is a complicated word.” Nicanor moved with her family from Barcelona to Houston in 2017 to become the executive director of the Rice Design Alliance, a nonprofit at the architecture school at Rice University. When Nicanor looks at the newer houses in Houston that she calls “white elephants”—those wonky, stacked boxes that look more like what children build with Legos than what they draw with crayons—it’s not so much that she finds the architecture aesthetically dubious (though she does), it’s that she sees right through it to “the systems that over decades have made it this way.” Ben Koush, a Houston architect and architectural critic, is more blunt: “I think they’re ugly,” he says. “But I also realize that they’re following the requirements of the market.”…

Kayla Miranda never thought she’d need public housing. Raised between Illinois and San Antonio in a Republican military family, the 36-year-old always believed hard work would be enough. Over the years, she helped run a construction company, worked at a post office, and managed gas stations. But starting in 2011, things took a turn: Her parents’ house was foreclosed on, her husband was arrested and they divorced, and her son was diagnosed with autism. Bouncing from friends’ couches to motels, Miranda began missing work as her son’s school peppered her with calls about his increasingly frequent meltdowns. Disaster loomed. Then, after a year and a half on a waitlist, a space opened for her at one of San Antonio’s public housing projects in mid-2017. “It’s a safety net, thank God,”…

LOURDES SALINAS STOOD AT THE end of her street and watched as her neighborhood filled with water. She awoke on the morning of June 20, 2018, to the sound of heavy rain pouring off the roof of her white-brick home. Salinas grabbed an umbrella and hurried through the front yard, past a chain-link fence where a handwritten sign instructs visitors to grite, yell, in the absence of a doorbell. She dodged potholes brimming with water as she made her way down the slick slope of a hill. Salinas paused on the edge of North Baseline Road, which divides her colonia, Indian Hills, into its east and west sides. A sodden American flag hung in a neighbor’s front lawn behind her; nearby, a sign posted on a tree read “Keep Texas…

THOMAS JEFFERSON HIGH SCHOOL, OR “TJ,” AS IT is locally known, sits 1.6 miles east of my home in Dallas. Though the school is surrounded by one of the wealthiest, whitest neighborhoods in Texas, its student body is 94 percent Hispanic, and 78 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Many students here are immigrants, including many members of the varsity boys’ soccer team, the Patriots. I’ve been documenting their lives since October 2017. As Americans have churned endlessly through fraught discussions of border walls, caravans, and family separation, the TJ soccer players have lived their normal high school lives filled with nervous tryouts, crappy fast-food jobs, new shoes, new girlfriends, and an ever-hopeful eye on the future. Some of the players are DACA recipients; some are Central…