Innehållsförteckning för September/October 2023 från The Texas Observer

Dear Observer Community, Short-term rentals—for which companies like Airbnb serve as brokers—are sucking up housing inventory across Texas, driving up prices for renters and home buyers alike. For longterm residents whose neighborhoods have been taken over by tourists, there’s also the noise, trash, and parade of strangers who lack community roots. Our cover story by Contributor Eva Ruth Moravec examines the toll on neighborhoods and how residents and cities have fought back. But any modest progress local governments have made in regulating the industry may soon fall victim to Republicans’ quest to wrest control away from cities with the recently passed “Death Star” bill. In a collaboration with Latino USA, Contributor Reynaldo Leaños Jr. looks at the military’s efforts to recruit Latinos, which oversell the benefits and understate the risks,…

Ricardo Nuila is a third-generation physician at Ben Taub Hospital, a busy public facility operated by Harris Health in the Texas Medical Center. An internal medicine specialist, he’s part of a staff dominated by residents and graduates of Baylor College of Medicine. And in his spare time, he writes. His compelling essays and new book, The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine (Simon and Schuster, 2023), focus on how many people get stranded in healthcare limbo—or needlessly lose their limbs or lives—in America’s cumbersome and costly healthcare system because of uncontrolled costs, overbilling, and greed promoted by health insurance companies and for-profit hospitals. Nuila thinks a good public hospital network across America could outperform even the most expensive private alternatives. He spoke to the Texas Observer about why.…

In a summer of record-high temperatures, things just kept getting hotter for Maverick County and its firefighters. Maverick County, on the Texas-Mexico border west of San Antonio, has a population about the same as San Marcos spread over an area about the size of Rhode Island. The Eagle Pass Fire Department is the only professional fire company and emergency medical service provider in the county. For several months, with the help of a state grant initially intended for equipment purchases but partially redirected to overtime, the department was able to keep 21 to 24 firefighter EMTs on duty per shift. With the grant ending in August, however, those numbers were due to fall to 15 to 17—to cover three stations and operate three fire trucks and five ambulances. The National…

In an orange prison jumpsuit and chains, a tall, lean drag queen writhed to a cover of “War Pigs” by Brass Against, which sounds like someone swapped Black Sabbath’s lead singer for a woman and added a highly caffeinated marching band. As she lip-synced, Hermajestie the Hung completed a dramatic strip tease down to an army fatigue jacket and fishnets, all to riotous cheers and a rain of dollar bills. It’s April at the Swan Dive on Red River in Austin’s club district, where “Tuesgayz” night LGBTQ+ gatherings—which include “Queereoke” sing-along sessions—are a tradition. For over a year, the Black-led drag troupe Vanguard, with an informal membership of about a dozen performers that includes both drag kings and queens, has opened each show with the same invocation: “On our stage…

The forthcoming impeachment trial of Attorney General Ken Paxton is guaranteed to provide a colorful show and a lesson on how Texans occasionally confront the corrupt through a highly anachronistic political tool. Many Americans may only recall the impeachments of U.S. Presidents Donald Trump or Bill Clinton—fraught theatrical affairs in which the House voted to impeach and a politically divided Senate then failed to convict. But such political trials are centuries-old, having been imported by the Founding Fathers from England, where an impeachment conviction could lead to beheading for egregious rogues. Under today’s U.S. and Texas constitutions, the most dire result is simply an embarrassing spectacle and possible removal from office. No one dies or goes to jail. Although it still seems unlikely that Paxton, the ultimate survivor, will lose…

Initially, the inside of the historic building on Cedar Street in Austin’s expensive Hyde Park neighborhood seems ordinary: Fluorescent lights line a narrow, carpeted hallway off of which branch offices, most just big enough for a desk and a few shelves. Some share jack-and-jill bathrooms with their next door neighbors, a relic of the building’s original use. But this structure has been altered and added onto so often that there’s a disjointed, Frankenstein’s monster-feel to some spots where former exterior walls are exposed or limestone switches to manufactured brick. I’m there in the morning, and in the light of day, it isn’t terribly eerie. Someone brought VooDoo donuts into the reception area, so one side of the building smells like warm sugar. Everyone we pass in the narrow hallway gives…

My great-grandfather, José-María Arana, was a racist. After the United States barred Chinese men from immigrating under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, tens of thousands sought a new life in Mexico, where they faced no warmer a welcome as they established themselves. A former schoolteacher and businessman, José-María led a vicious campaign against the Chinese in the Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja California in the early 1900s. Seeking “all legal means to eliminate the Asian merchant,” whose growing prosperity he viewed as a threat to the working class and Mexican national identity, José-María formed a junta of local businessmen in 1912 to address what he called “the tremendous calamity of the Chinese jaundice.” He launched a newspaper, Pro-Patria, whose masthead boldly proclaimed, “Mexico for the Mexicans and…

Lize Burr & Chris Hyams Lynne Dobson & Greg Wooldridge Dale Linebarger The McHam Project The Rapoport Family Foundation Alec Rhodes Carlton Carl Paul & Marian Cones Vincent LoVoi John Parten Winkler Family Foundation Gabriel Arana & Michael Collis H.L. Bryan Zeph Capo Kate Donaho Robert Frump Headliners Foundation Laura Hernandez Carrie James Kathleen McElroy Ronald Moore Rene & Jimmy Wisch Memorial Fund Margaret & Robert Ayers James Canup Andy Carson Joan Cheever Lois Chiles Debra Danburg & Randy Chapman Jo Didner & J. Michael Hershey Thomas Doneker Edgemon Family Foundation Yodo Faulk Cindy Fisher & Mike Kanin Noble G Fortson Gil Glover Tom Griebel Donna Bolding Hamilton Noah & Brittany Kyle Hawley Charlotte Herzele Kelly Inselmann Mr. & Mrs. I.H. Kempner III L.U. Kint, Jr. Darlene Lanham Dick Lavine…

In collaboration with Latino USA The house on Sabana Lane in Laredo is a repository of memories. Military posters, American flags, crosses, and photographs hang on the wall, each of them a piece of David Lee Espinoza’s story that ended in Afghanistan. “This was his cross he was wearing when he passed, and I wear it,” said his mother, Elizabeth Holguin, grabbing the necklace in her hands. “I always feel like he’s around me.” Espinoza, a lance corporal in the U.S. Marines, died in the waning days of the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan when suicide bombers blew themselves up near the Kabul airport on August 26, 2021. Twelve other service members, about half of them Latino, and more than 150 Afghans perished in the attack. Born just months before the…

America is undergoing an identity crisis, author Robert P. Jones writes. As revealed in recent studies by Jones’s research organization, Public Religion Research Institute, dramatic demographic shifts have rendered once-dominant white Christians a minority; the nation is more ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse. So it’s no surprise we find ourselves embroiled in bitter debates over who we truly are. Many in Texas still insist (despite historical evidence) that we’re a Christian nation, founded by godly (white) men. Countering this mythos, the 1619 Project locates the nation’s genesis in the year Africans were first brought against their will to Great Britain’s American colonies, framing our subsequent history as one of stubbornly systemic racism. In the new book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future,…

Heading into the desert sun,I tail an enthusiastic storm.Tires zing on sizzling pavement,slash through puddleson the rain-darkened highway, Like a guardian flanking the roadto El Paso, a muscular mountainheaves up, sable master of the horizon,his head silvered by rayed spotlightsstreaming through cracked charcoal cloudslike lake water breaching a dam. I stop to relish the sudden chill,feel retreating thunder rumblingmy bones, hear breezes sliding overdamp sand, greedy for its moisture. I sniff the air like an elegant ladyshopping for perfume, as pungentdesert sage, rain-released, driftslike piñon smoke, like incense, sendsshivers drug-like through my skin. I gulp the rare essence, reluctant to leave,store expansive breaths in my lungslike treasure. The fragrant air scolds,reminds me gently I’ve been gonetoo long—far too long. Cade Huie is a member of several poetry organizations, including the…

Dear Texas Observer Community, I’m excited to share the news that, in October, the Observer will host our first in-person fundraising event of 2023, where Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed, author of On Juneteenth, will be in conversation with Kathleen McElroy, professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication. As many of you know, this summer McElroy was at the center of controversy over academic freedom and journalism education. On October 19, instead of our traditional MOLLY prizes, we will present her with the MOLLY First Amendment Prize for her commitment to academic freedom and the education of young journalists. We are honored that Kathleen has agreed to let us celebrate her at this extraordinary moment, and we’d like to share this honor with you. You…