Innehållsförteckning för June 2016 från The Texas Observer

Give Amarillo Your Huddled Masses As an Amarillo resident who grew up here, left, and came back, this piece was moving and personal (“The Strangers Next Door,” April issue). We do, in fact, have a very diverse city. The unfortunate reality is that everyone lives in and stays in their own places. I ride my bike through the apartments near Margaret Wills that house so many Burmese refugees, and I am moved each morning when I see the children walking in groups to school. There is something beautiful about knowing that those who have come so far are finding a life in the place where I grew up. That said, we can do so much better. Our churches and community groups have done wonderful work welcoming, teaching and helping the…

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WIELDS ALMOST total political power in Texas. What has it chosen to do with it? In the last few months, the GOP political class has been consumed by a panic over “men in the women’s restroom” and have worked themselves into a froth over a taxi dispute in Austin. In May, Austin voters shot down a proposal, pumped up by a $9.1 million campaign funded by ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft, that would have allowed them to write their own rules for drivers’ background checks. The two companies made good on their threats to leave Austin. The vote was never really about background checks: It was about who runs Austin — citizens and their elected leaders, or out-of-state corporations? Judging from the reactions of the Republican establishment,…

THIS HAS BEEN A BAD COUPLE OF MONTHS FOR TEXAS REPUBLICANS. BAD headlines, petty corruption, clownish behavior. In fact, the couple of months before that were bad, too, and the months before that, and back and back into the mists of memory. So it might stand to reason that it has been a good time for Texas Democrats, whose operating theory has long been that one day, the Texas GOP will scrape the bottom of its own barrel so hard that the thing will collapse and the party of Ann Richards and LBJ will emerge from the ashes, wings spread, ready once again to do battle. ¶ But a strange thing is happening: As the Republican Party gets weaker, the Democratic Party seems to be getting weaker, too. Several senior…

We decided that our play might also explore how the Border Patrol perceived them — as aliens in their own land. THE SUDDEN AND UNEXPECTED DEATH OF David Bowie this year touched me personally. He had been more than an influence, more than an inspiration for this former high school English teacher and present-day playwright. A flood of memories took me back to a time when I taught in Crystal City, and my theater students had created and produced a Chicano sci-fi space opera based on Bowie’s music. While my duties as an English IV teacher extended to instructing and sponsoring the school newspaper and a video production class, it was the theater program that gave me the most satisfaction, for it allowed me to explore my own creativity and,…

“Since God inspired me to write this book, He automatically gets 5 stars and the CREDIT!” —Patrick, in an Amazon.com review of his own book, The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read. “We are in a nation, on this upcoming weekend of the Fourth of July, on the highest level of alert that you can be. We are under assault because we stand and we believe in the word of Jesus Christ.” —Patrick, speaking to Mims Baptist Church in Conroe in 2015. “When I vote — and I’ve cast 13,000 votes in three sessions — the lobbyist I listen to more than any is Jesus Christ.” —Patrick, speaking to Mims Baptist Church in Conroe in 2012. “If you believe God, how would God vote tonight if he were…

ODESSA // Lois Hicks, lying in state at the Sunset Memorial Gardens and Funeral Home, was relieved of a ring from her left hand by Kalynn Homfeld, who labored for more than a minute to pry it off the dead woman’s finger. The Odessa American reported that Homfeld was caught on security cameras boosting the ring just minutes after the Hicks family left the funeral home. Although the stolen ring was worth just $10, Homfeld faces a stiff penalty: Any theft from a corpse, under Texas law, is a state jail felony. PORT LAVACA // Four student “milk gurus” from Calhoun High School placed 28th (out of 50 teams) at the state milk judging championships in Stephenville, in which competitors try to identify the flaws in various milk samples. Agriculture…

TEXAS ATTORNEY GENERAL KEN PAXTON’S PRODIGIOUS political fundraising plummeted after his criminal indictments in the summer of 2015. This could suggest that some donors are quietly rethinking their support of the embroiled attorney general, even as top GOP leaders have refrained from commenting on the plight of Paxton, who is one of the headliners at the Texas GOP Convention in May. Political fundraising fluctuates throughout campaign seasons. So it helps to compare Paxton’s money to that of predecessor Greg Abbott — who amassed an unrivalled $21 million war chest over three terms as attorney general. From the launch of Paxton’s attorney general campaign in August 2013 to his indictments on securities fraud charges two years later, Paxton took in $8.3 million. This exceeded the $6.2 million Abbott raised in the…

IF ONLY THE PARTY OF SMALL GOVERNMENT WOULD GET BACK TO ACTUALLY making the government smaller, so at least we could argue about that instead of fighting the latest bogeyman: transgender people using public restrooms. ¶ Instead, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is meddling in the affairs of private businesses by haranguing Target about the retailer’s policy of letting people pee where they feel comfortable peeing, without first installing some kind of bathroom police to inspect folks’ genitals or survey their birth certificates. ¶ In May, Paxton issued a letter to Target saying that the store is “free” to have whatever bathroom policy it likes, but that theirs “could lead to criminal and otherwise unwanted activity.” He then asked for “the full text of Target’s safety policies regarding the protection…

ALL GOOD CRIME REPORTERS HAVE STORIES THAT HAUNT THEM well after the final fact check. Loose ends, niggling details, witness statements that never quite lined up just right. It only makes sense that Texas Monthly’s Skip Hollandsworth, one of Texas’ finest journalists and preeminent crime writers, has one of those stories, maybe even the biggest one: a nearly 130-year-old unsolved string of murders involving scandal at the highest levels of Texas government, enraging and sometimes comical police ineptitude, high-society women and, at the heart of it all, servant girls. ¶ Hollandsworth first wrote about the murders for Texas Monthly back in 2000, packing his true-crime feature with the grisly details: seven women and one man beaten and slaughtered in the most appalling fashion in 1884 and 1885 Austin. In his…

LAST DECEMBER, JUAN MANCIAS, A CAR- rizo indigenous organizer, wrote a letter to the Railroad Commission of Texas demanding to know why a coal mining company had been permitted to start digging up land rich with indigenous artifacts, including human remains. The response gave him ammunition for his longtime struggle against the Mexican-owned Dos Republicas Coal Partnership. The Railroad Commission’s letter acknowledged that the mining area — 6,346 acres just outside Eagle Pass where mining had started in September — contains 14 sites that appear to be significant enough to require federal protection. The commission insisted that Dos Republicas would not disturb the sites unless they were deemed ineligible. But in response to Mancias’ question about who would oversee potentially destructive mining activities, the commission said there is no single…

After they reported That Father Lorenzo had been killed And after I read his book, I ate more rice and beans. At the center of his greatest work There was always rice and beans. Be it Guatemala or El Salvador There was always rice and beans. At 5:00 a.m. with field workers They ate their rice and beans. Returning back at the end of the day There was still more rice and beans. Living with those who lived in the street He shared their rice and beans. With prostitutes and drunkards He prepared the rice and beans. Through his priestly ordination And the pot of rice and beans He erased every border With a serving of rice and beans So tangible, so real, I’m connected through this means To him,…