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One Hundred Years Ago, A Flood Reshaped San Antonio. A New Book Shows How Little Has Changed.
Char Miller’s 'West Side Rising’ delves into the man-made side of the 1921 flood. In September 1921, a Category 1 hurricane crashed into the Gulf Coast, pushing nearly three feet of rain all the way into Central and South Texas over just a few days. The San Antonio River swelled above its banks, submerging the city’s urban core and causing millions of dollars in damage. And on San Antonio’s West Side, where a majority of the city’s Mexican-American population lived, creeks and other small waterways were transformed into rushing walls of water that swept poorly constructed houses off their foundations. At least 224 people died in San Antonio, and most of them Mexican-American.
Mapping Indigenous Communities of Texas: Atakapa Ishak
The Ishak built mounds tall enough to escape floods and hurricanes in southeast Texas. The Atakapa Ishak have lived for thousands of years in the lush green forests of southeast Texas where the Galveston Bay and the Big Thicket meet. Ishak means “people” in the Atakapa language and they built communities off the San Jacinto and Neches rivers. As colonizers entered the homelands of the Ishak, they moved into the deep swamps of east Texas and Louisiana where giant Cypress trees reigned over the muddy, marshy landscape.
The River, At Night
A version of this story ran in the September / October 2021 issue. Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their...
Texas Law Banning Abortion as Early as Six Weeks Goes Into Effect as the U.S. Supreme Court Takes No Action
“Texas law banning abortion as early as six weeks goes into effect as the U.S. Supreme Court takes no action” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. Sign...
To the Right, to The Right
A version of this story ran in the September / October 2021 issue. With a simple statement, the man from Mar-a-Lago can still make or break political fortunes. Exhibit A: the GOP primaries in Texas. This summer, former President Donald Trump issued his “Complete and Total Endorsement” of two of Texas’ most powerful Republicans—Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton—who both face the toughest primary battles of their careers in 2022.
Writing ‘Love Letters’ Can Give Home Buyers an Edge—and Open the Door to Discrimination
As housing prices skyrocket in Texas, desperate buyers will try anything to stand out. But experts say the implications are troubling. This story was published in partnership with Texas Monthly. In 2016, when Gisella Olivo and her husband walked into a four-bedroom house in downtown McKinney, about thirty miles north...
‘Texas Observer’ Redesigns
Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”. Articles cannot be rewritten,...
Introducing the New ‘Texas Observer’
Articles must link back to the original article and contain the following attribution at the top of the story:. This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.”. Articles cannot be rewritten,...
Dallas’ Hidden History of Terror
The Accommodation begins with the bombings. The 1950s terror spree that racist Dallasites unleashed on Black residents who’d dared buy homes in a then-white neighborhood. The dozen or so packages of dynamite hurled at South Dallas houses that rocked the city, yet led to no criminal conviction. The shameful episode that local elites have fought to see forgotten but that, the book’s author writes, sprung “right up out of the spiritual heart of the white community, the heart darkened by nineteenth-century specters.”
Resisting the Allure of Innocence
Earlier this year, in only his second week in office, President Joe Biden signed several executive orders aimed at reversing some of the Trump administration’s harshest immigration policies. In June, the Biden administration released a “progress report” on its “relentless pursuit of reunifying families that were cruelly separated during the previous administration.” The report identified 2,127 separated children not yet reunited with their families. According to the Women’s Refugee Commission, as of August, the Biden administration has reunited only 40 families that have been separated from each other for years. Slow, painstaking progress is being made, but the nightmare is far from over for many families.
The Supreme Court Upholds a Federal Judge’s Order to Reinstate “Remain in Mexico”
The reinstatement of the controversial “remain in Mexico” program was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday after it denied an appeal by the Biden administration. The judge’s order forces the administration to begin reimplementing the program Wednesday. “The applicants have failed to show a likelihood of success on the...
Newspaper Unions in Texas Fight for First Contracts
In the notoriously anti-labor Lone Star State, three recently unionized newsrooms are fighting for their first collective bargaining agreements, the contracts that will determine their future working conditions. Often, this is a long and gruelling process. At Texas’ three union newspapers, workers report that bargaining is taking dramatically different paths depending on who owns the outlet.
Four days after 9/11, a towing barge crashed into the Queen Isabella Causeway, killing eight people. Twenty years later, the fishermen who saved three lives are telling what really happened that night.
This story is from the July/August 2021 issue. Robert Espericueta and his cousin Roland Moya stand outside the Lighthouse Assembly of God in Port Isabel, a sleepy town of roughly 6,000 people in South Texas. It’s a weekday in mid-April, overcast but bright, and the wind is coming on strong. The sound of waves crashing in the Gulf Coast bay just a few blocks down the road carries in the salty air.
A New Book About a Little-Known West Texas Power Plant is Important but Dense
In 2014, in far-flung West Texas, a group of energy developers floored industry insiders: They began operation of a sprawling solar farm in the heart of the Permian Basin, one of the world’s most productive oil fields. Named the Barilla Solar Project, the facility had the capacity to generate 30 megawatts of power—enough to supply nearly 5,000 homes—from thousands of solar panels arranged in symmetrical, gleaming lines. According to Andy Bowman, author of The West Texas Power Plant that Saved the World, the Barilla solar plant represents one of the most important chapters in the story of renewable energy—both here and abroad.
Report: Oil Companies Are Burning Off Natural Gas—and Leaving Regulators in the Dark
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for their daily newsletter, The Beacon. Billions of cubic feet of natural gas are burned off in U.S. oil and gas fields every year, wasting the fossil fuel and emitting greenhouse gases without actually generating energy. In Texas alone, state regulators have permitted companies to burn more than a million cubic feet of gas every day since 2019. Combined, that would be enough natural gas to supply 15 million homes’ annual gas needs.
New Book of Poems and Essays Is a Posthumous Love Letter to the Texas Hill Country
Alongside myths about the Alamo or the cowboy, Texans’ proud self-image is bound up with tales of white settlers conquering a hard and stubborn land, breaking it like a horse, and making it productive to the enrichment of a few, by means of the plow, the drilling rig, and the bulldozer. That narrative still dominates the Texas psyche, crowding out a very different and more venerable Texas tradition: one of deep reverence for the land, its flora, and its fauna.
‘Inflamed’ Shows How An Unjust World Is Making Us Sick
When a wave of Anglo homesteaders laid their false claims to the sprawling Texas plains in the 1860s and 1870s, an extremely profitable invention followed close behind: Barbed wire. It was the end of the open range—the Mexican rancheros, old-school cowboys, and Indigenous communities who had tended the land saw how it was suddenly sectioned off and sequestered. Enormous, roaming buffalo herds were nearly driven to extinction, in large part because government policy was to kill them and starve tribes, but also because the wire cut off surviving buffalo from their grazing lands and water. Food that humans once plucked from the earth now sat behind sharp fences, withering in the hot sun. Mexicans throughout the Southwest coined a phrase: Con al alambre vino el hambre. With the barbed wire came hunger.
The CDC Halted Evictions. Texas Judges Are Proceeding Anyway.
For more than three decades, Harris County Justice of the Peace David Patronella has presided over one of the busiest courts in the state, overseeing cases ranging from car accidents to truancy to eviction. But the past year has been among the most unusual he’s seen. In September, shortly after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) halted evictions for most tenants nationwide, the Texas Supreme Court issued an order giving judges the authority to enforce the CDC’s moratorium; the federal order required tenants to file declarations with the court saying they were eligible and Texas judges were required to review them. At the end of March, without announcement or explanation, the Texas Supreme Court allowed that order to expire. Confused, Patronella called the court for guidance—was he supposed to enforce the CDC moratorium or not?
A Moving Debut Chronicles a Queer Coming-of-Age in Midland
Tarantula hawk wasps are beautiful bugs: They have iridescent blue-black bodies with yellow wings; large, doe-like eyes; and delicate frames with a seemingly magnetic connection between thorax and stinger. The hawks also boast the most painful sting in the world—scientists recommend that if stung, people should lie on the ground and scream for three minutes, the duration of the pain.
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