Hundreds have died anonymously crossing the Also border in South Texas. The things they carried SANDRA CISNEROS on her beloved house may help researchers unlock their identities. WENDY DAVIS on her past and future

NOVEMBER | 2015

THE THINGS They Left Behind

PHOTO ESSAY BY JEN REEL IN THIS ISSUE ON THE COVER: PHOTOS BY JEN REEL

LEFT: Wendy Davis in her Austin condominium PHOTO BY JEN REEL

10THE INTERVIEW Wendy Davis’ mea culpa by Christopher Hooks

THE THINGS RECKONING THE WAITING THEY LEFT WITH ROSIE GAME BEHIND What the 1977 death With a dearth of services OBSERVER 18 Clothes and jewelry 12 of a young McAllen 24 for the intellectually ONLINE found in unmarked graves may woman says about today’s disabled, Texans like Betty For our extended help give names to the nameless. anti-abortion laws. Calderon end up on the streets. Photo essay by Jen Reel by Alexa Garcia-Ditta by John Savage interview with Wendy Davis, including her REGULARS 07 GREATER STATE 36 BOOK EXCERPT 43 THE GRIMES SCENE take on the Texas 01 DIALOGUE From the Bottom, Up Sandra Cisneros What’s Your legislature and 02 POLITICAL by Ronnie Dugger On Her Problem, Man? Governor Greg INTELLIGENCE San Antonio House by Andrea Grimes Abbott, visit 06 STATE OF TEXAS 30 CULTURE texasobserver.org 08 STRANGEST STATE An Artist 38 POSTCARDS 44 LEFT HOOKS 09 EDITORIAL Interprets Violence Epitaph for The Gutting 09 BEN SARGENT’S by Michael Agresta an Alligator of Medicaid LOON STAR STATE by Asher Elbein by Christopher Hooks 34 FILM U.S. Fuel in a 42 POEM 45 EYE ON TEXAS Mexican Conflagration “How Far You by Guillermo Hernandez by Josh Rosenblatt Are From Me” by Eloísa Pérez-Lozano

THE TEXAS OBSERVER (ISSN 0040-4519/USPS 541300), entire contents copyrighted © 2015, is published monthly (12 issues per year) by the Texas Democracy Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit foundation, 307 W. 7th St., Austin TX, 78701. Telephone (512)477-0746, fax (512)474-1175, toll free (800)939-6620. Email observer@­texasobserver. org. Periodicals Postage paid in Austin, TX, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER Send address changes to: The Texas Observer, 307 W. 7th St., Austin TX 78701. Subscriptions: 1 yr $35, 2 yr $60, 3 yr $85. Students $20. Foreign, add $13 to domestic­ price. Back issues $5. Airmail, foreign, group, and bulk rates on request. Microfilm available from University Microfilms Intl., 300 N Zeeb Rd, Ann Arbor MI 48106. INDEXES The Texas Observer is indexed in Access: The Supplementary Index to Periodicals; Texas Index; and, for the years 1954 through 1981, The Texas Observer Index. INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING is supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Institute. BOOKS & THE CULTURE is funded in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts. A JOURNAL OF FREE VOICES since 1954

OBSERVER VOLUME 107, NO. 10 DIALOGUE FOUNDING EDITOR Ronnie Dugger Defend the Defenseless EDITOR Forrest Wilder MANAGING EDITOR Nancy Nusser Kudos on the excellent story by Emily DePrang about the debacle that is the indi- DIGITAL EDITOR Andrea Grimes MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Jen Reel gent defense system in Harris County. (“Poor Judgment,” October issue) As she STAFF WRITERS Melissa del Bosque, Alexa notes, the real losers are the poor people who are denied their Sixth Amendment Garcia-Ditta, Christopher Hooks, Patrick Michels rights to effective counsel simply because they cannot afford a lawyer on their own. ART DIRECTOR Chad Tomlinson A recent bipartisan report from our organization shows that one way to improve POETRY EDITOR Naomi Shihab Nye STAFF CARTOONIST Ben Sargent fairness and due process in our criminal justice system is to provide indigent defen- COPY EDITOR David Duhr CONTRIBUTING WRITERS dants with an effective attorney at initial bail hearings. Without representation at Michael Agresta, Lou Dubose, Saul Elbein, Alex Hannaford, a pretrial release hearing, all too often poor defendants remain needlessly locked Steven G. Kellman, Robert Leleux, James McWilliams, Bill in jail at great cost to themselves, their families and society as a whole. The guiding Minutaglio, Priscila Mosqueda, Rachel Pearson, Robyn Ross hand of counsel is the most assured way to prevent innocent people from pleading CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Alan Pogue, Matt Wright-Steel guilty to crimes they did not commit simply to gain their freedom. INTERNS Virginia E. Sloan Samantha Cortez, Hannah McBride, Xander Peters, P r e s i d e n t , T h e C onstitution P r oj e c t Jacob Sanchez, Elizabeth Stauber PUBLISHER Emily Williams One topic not addressed in your article, “Poor homemade drones, planes, rockets and other “it OFFICE MANAGER/BOOKKEEPER Judgment,” that would help the system immediate- looks too much like a bomb” projects. In my class, Mandy Estepp ly is prosecutorial discretion. From the cop on the he’d be asked to write two essays about building his MEMBERSHIP MANAGER street to the prosecutor in the courtroom, whether clock in order to help him understand voice and au- Jacqueline Galvan or not to arrest, charge or prosecute a suspect is an dience: one for the engineering teacher and one for AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT MANAGER enormous power the state has, and nobody is talk- the layperson, like me, an English teacher. Oh, and Michael Schrantz ing about its more effective use! Caseloads could be my colleagues and I would love for him to come syn- BUSINESS ASSOCIATE Beth Bond cut, records could stay clean, and money could be chronize all the clocks in our school! TEXAS DEMOCRACY saved if law enforcement resources were concen- Mary F. Ciccone-Cook FOUNDATION BOARD Cade Bernsen, Carlton Carl, trated on more serious crimes. If a kid’s got a joint T u kw i l a , W a s h i n gt o n Bob Frump, Melissa Jones, and a clean record and isn’t causing anybody any Susan Longley, Vince LoVoi, problems, wouldn’t it be better to let him slide with Jim Marston, Mary Nell a warning instead of rolling him into this gristmill? Damn Hypocrites Mathis, Heather Paffe, Ronald sn t it ironic that all these pro life legisla Rapoport, Peter Ravella, If a defendant is hearing voices and having hallu- I ’ “ - ” - Katie Smith, Greg Wooldridge, cinations and gets into a fight with the cops, does tors beat the war drum against Planned Parenthood Ronnie Dugger (emeritus) that person belong in therapeutic drug court or and women’s reproductive rights while at the same OUR MISSION mental health, mental retardation (MHMR) ser- time maintaining the highest execution rate in the We will serve no group or party vices? Why isn’t anyone talking about this? country? (“Texas Bans Medicaid Funds for Planned but will hew hard to the truth Eddie Cortes Parenthood,” October 19, texasobserver.org) as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated H o u s t o n Natasha Bitter to the whole truth, to human p o s t e d o n fa c e b o o k values above all interests, to the rights of humankind as the Welcome, Ahmed! foundation of democracy. We will take orders from none but A homemade clock? (“Teen Clockmaker Arrested our own conscience, and never in One of Texas’ Most Punitive School Districts,” will we overlook or misrepresent September 17, texasobserver.org) That’s what we the truth to serve the interests call a class project here at my school, Raisbeck Avia- of the powerful or cater to the tion High School, an aerospace-themed, STEM col- ignoble in the human spirit. Sound Off lege prep school in Tukwila, Washington. Ahmed CONTACT US 307 W. 7th St., Austin, Texas Mohamed would feel right at home with my Chris- [email protected] 78701, (512) 477-0746 tian, Jewish, Muslim and atheist students and their or comment on facebook.com/texasobserver and texasobserver.org

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 1 POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE

FAMILY PLANNING Condoms and Care in Brownwood Around the clinic, coordinator Judy Guinn is Texas Legislature made deep cuts to the state family known as “The Condom Queen” because of her at- planning program. Midway limped along on a volun- tention-getting bouquets of condoms on popsicle teer basis for months until federal funding kicked in. sticks. Nurse Kay Wadsworth makes her high school Now, the clinic is almost entirely paid for by Title X, a patients promise to come see her before they head federal family planning program. off to college. Director Carole Parker knows almost Title X has been a frequent target of Republican everyone who walks through her door. lawmakers because some of the funding reaches Together, they are the three-woman show that Planned Parenthood health centers. In 2013, the feds operates Midway Family Planning in Brownwood, rerouted the money to providers including Midway Kay Wadsworth, Judy Guinn and Carole Parker run the about 80 miles southeast of Abilene. Since 1991 the after the Legislature booted Planned Parenthood Midway Family Planning clinic clinic has provided contraception, STD testing and from the program. Under Title X, more Texans are located in Brownwood’s public housing projects. For many Pap smears from a building in Brownwood’s public receiving planning services and the number of pro- poor, uninsured and homeless housing projects, an unusual setting that puts the viders has increased. patients, the clinic is their only option for medical care. services amid some of the town’s poorest residents. But Parker and her team don’t have time for politics. PHOTO BY ALEXA GARCIA-DITTA But Midway almost shut down in late 2012 after the For their patients, who are often uninsured, homeless,

2 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE TRIVIATEXAS parentless or just struggling to get by, Midway Family According to Texas Department of Transportation In a tremendous Planning is the only place nearby that offers free records, LPM holds nearly $2.5 million worth of con- victory for the Lone reproductive health services. Because of rules unique tracts to clean up the highways around Fort Worth. Star State, the to Title X, the clinic can’t turn away anyone, regardless Picking up roadside Whataburger wrappers and Republican National of ability to pay. Minors can get birth control without mopping rest stop bathroom floors may not be the Committee an- their parents’ consent. The clinic is also the only place most glamorous job training out there, but if you’ve nounced in October in town that offers free STD and HIV testing. got a conviction on your record or a severe disability, that the GOP’s The clinic has the homey feel of a great aunt’s liv- getting back to work can be a huge step. At the very final presidential ing room, decorated with faux flowers, leopard-print least it pays the bills, right? debate before Super curtains and comfortable furniture. After seeing Well, not if you’re working 15-hour days and only Tuesday will be held either the nurse or nurse practitioner, who visits getting paid for six. Not if you work more than 40 once a week, patients can grab hours a week and are never not in Florida, as one of Guinn’s gift bags of con- paid overtime. Not if you work originally planned, doms on their way out. weekend shifts without getting but at the University If patients “had unprotected paid at all. According to Gloria of Houston. Next sex over the weekend, they feel Conley, Michael Jones, Roder- February, a few po- comfortable that they can walk ick Mukes and dozens of former litical junkies will get in and get birth control,” Parker LPM employees who joined a to witness the great said. “If a girl had sex with a per- federal lawsuit last year, that was orators of our time son who is HIV-positive, we’re how LPM and an associated firm plying their trade on right here where she is, she can called Ministry of Property rou- Texas soil. It’s the talk to us.” tinely treated their employees. first time since the With $76,000 a year in fund- According to Michael O’Keefe Patients at Midway Family Planning have free 1988 campaign that ing, Parker has been able to pay access to birth control, including condoms, Cowles, an attorney with the Houston has had medical staff, who volunteered pills and long-acting hormonal devices, thanks nonprofit Equal Justice Center to the federal Title X program. such an honor. their time during the rough PHOTO BY ALEXA GARCIA-DITTA who represented LPM workers patch before federal funding in the lawsuit, employees were arrived. Midway Family Planning is also expanding its expected to work from 6 a.m. till sundown but were That debate, space and buying more medical equipment. regularly paid — at minimum wage — for only six or from Houston’s As family planning providers have shut down, seven hours. Wortham Theater reduced clinic hours, or started charging for previously LPM’s website is full of success stories from Center, featured free services, places such as Midway have become folks who credit the program for turning their lives all but which of more critical. Midway sees patients from as far away as around. But Cowles said his clients wouldn’t be so these candidates? San Angelo, 100 miles to the west, as well as Ballinger, generous. “It wouldn’t be a stretch to call this the Comanche and Ranger. Some can’t find affordable opposite of charity, when you’re stealing from people a. Jesse Jackson health services in their hometowns. Others, such as of meager means,” he said. b. Joe Biden 22-year-old Megan Todd, have health insurance, but Donna Griffin didn’t respond to the Observer’s c. Al Gore can’t get appointments with other providers. interview request by press time. According to court d. Lloyd Bentsen On a recent visit to Brownwood from Abilene, records, the case closed last year with two separate e. Michael Dukakis where she lives and works as a retail store manager, settlements: a $200,000 settlement paid by the Todd “swung by” to get her birth control shot. Griffins and LPM, and a $1 million default judgment “You know that they care,” she said. “They make against their former associate Herbert Davis, who things less stressful, and it’s nice to have a place that ran Ministry of Prophecy. you can rely on.” — Alexa Garcia-Ditta Wage theft is particularly prevalent in construc-

tion, custodial work and other low-paying industries.

Its victims tend to be undocumented people, women Kennedy.” Jack no are you tor, -

LABOR DEPARTMENT and people of color. Some cities — Houston and El “Sena Quayle, Dan told he when son at a vice-presidential forum, forum, vice-presidential a at son

-

Paso among them — have responded recently by dis- sea debate that of smackdown

Highway Robbery qualifying companies with a history of wage theft enduring most the delivered Fort Worth’s Liberty Proclaimed Ministry is a violations from getting city contracts. Bentsen though, mate, running

small, family-run company that does a lot of business Neither Fort Worth nor the state of Texas has his as Bentsen tapped Dukakis campaign’s “seven dwarfs.” After After dwarfs.” “seven campaign’s

with the state. Founded by Donna Griffin and her hus- passed wage theft laws, so the only recourse left for the as known jokingly candidates

band, Robert, in 1998, LPM offers Bible study, mentor- LPM’s workers was either a civil case or a complaint little-known the between face-off ship and job training for ex-offenders and people with to the U.S. Department of Labor. According to federal 1987 July the for there wasn’t

disabilities. The company is also a major subcontrac- records, the Labor Department found three wage Bentsen Lloyd native Mission ANSWER: ANSWER: d. d.

tor under a state jobs initiative for disabled Texans. violations at LPM in 2009, four years before LPM and Senator U.S.

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 3 workers brought their case to Cowles. It’s been a year TALK OF TEXAS since that case closed, and Cowles told the Observer that the courts don’t seem to be a sufficient deter- rent, either. GUNS ON CAMPUS “After we stopped litigating this case,” Cowles said, “we got calls saying that people were not being paid properly. Still. And that’s the real travesty about this: “We want administra- We litigate these cases to have broader impact, and when those violations continue, that’s a real failing of tors to interpret the the system.” — Patrick Michels law in the strictest way PAYDAY LENDING Jumping the possible, and keep Loan Sharks When attempts to regulate payday and auto-title guns out of as many lenders went down in flames at the end of the 2013 legislative session, some advocates took it as a sign places as they can.” that statewide efforts to rein in predatory short-term lending were a dead end. The lenders, who make con- —Ellen Spiro, a radio-television-film professor and co- siderable profits from offering loans to the needy at chair of Gun Free UT, to the Texas Tribune, October 1. extremely high rates, had flooded the Legislature Commercial with cash, and it seemed impossible to get meaning- ful legislation past their chosen defenders. “Out of self-protection I have payday loans But at the local level, consumer advocates have chosen to spend part of next had some success over the last five years. Cities con- can carry tinue to advance their own lending regulations. And fall at the University of Sydney, some advocates are working to provide a practical interest rates alternative to predatory lending through a lending where, among other things, model first established in Brownsville in 2011. this risk seems lower.” in excess of Retail banks in the area found that many of their —University of Texas at Austin economics professor Daniel customers were often unable to access credit, such as Hamermesh, in a resignation letter to university president 400 percent home and auto loans, because their credit histories Greg Fenves, October 4. had been ruined by usurious short-term loans. The and must banks helped create a new financial institution, the Community Loan Center of the Rio Grande Valley, to be repaid in offer small loans at modest interest rates with com- “I feel less threatened by a paratively lengthy repayment periods. licensed concealed weapon a matter of Commercial payday loans can carry interest rates in excess of 400 percent and must be repaid within holder than some of the months. months or weeks, often causing financially troubled students I have encountered customers to refinance repeatedly, trapping them in a cycle of debt. In contrast, the Community Loan Center who were probably psychotic offers loans up to $1,000, with a repayment period of a but weren’t armed.” year at 18 percent interest. The program is offered through area employers, —Walter Daugherity, a Texas A&M University computer and borrowers repay loans through the deduction of science professor, to the Houston Chronicle, October 2. small amounts from each paycheck. The loans come with free optional financial counseling. Default rates are less than 5 percent. “This is America; if guns In the last two years, five other Community Loan and bloodshed don’t wake Centers have cropped up around Texas, in Houston, Dallas, Austin, Laredo and Bryan/College Station. people up, a public celebration It’s a model that backers hope to continue to spread of sexuality may just do the around the state — but it’s only part of the solution, according to Howard Porter, a program manager trick. We’re going to need a with Texas Community Capital, which helps train and support Community Loan Centers. lot of dildos.” “We’ve made a little over 7,000 loans total,” Porter —Jessica Jin, a 24-year-old San Antonio native who said. “That’s a nice start, but the payday loan and organized the viral #CocksNotGlocks protest at UT-Austin, auto title loan industry is nearly a $6 billion industry, to the Houston Chronicle, October 12. according to the state, and we’ve made about $6 million worth of loans.” The loans are only available to workers whose

4 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG employers participate in the program, so they can’t It’s unclear whether the 2008 correspondence is help seniors or students, two groups who often avail the first time DSHS articulated a formal policy against themselves of short-term loans. And though a variety the matricula, and even Texas legislators haven’t been of large and small employers have signed on, many able to get clarification from DSHS about the policy. are uninterested in offering the service, Porter said. State Representative Gene Wu, D-Houston, has Still, in the absence of statewide regulation on lend- twice asked DSHS by letter in July and August for ers, advocates are relying in part on the benefits these an explanation about the policy’s origins and imple- local efforts provide. The pushback against predatory mentation. A staffer in his office told the Observer lending is “a big jigsaw puzzle with a lot of pieces,” that DSHS has confirmed receipt of the letters and Porter said. “Well, we’ve got one of the pieces.” is working on a response, but that Wu’s office has —Christopher Hooks received “nothing substantive.” For now, American kids and their families will have to wait for a judge to decide whether this is a case BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP of insufficient communication and policy enforce- ment, or something more unsettling: a xenophobic, Citizen’s Bane politically motivated attempt to deny citizens their As debate over birthright citizenship peppers the birthright. —Andrea Grimes Republican presidential race, Texas is acting as something of a test case for what the denial of that citizenship might look like in practice. Dozens of undocumented Texans, on behalf of their U.S.-born children, have joined a lawsuit against the Texas Department of State Health Ser- vices (DSHS) in federal court, arguing that their kids, mostly infants and toddlers, have been denied birth certificates. The parents say that years ago, state bureaucrats accepted certain forms of foreign-issued documentation for vital records, but that they later ceased accepting that documentation amid a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. The central question: whether the state of Texas essentially changed the rules without warning. In court, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid attorney Jennifer Harbury said that Texas has “locked all available doors” to her clients by not creating a means by which undocumented family members can prove their identities to get their American kids’ records. The state’s list of acceptable forms of for- eign ID includes valid passports with visas or current driver’s licenses, many of which are largely unavail- Exceptional organic & cooperative coffee roasted to order in Austin. able to undocumented Texans. But many of these families do have the matricula consular, a photo ID issued by the Mexican consul- ate, which they say they’ve used in the past to get vital records. Texas law does not expressly reject the matricula, and other states, including California, accept it as a valid form of ID. Dallas County even accepted the matricula as recently as this year. Give like DSHS counters that it has never accepted the matric- ula, due to concerns about the integrity of the identity validation process for matricula applicants. But the fact that some of the plaintiffs’ older children have birth certificates obtained with the matricula, along with a 2008 letter from DSHS to the Mexican consulate, indi- cates that the policy is not, and has not always been, as Molly clear-cut as DSHS has claimed. The June 2008 letter, signed by DSHS’ then-Chief Molly Ivins Operating Officer Dee Porter, is addressed to then- consul general of Mexico Rosalba Ojeda. In it, Porter remembered us in her writes that an attorney for the agency had researched will and we hope you the issue and “it is the conclusion of the Department will too. that the Matricula Consular identity cards are not THE TEXAS OBSERVER a secure form of identification” for obtaining vital LEGACY SOCIETY records. The Observer also obtained internal docu- ments showing DSHS employees discussing the Consider a planned legacy gift that will protect investigative acceptability of the matricula around the same time. journalism for years to come. Learn more by contacting Publisher Emily Williams at 512.477.0746. NOVEMBER 2015 STATE OF TEXAS: Texas Abortion Clinics: Safe, Legal & Increasingly Rare BY ALEXA GARCIA-DITTA FOR MORE THAN a year, a coalition of independent abortion providers has been challenging the constitutionality of House Bill 2, Texas’ omnibus abortion law passed in 2013. The state has maintained that HB 2’s restrictions would make legal abortion safer, despite the opposition of main- stream medical organizations, which have said the law would “harm women’s health in very clear ways.” As the case continues to wind its way through the courts and appears likely to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, Texans are already feeling the law’s impact.

Texas Has Lost More Number of remaining than Half its Abortion Number of abortion Clinics Since 2013 clinics in Number facilities — all November of clinics ambulatory By requiring physicians to obtain hospital 2013, when currently surgical admitting privileges and clinics to operate Number of the first open and centers — if as ambulatory surgical centers, HB 2 has abortion provisions providing the Supreme forced the closure of more than half of the clinics prior to of the law abortion Court were to state’s abortion facilities since parts of House Bill 2 took effect services uphold the law the law first took effect two years ago. 41 22 18 9

30 Austin Fewer Clinics Means Ft. Worth Houston Longer Wait Times 25 for Patients As the number of abortion clinics has dwindled across the state, patients are 20 waiting longer to receive services. When researchers at the University of Texas

at Austin called abortion clinics in five Days 15 major metro areas between November 2014 and September 2015, they found that wait times ranged from five to 23 10 days. At least one clinic was unable to take on new patients this summer. Wait times at the existing nine surgical centers 5 have also increased, suggesting that the hospital-like providers might not be able to meet patient demand if they are the 0 only remaining clinics in the state. Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep 2014 2014 2015 2015 2015 2015 2015 2015 2015 2015 2015

100% 13,000 %< 12 weeks 12,336 90% %>= 12 weeks Longer Wait Times #>= 12 weeks 11,000 80% x x x x Will Mean More x x x x x x x 9,000 x x x x x x x Second-Trimester 70% x x x x x x x x x x Abortions 60% 6,647 7,000 As wait times increase and Texans 50% are forced to obtain abortion services 5,000 later in their pregnancies, researchers 40% also expect the number of procedures performed after 12 weeks of pregnancy 30% 3,000 12 weeks gestation or later 12 weeks gestation or later to go up. While second trimester 20% Number of abortions performed at

abortion is extremely safe, the likelihood abortionsProportion all performed of at 1,000 of complications increases, as does the 10% cost of the procedure. 0% -1,000 2013 4 days 6 days 8 days 10 days 12 days 14 days 16 days 18 days 20 days Wait Time SOURCES: University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Policy Evaluation Project, Fund Texas Choice ILLUSTRATION BY JOANNA WOJTKOWIAK STATE OF TEXAS: Texas Abortion Clinics: Safe, Legal & Increasingly Rare BY ALEXA GARCIA-DITTA RONNIEDUGGER GREATER STATE From the Bottom, Up ellow Texans, we should be ashamed of our state. Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and their gov- erning majorities in the lobbyists’ house of dubious repute known as the Texas Legislature, together parroting former Governor Rick Perry’s “Texas Miracle,” have turned us into the most immoral state in the American federation. ¶ The ethical quality of a society is fairly judged, as is often said, by how its poorest citizens fare. ¶ What, then, is our gravest moral fail- ing? Is it the Legislature’s repeated refusal, after losing six straight lawsuits, to pay for an adequate system of public education for our chil- Fdren? Is it our one-party phalanx’s grim refusal to raise the state minimum wage, so cruel to the working poor? Is it our highest officials’ 445,000 poor Texans afflicted with, among other What can one xenophobic, racist splurging, as if drunkenly, on border things, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, autism, fences, watchtowers, drones and National Guardsmen and Alzheimer’s disease.” person who to net the brown-skinned persons from the south who Think what this indescribably huge, circumam- want to do the jobs most of us look down on? bient ethical failure here means to a person living cares about Not quite. The moral bottom is where health care alone with a cancer, or to a family with a child with is concerned. leukemia. That now is the ethical measure of our others do In all but one of the advanced industrial nations — state and the Texas Republican Party. that is, our own — health care for all as a human right What can one person who cares about others do when our is firmly established. Health care is the best and surest when our dangerously pivotal Texas needs a nonvio- test of the justice and fairness of a nation. Medicare lent revolution? Something? Anything? dangerously for the older and Medicaid for the poor — the greatest The historically momentous primary elections in achievement of Texan President Lyndon Johnson — Texas are about four months away. pivotal Texas and now Obamacare are the best we have been able to Two nonviolent revolutions are being declared, do. Obamacare closed the huge “Medicaid gap,” but one from the far right by Ted Cruz, the other boldly needs a many states, including Texas, when given a shrewd liberal and left, including some democratic social- green light by the Supreme Court, have refused to ism on the Scandinavian model, by Bernie Sanders. In nonviolent participate in that beneficent closure. the first, establishment Republican Jeb Bush and In 2013, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the others are trying to somehow stop the phe- revolution? 5.4 million Texans lacked any health insurance. By nomenal Donald Trump. In the second, leading 2014, according to a survey by the U.S. Centers for establishment Democrat Hillary Clinton is rolling Disease Control and Prevention, Texas had the high- out some substantially progressive projects to try to est number of uninsured people in the nation, as well sideswipe Sanders’ broad and daring demands for “a as the highest percentage of uninsured, at one in four. political revolution.” First Rick Perry, now Abbott, Patrick, et al., have Well, will you vote March 1? Will you get your friends refused to let more than 1 million men, women and to vote? Do you even know what number your precinct children receive their share of a total of $100 billion, is? That’s where, shortly after the primary elections, almost all of it from the federal government, for the those who take the minor trouble to attend will elect care of their own diseases and injuries. The people the Texas delegates for the various presidential candi- have paid and will pay for this medical care with our dates. In both primaries, Democratic and Republican, taxes. The money, and the care it pays for, are ours the delegate slots are assigned proportionally as the by law. The state’s top leaders and the Legislature votes have been cast in the March 1 election. Cruz just refuse to accept it. Even the Texas Association of could go to his national convention with most of the Business can hardly believe it. Republican delegates from huge Texas. So could The Then this year, without a public hearing, the Donald. So, with most of the Democratic delegates, Legislature cut by $350 million Medicaid for physical could Sanders or Clinton. and occupational therapists who, as Robert Garrett What can one person do? Together with others, a reported in the Dallas Morning News, work “with great deal.

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 7 STRANGESTSTATE NOTES FROM FAR-FLUNG TEXAS by Patrick Michels

PARIS // Two unidentified Parisians had just come home from running errands when they discovered they’d FORT WORTH // Sycamore Creek Golf Course has gone need to add a few more items to their shopping list. to the dogs... on a train! The “unusual sight,” reported The first clue that someone had been in their home KXAS in Dallas, is the brainchild of 80-year-old Eugene came, according to eParisExtra.com, when they spotted Bostick, a retired Union Pacific employee, and his pots and pans scattered on the floor. “Upon further 86-year-old brother Corky. The brothers Bostick spent investigation,” eParisExtra.com continued, “it was found the dog days of summer pulling Eugene’s nine adopted that the unknown person(s) had eaten a new bag of strays in a train of open-topped barrels behind his Oreo cookies, drank half their kids’ Capri Suns and then tractor. “One day I was out and I seen this guy with a ate their bucket of chicken.” On the upside, however, tractor who attached these carts to pull rocks,” Eugene the Oreo thief left a mysterious note of good news, explained to The Dodo. “I thought, ‘Dang, that would promising residents that “the stove had been fixed.” do for a dog train.’” He settled on a name — “the dog train” — and assigned a train car to each of his lucky pups, and the rest is adorable history. The doggone fetching sight kept golfers entertained all summer and has charmed the national media, too. Corky told KXAS he figures the twice-weekly ritual has been good for his health: “My wife said if I didn’t get up and do this I’d be dead. And I really would.”

FARMERS BRANCH // Tiffany Gallaway was shocked by what she found sitting in the Wal-Mart parking lot: an unattended and illegally parked hearse with a flag-draped cas- ket loaded in the back. Gallaway waited by the car to press the driver for answers, and shared video of their conversation with Dallas’ KTVT. Gallaway, a Marine veteran, told the station she was particularly offended that another veteran’s remains would be treated so carelessly. “This has got to be the most disrespectful thing I have ever seen in my life,” she told the driver as he emptied ice into a red cooler beside the hearse. “I just want you to know that. This is absolutely horrible.” The driver told her he was just obeying orders. “I didn’t want to do this in the first place,” he said. “Who cares if you served?” Gallaway wondered to KTVT. “Who cares if you died? It doesn’t seem to matter anymore.”

PLEASANTON // As a high school freshman, Dawn Brown-Lopez was thrilled to get a wearable chrysanthemum from a boy she liked, as is the tradition before the homecom- ing dance. But, the Pleasanton Express reported, “when she walked into the hallway, her feelings of elation turned into disappointment upon noticing that every mum looked alike.” That was 23 years ago. Since then, Brown-Lopez has converted her excitement- turned-disappointment into a thriving seasonal business, arranging custom mums. Over the years, mums have grown more ostentatious, and the business of mums has grown more competitive. Brown-Lopez said that her mums range from $8 up to $400. She is careful, though, to also pass along “mum history” and “mum etiquette,” the Express PORT NECHES // “Each community has its set of notes. “She tells them the importance of being lady-like and not looking at another girl’s characters, whether they’re loud and obnoxious or the mum in an ugly way.” effervescent, kind ones you secretly wish you were related to,” the Beaumont Enterprise opined, by way of introduction to one knife-wielding character lately spotted around Port Neches in a hood and mask. After one resident posted a photo of the man on Facebook, other locals chimed in to recount other sightings. One claimed to have seen him “walking around in his under- Visit texasobserver.org/ wear or waving at people while sitting in a box.” Others strange for more “Strangest cautioned against fearing people just because they’re State” and links to original different. “Be careful not hateful,” one commenter stories. Got a local oddity or urged, “just because he don’t [sic] have an f250 with a some small-town news to Yeti sticker.” share? Tips are welcome at [email protected].

8 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG EDITORIAL They All Have Names

hese are words I never thought would be uttered: remains of migrants exhumed from cemeteries in Brooks County. The Texas Observer has won an Emmy. In September, Jen’s images are so powerful because they force us to imagine the I had the pleasure of accepting, along with publisher people behind the objects; they chip away the anonymity to suggest Emily Williams and our partners at the Guardian US, a individuals with hopes and dreams. News & Documentary Emmy for “Beyond the Border,” As proud as we are of our stories, we’re not content to leave it at a four-part multimedia series written that. We also think the images could help families iden- by Melissa del Bosque that chronicles tify and recover their loved ones. Working with Baylor, the ongoing crisis in Brooks County, where hundreds Whatever you we’re developing a searchable, bilingual web applica- Tof migrants have died trying to get around an internal tion that will combine photos of personal belongings Border Patrol checkpoint 70 miles from the border. think of illegal with forensic information gleaned by Baker and her Whatever you think of illegal immigration, the team. The hope is that families, activists, government deadly crisis in South Texas is appalling and senseless. immigration, officials and others can use the tool to help identify the These people — men, women and children, mostly nameless. Perhaps they will recognize a wedding band, from Central America and Mexico — do not deserve the deadly a shirt or a stuffed animal. DNA testing will corroborate the ends they meet. Many are asylum-seekers and any suspected matches. To make this project possible, refugees who survived conflict and poverty in their crisis in South we need to raise $20,000 through a crowdfunding cam- homelands only to be driven to a cruel fate by callous paign ending on November 6. For more information, smugglers and U.S. border policies. Texas is visit texasobserver.org/TengoNombre For some, even in death there is no peace. Hundreds * * * of bodies remain unidentified; until recently, many appalling and You’ll notice some changes in this issue. Though were buried in trash bags in shallow graves. Their Christopher Hooks left the Observer as a staff writer at loved ones are out there somewhere, wondering what senseless. the end of October, his withering take on Texas politics became of their sons, daughters, brothers, mothers. will appear in these pages each month in a new column This issue includes multimedia editor Jen Reel’s stunning photo we’re appropriately calling Left Hooks. essay of the personal belongings found with migrants who died in We’re also starting a new monthly feature, The Interview, South Texas. Jen, who also contributed to “Beyond the Border,” which features Q&As with prominent public figures. This month photographed the objects in a forensic lab at Baylor University, spotlights Wendy Davis in what amounts to a mea culpa for her where Dr. Lori Baker, a forensic anthropologist, is examining the disastrous gubernatorial campaign. — The Editor

LOON STAR STATE Ben Sargent

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 9 THEINTERVIEW

WENDY R. DAVIS there aren’t many opportunities for people to hear the differences between candidates. Districts are so purely What She Would’ve drawn now as either Republican or Democrat that gen- eral election conversations aren’t happening. Done Differently We tried to make that happen in the gubernatorial race. Leticia Van de Putte tried to make that happen. The former state senator opens up about Mike Collier, Sam Houston, Steve Brown all tried to make that happen. But the problem is, in a state as the ‘grief’ of watching the Lege as an big as Texas, the cost of communicating on TV in the media markets here makes it almost prohibitive to outsider and her to-do list for Democrats. get that message out. I raised an extraordinary amount of money — $43 Interviewed by Christopher Hooks million dollars. I couldn’t even penetrate many of the media markets here. And those that I did get up You experienced what must have in the air in, I couldn’t buy the kind of media time been one of the biggest emo- that it would take to actually create a penetrating tional highs of any Texas politician message in voters’ minds. If you can’t communicate in recent memory on the night of the differences between the two parties to voters, it the filibuster, and then you expe- makes it extremely challenging to help them see the Q: rienced its polar opposite within legitimacy of a choice that they could be making. And the space of about a year and a half. What is it like I don’t have an easy answer to that. to live that? I wouldn’t exactly say that election night was the You’ve said that you felt your voice getting lost in the opposite of that moment. I certainly felt through the course of the campaign. What is it you wish you could election the continued energy and enthusiasm of have said to voters that you don’t think they heard? people around the state, and I think that most folks I wish that I had done a better job of helping voters to that have followed gubernatorial races would tell you see the vision I had for this state. We spent an awful “When we try to that the excitement with which our campaign was lot of time and money telling voters why Greg Abbott greeted wherever we would go was fairly unusual. We was not the right choice. But we didn’t spend a whole have too much had an extraordinary number of young people who lot of time and money telling them why I was. got engaged, and the records that we were able to The vision I had for creating a strong economy of a center-right break in both fundraising and volunteers were truly and investing in our people. For creating a bipartisan remarkable. When Bill White ran in 2010 he set a climate where all voices are heard. I don’t think that message ... we record for the number of individual donors who had those messages really resonated outside of the rallies given to a statewide campaign. He had 34,000. We had that I had where I had an opportunity to talk about risk losing the over 180,000. And that said a lot about where people those things. And because so few people show up at are in this state. Unfortunately, it said a lot about a rally, and usually when they do it’s because they’re passion of our where fewer people are than we would have hoped. already supporting you, it makes it really hard to get The turnout in that election was abysmal, in spite that message out. That goes back to, not only the base voters in of the fact that I spent in excess of $40 million. message that we stressed, but the ability to stress Governor [Greg] Abbott spent somewhere in the your message in a widespread enough way to have the process. neighborhood of $60 million. So it certainly wasn’t it sink in. And that, once again, brings into relief the for lack of the electorate understanding that there issue of money, and the challenge of communication I absolutely was a race going on. But I think when you look at in a state this big. the turnout among Democratic voters, it shows that do believe people here have begun to believe that they just don’t There’s an ongoing debate among Democrats, as there have enough power to change. And so they don’t was within your campaign, about whether candidates that happened show up. And it’s convincing them of the power of should seek first to fire up the party’s base, or to move their own voice that is the real challenge. more to the center to pursue moderate voters. What’s with me.” your advice for the next statewide campaign? What can Democrats do from exile to highlight their I would encourage them to understand that they need competing vision for the state? to speak to the base. We can’t take the base voter for Well, one of the great challenges is having the resources granted. We can’t just expect that they’re going to show to communicate that message. And when you think up and elect us because they know we’re good people. about how few general election campaigns there are, We have to inspire them and we have to give them a

10 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG reason to want to take the time to come and vote for us. own field program. And we understood at every turn When we try to have too much of a center-right where we needed to change direction or emphasis or message, because we think we might convince some resources based on what we were seeing in the field. fence-sitters, we risk losing the passion of our base When you have two separate entities attempting to voters in the process. I absolutely do believe that that work together, the fluidity of communication and happened with me. Not only with our messaging, but decision-making that needs to take place gets lost. also with our field efforts, and the way that field pro- gram was designed. What have the last two years been like for you emo- tionally? How do you hold on to a sense of yourself? Your campaign’s field program was run by Battle- I definitely have gone through a grieving of sorts. ground Texas, and your campaign had an unusual You hear about the stages of grief: I’ve come to some organizational relationship with the group in which acceptance about where I am right now. But the grief you attempted to share money and resources. Was wasn’t about losing that race. The grief has been that a mistake? about not being in public service anymore. Not being I think the structure of that relationship was a mis- inside the ring. And fighting. It was hard for me to take. I think that when you look at the work that watch the legislative session tick by, and read about Battleground is doing post-election, you see a con- some of the issues in the paper that I would have tinuing passion for engaging voters, for registering been crying out loud and strong about. Wendy Davis in her voters, for helping to create a dynamic that will play And I began to understand what it probably feels Austin home. Davis told the Observer she’s gone upon the state’s continuing demographic shift. That like for so many people who live here who feel as through “a grieving of work is very important. though it’s a fait accompli and they don’t really have sorts” since her national news-making filibuster and But our structure didn’t provide the kind of over- the power to do anything about it. And it’s difficult to unsuccessful gubernatorial sight of the field program that, looking back, would resist that feeling. What I’ve tried to do is find a way campaign. Now, she says, she’s focused on getting have been advisable. In my two very difficult Senate to transfer that into the next constructive way that young people to the polls. races, we devised and designed and implemented our I’ll use my energy and my passion and my voice. PHOTO BY JEN REEL

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 11

RECKONING WITH THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS AGO, A YOUNG WOMAN IN MCALLEN DIED OF AN ILLEGAL ABORTION. TODAY HER STORY IS ROSIE MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER. BY ALEXA GARCIA-DITTA

n a June afternoon in McAllen in 1978, Diana Rivera, posing as a young pregnant woman, walked into the home of a local midwife. At Rivera’s side was a female friend, who was wearing a small, con- cealed microphone. Outside, two older women, both abortion rights activists and writers, waited in a parked station wagon with a Dallas television crew, listening in. The day before, Rivera, a self-possessed college student and single mother, had arranged to meet the midwife, Maria Pineda, middle aged with some 12 years in practice. Rivera told her that she needed to get an abortion quickly, before her father found out, and couldn’t afford an OB-GYN. Pineda, who was licensed to deliver Obabies but not perform abortions, responded that she could do the procedure for $125, and they agreed to meet at 1:30 p.m. the next day.

The price was key. Although abortion was legalized LEFT: An undated school photo of Rosie Jimenez. in 1973, the 1976 Hyde Amendment had banned the Her daughter, Monique, use of Medicaid for the procedure. Without the fed- created an album with photos that her grand- erally subsidized insurance, many women couldn’t mother had kept in a afford the $230 that McAllen OB-GYNs typically basket for many years after Jimenez’s death. charged. The amendment — calculated to keep RIGHT: Jimenez died in women from getting abortions in the same way that September 1977 due to complications from an Texas’ recent abortion laws have been engineered — illegal abortion performed instead forced them to seek less expensive options. in this McAllen home by midwife Maria Pineda. Once Rivera and the friend were inside the home, PHOTOS BY JEN REEL a worn wooden house, the midwife took them into a separate room and locked the door. There was a bed and a cot, and Rivera spotted medical instruments sitting in a jar of dirty water. By then, she was crying about the procedure. Pineda went into her stock out of nervousness and anger. explanation, describing the instruments as well as Nine months earlier, her best friend, Rosie the process: She would insert a thin rubber hose, and Jimenez, had been treated by Pineda with disastrous later, Rivera would bleed. “I remember that red rub- consequences. For Rivera, this amateur sting opera- ber hose,” Rivera says. “It was filthy.” tion was a way to bring down harsh repercussions on Pineda told Rivera to remove her clothes and lie on the midwife. In Rivera’s perfect world, the midwife the bed. With those words, one of the women listen- would never practice again. ing to the conversation from the station wagon ran to “I was crying, and shaking,” Rivera says. “She sat call the McAllen police. in this chair, she talked to that woman, and she saw those instruments, and it didn’t matter. She went When Rivera and Jimenez met in secretarial school through with it.” in 1973, they quickly became close friends. Rivera, who Stalling for time, Rivera asked Pineda to tell her towered over her petite classmate, found Jimenez’s

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 13 running commentary during their typing class fun- to have a better life, that was her goal,” says her ny as hell. “I would start laughing, and of course the daughter Monique, now 42. “I know that she saw my teacher would say, ‘You two, settle down,’” Rivera says, grandparents struggle, and she wanted to provide me remembering her friend’s infectious giggle. “Can you with a better life.” imagine if we had been in high school together?” In September 1977, Jimenez discovered she was The two women had a lot in common. Both were pregnant again. Rivera has described it as a last straw, Mexican-American, children of migrant farm work- too much for Jimenez, despite her natural optimism. ers whose families struggled with poverty; Jimenez Intent on finishing college, worried about caring was one of 12 siblings. They were single mothers for another child, she decided to have an abortion, on welfare in socially conservative McAllen, deter- and Rivera insisted that she see a physician. If it had mined to improve their lives and devoted to their been a few months earlier, Jimenez could have used kids. In 1974, they talked each other into enrolling at Medicaid to pay for one of McAllen’s OB-GYNs, whose McAllen’s Pan American University. Jimenez wanted offices spread like a fan around the McAllen General to become a special education teacher, Rivera a law- Hospital on Houston Avenue near South Main Street. yer. With their kids in hand, they moved into adjacent But by then, the Hyde Amendment had been in apartments on Hibiscus Avenue on McAllen’s north place for two months. During debate over the legis- side. Jimenez’s daughter, Monique, was a baby; lation, its author, U.S. Representative Henry Hyde, Rivera’s son, Anthony, a few years older. R-Illinois, told colleagues he hoped the bill would Over the next years, they helped each other manage prevent anyone — “a rich woman, a middle-class grueling schedules: study, part-time jobs, raising woman, or a poor woman” — from having an abor- children, cleaning houses on weekends to pick up tion. Instead, it made the terrain more dangerous. extra money. In the mornings, Jimenez would knock In the slim two-month window after the amend- on the wall between the apartments, calling to Rivera, ment took effect, complications arising from poorly “Get up, we’re leaving.” By then, Anthony was showing conducted abortions seemed already to be increas- Diana Rivera in her McAllen early signs of autism, and Jimenez helped Rivera care ing in McAllen. Between August and October of 1977, home. Rivera and Jimenez, for him. “She loved children, and she really felt like she five women, including Jimenez, turned up at the both single parents and students, were best friends could make a difference,” Rivera says. emergency room with infections and related com- and neighbors during their Parts of Jimenez’s life had been tumultuous — in plications, probably from cheap illegal abortions, few years in school together. Diana played a crucial role in February 1977 she had her second abortion — but according to a report from the Centers for Disease the arrest and conviction of she was working toward a steadier existence. She Control and Prevention. the midwife who performed Jimenez’s abortion. had a longtime boyfriend, Jesse, who was in prison, Without Medicaid, OB-GYNs were too expen- PHOTO BY JEN REEL and they planned to marry. “She was going to college sive for some women needing abortions not only

14 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG in McAllen but across the nation. Jimenez refused In the years since, as the facts about Jimenez’s to resort to using her financial aid check; she still case have emerged, her death has become a powerful had two years left in school. “I said, ‘Then let’s have reminder of what happens when abortion becomes a fund­raiser,’” Rivera says. “‘We’ll have bake sales. inaccessible. Though abortion itself is now extraordi- We’ll come up with the money.’” Jimenez was non- narily safe, it’s also become, if anything, harder to get committal, and a few days later, Rivera left town to than it was in the 1970s, especially in Texas. visit her mother in Weslaco. Under legislation passed in 2011, Texas women On the night of September 26, while Rivera was must get ultrasounds at least 24 hours before receiv- still gone, Jimenez developed a fever and began ing an abortion and receive so-called “woman’s right hemorrhaging and vomiting. She’d contracted a to know” counseling, which is based on outdated, bacterial infection in her uterus from the abortion scientifically unsound research. Under Texas’ 2013 Pineda performed the day before. The infection usu- omnibus abortion bill, clinic doctors must have admit- ally derives from feces or dirt, according to a doctor ting privileges at hospitals, and the clinics themselves quoted in a comprehensive book on her case, Rosie: must operate as ambulatory surgical centers. The Investigation of a Wrongful Death. Jimenez’s More than half of Texas’ 41 abortion clinics have cousin and friends rushed her to the emergency closed, and the wait times for women needing abor- room at McAllen General Hospital. She was given a tions have increased to up to 20 days. Especially in tracheotomy to help her breathe and then a hyster- far reaches of the state, where there are fewer clinics, ectomy, according to the doctor. But the infection women must travel long distances for the proce- had spread through her body, attacking her organs, dure, sometimes hundreds of miles. Only one clinic including her heart. She struggled for seven days in remains open, in McAllen, to serve Texans living in intensive care. On October 3, she died from organ the lower Rio Grande Valley. Without it, patients failure at the age of 27. would be forced to travel nearly 250 miles to San Rivera didn’t find out about Jimenez’s hospital- Antonio. If the McAllen clinic closes, undocumented ization until she returned from Weslaco. “I guess I’m glad I didn’t get to see her,” she says. “I would’ve gone crazy.” Monique, 4 years old then, was sent to JIMENEZ’S DEATH HAS BECOME live with relatives soon after Jimenez’s death. She has one clear memory of the funeral at McAllen’s La A POWERFUL REMINDER OF WHAT HAPPENS Piedad Cemetery. “When the casket was going down … I said, ‘Where is my mommy going?’ I remember WHEN ABORTION BECOMES INACCESSIBLE. somebody was holding my hand, but I don’t remem- ber all the faces.” women in particular will face a perilous situation, because going to San Antonio would require passing Jimenez’s death — covered by the New York Times, through an internal immigration checkpoint. Their the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and choice would be stark: risk deportation or opt for an ABC News — roiled the national dialogue over abor- illegal abortion. tion rights. Reproductive rights organizations held And again, Texas has taken center stage in the candlelight vigils across the country, attracting as national debate, this time becoming a testing ground many as 300 people in Washington, D.C. At rallies for restrictive abortion laws, some of which have in New York and at the U.S. Capitol, protesters de- subsequently been enacted elsewhere. The omnibus cried the federal government and Congress, blam- abortion law, called the most onerous in the country, is ing Jimenez’s death on the cutoff of Medicaid funds. expected to head to the U.S. Supreme Court for a deci- A New York Times editorial called Jimenez the “first sion that will determine how, or whether, states can victim” of the Hyde Amendment. Among abortion legislate access to abortions. Meanwhile, reproductive rights activists — even, to some degree, within the rights activists worry that the restrictive landscape is U.S. public at large — she became a symbol of the de- forcing women to choose unsafe options again. structive power of the bill. In November 1977, the CDC launched an investi- Rivera couldn’t bear living in the Hibiscus apart- gation into Jimenez’s death, and its findings set off a ment after Jimenez was gone. Within a few months, spate of skeptical news articles. The CDC reported, she started looking for a new place to live, and in the inaccurately, that Jimenez had “obtained an induced middle of her search, she got a call from Ellen Frank- abortion in Mexico.” Subsequent media reports fort, a New York journalist and feminist author who questioned assertions that she was driven to seek an wrote for the Village Voice and Ms. Magazine. Amid abortion in a nonmedical environment because she the swirl of conflicting stories about Jimenez’s death, couldn’t afford an OB-GYN, suggesting instead that Frankfort decided to find out what happened and she was trying to hide her pregnancy from her fam- learn more about Jimenez as a person. She hopped on ily. Even people in health care who treated women a plane for McAllen. like Jimenez made comments rife with the stigma Over several months in 1978, Frankfort pieced attached to abortion. A Washington Post article together the story with help from Rivera and quoted the director of a McAllen Planned Parenthood Jimenez’s relatives and other friends. Jimenez did go clinic: “Who knows why someone goes to Mexico for to Mexico, they told Frankfort. There, she received an abortion?” she asked. “Is it money? Or is it that a hormone injection, which she hoped would trig- they don’t want anyone to know about it?’” ger a miscarriage but didn’t. After returning to

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 15 records, she was convicted of practicing medicine without a license, a Class A misdemeanor in Texas. She was sentenced to three days in jail and charged a $100 fine. “Every time I think about it, it still hurts,” says Rivera, now 63, retired from her career as an attorney and living again in McAllen. Her home is decorated with her son’s paintings and washed by sunlight that pours through big windows. It’s simi- lar to what she and Jimenez hoped they might have. “If she were still around,” Rivera says, “she would be enjoying everything that I am enjoying.”

After Jimenez’s death, nonprofit organizations stepped in to help fill the financial gap that the Hyde Amendment created. The first abortion fund, established in 1978 in Central Texas in Jimenez’s honor, provided financial assistance to low-income Texans. Dozens of similar funds have cropped up in the state and the nation, giving women some “WHEN I WAS SITTING IN THE POLICE STATION, recourse despite the slew of regulations aimed at reducing access to abortions. Planned Parenthood IT JUST HIT ME ALL AT ONCE. I STARTED BAWLING. and other providers, too, addressed expense. To meet the needs of lower-income women, the organizations I CRIED AND CRIED. I SAID, ‘ROSIE, WE GOT HER.’” in some cases use sliding scales for abortion prices. Monique Jimenez, as she was growing up, knew McAllen, Jimenez turned to a friend, who told her nothing about the wave that her mother generated. about Pineda. Frankfort also learned that Jimenez Her relatives told her little about her mother’s life, had relied on doctors for her previous abortions, with the exception of a few anecdotes: She liked clas- which were covered by Medicaid. Frankfort’s report- sic rock music, spent summers lying on the beach in ing became the basis for Rosie: The Investigation South Texas and traveled throughout Mexico. They of a Wrongful Death, which she co-authored with said nothing about her death. Finally, when Monique Frances Kissling, then director of the National was 19, her aunt gave her a copy of Frankfort’s book. Abortion Federation. In adulthood, Monique has carved out a place But nothing happened, even after the CDC in her life for her mother. She put together a photo updated its report using the same information about album, using pictures she found in a basket in her the McAllen midwife that Jimenez’s friends and grandmother’s house. As I sit with her in her airy, relatives gave to Frankfort. Despite the evidence high-ceilinged duplex in Houston, we flip through piling up against Pineda, she was still practicing, as the album’s yellowing pages. In the photos, Rosie is far as Frankfort knew. Frankfort decided she had to a 20-something woman with shoulder-length hair, act, and Rivera agreed to help. dark eyes and a wide smile. She’s dressed in bright Frankfort, Kissling, Rivera and other friends of florals and the high-waisted pants of the 1970s. Jimenez came up with a detailed plan. They even Glued into the album is the invitation for Monique’s marked the bills Rivera would use to pay Pineda. As first birthday party. Another photo shows Monique, a Rivera stood in the bedroom of Pineda’s house, the round-faced toddler, eating cake with her hands. midwife told her: If there were complications, she She’s followed a path similar to the one her mother was to return rather than see a doctor. If she ended hoped to take. She works in the mental health field, up at a physician’s office, she was to say she got the helping people with bipolar disorder, depression abortion in Mexico — not McAllen. and schizophrenia.“I feel like I’m still a lot like her in When the midwife told Rivera to remove her some sense,” she says. When she picked a date for her clothes, Kissling ran to a phone booth and called wedding, she chose her mother’s birthday, August 5. the McAllen police. Pineda tried to block them from “It meant a lot to me to do it on that day,” she says. coming in the door when they arrived. She hid the “I always feel like when someone passes away, people rubber hose in her bra and pushed Rivera, as well as forget about them. I don’t want it to be like that.” her medical instruments, into the bathroom. On the October 3 anniversary of Jimenez’s death, Police arrested Pineda on the spot, but Frankfort, when reproductive rights groups renew their call Kissling and Rivera were also hauled off to the police for improving access to abortion, Monique reflects station as co-conspirators in an illegal abortion. on what her relationship with Rosie would be like if The women were questioned for hours before being she’d lived. Rivera lights a candle for her at St. Jude released. “When I was sitting in the police station, Catholic Church in Pharr. “People ask me, ‘How it just hit me all at once,” Rivera says. “I started can you be for abortion when your mom passed As a girl, Monique Jimenez, now 42 and living in Houston, bawling. I cried and cried. I said, ‘Rosie, we got her. away?’ Monique says. “Well, because my mom was knew nothing about the wave We got her, Rosie.’” choosing a better life. It would’ve been such a big of pro-choice activism that her mother’s death generated. When Pineda was finally charged, though, the struggle to have another child. She was trying to do

PHOTO BY JEN REEL penalties were disappointing. According to police better for us.”

16 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 17 THE THINGS THEY

18 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG THE THINGS THEYLeft

Behindin tragedy for anyone. In the last 15 years, since When migrants die in South Texas, the checkpoint was made permanent, hundreds have died, their identities often unknown to those the objects they leave behind hold who find them. But to their families, they are loved ones who’ve clues to their identities. gone missing. In 2013, 31-year-old Exelina Hernan- dez fled El Salvador and the gang members who were threatening her. Hernandez traveled for three weeks n the fall of 2013, Observer reporter to reach the Texas border and then found herself on Melissa del Bosque and I visited Baylor that same dangerous walk around the checkpoint. University’s forensics lab, one of several Along the way, she befriended an older woman in Texas labs that handles the remains of their group. Once the group reached Houston, the unidentified migrants who die in Texas woman called Hernandez’s mother, Elsy, with dev- after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. astating news. “The men carried her on their backs,” The forensic anthropologists at Baylor the woman said. “Even one of the smugglers carried and elsewhere perform skeletal analysis and/or DNA her for a while. They didn’t want to leave her, but they Itesting in the hopes of gleaning enough information just couldn’t carry her anymore, and she couldn’t to identify people and return them to their families. walk. … We prayed with your daughter. I told her, We watched as Dr. Lori Baker and her team at the ‘Don’t give up. Think of your children. They are wait- lab inspected a blue backpack that had been bur- ing for you.’” Two years later, Elsy is still waiting for ied with remains exhumed from a Brooks County someone to tell her where her daughter is. cemetery earlier that year. They carefully placed its Such stories inspired this photo essay. These contents on the examining table. Most of the items objects belonged to real people — people who were ordinary toiletries: a comb, razor, tweezers and wanted to play baseball with their kids, or propose deodorant. But there were more personal belong- to their love, or see their parents again, and were ings too — a rosary, a diamond ring, a clean, unused willing to risk their lives to do so. We should feel baseball — that prompted questions from the group. compelled to ask why. Who was this man? Where was he going and why? We also realized that these photos could do more Was there a family waiting for him? Was he taking than build awareness; they could help families the baseball to his daughter or son? The ring to his identify and recover their loved ones. This realiza- love? Such objects hint at a story about the person tion has inspired another project: We are building a they were connected to, but they can also be keys to database that includes images of personal belong- unlocking the individual’s identity. ings and information gleaned from the forensic The lab visit was one of numerous trips I made work of Baker’s team. Although we can’t include all with Melissa for “Beyond the Border,” a four-part of the cases under review in Texas, we’ve commit- series that utilized multiple viewpoints to describe ted to photo documentation of items found with the depths of the humanitarian crisis in Brooks remains currently under Baylor’s supervision. The County. After crossing into Texas, migrants are online tool will be searchable by keyword in both transported north until they approach a Border Spanish and English. We hope the project, which Patrol checkpoint near Falfurrias, 70 miles from we’re calling “I Have a Name/Yo Tengo Nom- the border. From there, smugglers lead groups bre,” will contribute to efforts to restore identity for several days through harsh, remote ranchland to the deceased and bring closure to their fami- to avoid the checkpoint. If people can’t keep up, lies. For more information on this project and to they’re left behind. Old, young, female, male, preg- learn how you can help support it, please visit nant, sick, injured: The punishing journey can end texasobserver.org/TengoNombre. — Jen Reel

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 19 CASE 0435 The remains are presumed to be male and were found February 9, 2012, on the Laborcitas Creek Ranch, 1.2 miles from the nearest road. They were exhumed from the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Falfurrias on May 23, 2013. All items, including the rosary on the cover, were found in the blue backpack on page 18. 20 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER CASE 0354 The remains are presumed to be female. The femur shows a massive break that was surgically repaired with a metal rod inserted into the bone. The body was found in a sundress and slippers. Homemade slings, used to carry water, are commonly found on the ranches traversed by migrants. THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 21 CASE 0408 The remains are presumed to be male, aged 35 to 56, and were found on November 3, 2009, on the Coldwell Ranch. They were ex- humed from the Sacred Heart Cemetery on May 26, 2013. The ring was sewn into the waistband of a pair of pants, and a brand tag was still attached to the stuffed lion. 22 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG CASE 0462 The remains are presumed to be male, aged 30 to 50, and were found January 7, 2013, on the Laborcitas Creek Ranch about 2 miles from the nearest road. The ball of the femur shows severe damage, possibly related to an untreated hip break or fracture. The Baylor lab team noted that walking with this injury would be extremely painful.

CASE 0378 The remains are presumed to be female and were found August 28, 2012, CASE 0517 on the Tepeguaje Ranch. The remains, exhumed from the Sacred They were exhumed Heart Cemetery in 2014, have not yet been May 19, 2013, from the identified as male or female. Found with Sacred Heart Cemetery. them were this key chain and necklace, as A scar was found on the well as a bag of buttons. abdomen of the body. NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 23 The Waiting WITH NO PLACE TO GO, MANY TEXANS WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES END UP ON THE STREETS. Game BY JOHN SAVAGE

It’s 9 a.m. on one of the coldest days of the year, and 33-year-old Betty Calderon is brushing her long black hair in anticipation of seeing her fiancé. For the last two weeks, Ernest Rodriguez has been locked up at the Travis County jail for aggravated assault by strangulation. He is accused of choking Calderon until she almost blacked out. That night in November 2014, the couple was getting ready to bed down in a parking lot in one of the few pockets of East Austin that hasn’t been gentrified. Calderon was scrolling through the prepaid cell phone she’d purchased for Rodriguez with her disability income when she discovered intimate messages he’d exchanged with another woman. She confronted him. Tempers flared. It wasn’t the first time Rodriguez had choked years. She receives Social Security disability income, her. This time, though, the cops showed up before but because of an intellectual disability, she has she passed out. trouble managing money. People steal from her and “He was pushing my wind really hard, and I had sometimes she splurges on things like Air Jordans weak breathness,” Calderon says a few weeks after the and can’t afford to buy food at the end of the month. incident, the bruises on her neck finally fading. “But I Calderon has Type 2 diabetes, which is tough to still have feelings for him. I pray for him every day and manage when food is something you find rather than tell him goodnight every time I go to sleep.” buy. Her dental hygiene has deteriorated to the point Calderon has been homeless for more than two that decay has eaten a hole in her front two teeth.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW MAHON

24 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 25 With Rodriguez in jail, Calderon says she strug- After graduation, she met Chris Foley, a man almost gles. He protected her — when he wasn’t hurting her 20 years her senior. He proposed to her at the High- — and helped her find food and places to camp. They land Mall food court, though they never married. The would take turns at night guarding their spot while couple had two children and lived in a public housing the other slept. development. In 2011, Foley died of cancer, according to Calderon’s situation highlights an overlooked Calderon’s parents, but she says he succumbed to AIDS. demographic: those who are homeless and have “When she was with Chris she had no problem,” intellectual disabilities, generally defined as having says Calderon’s father, Ralph. “When Chris died she an IQ below 70 and lacking the social, conceptual and couldn’t take it.” practical skills needed to manage everyday life. With Without a partner, Calderon was adrift. regard to the well-being of citizens with intellectual “He was my everything,” she says. “He gave me a place disabilities, Texas ranks 50th among the states and to stay, he gave me kids and he always went to work.” the District of Columbia, according to the nonprofit After Foley died, Calderon had a child with a boy- United Cerebral Palsy. Only Mississippi is worse. friend. Her mother says Calderon had a hard time Research on the intersection of homelessness keeping her three children clean and fed. Not long and limited cognition is sparse but the best estimate after her youngest was born, Texas Child Protective is that about 9 percent of homeless adults have an Services removed the children from the home. “CPS intellectual disability, compared to 1 to 3 percent in said I wasn’t taking care of them,” Calderon says. the general population. In July 2012, a court granted custody of the chil- As many as 73,000 Texans with intellectual dis- dren to Calderon’s aunt. Calderon has the right to abilities are on a waiting list to receive home- and visit them with supervision. She rarely sees them, though, because her aunt doesn’t like it when she vis- its, Calderon says. Experts say that Texas’ failure to fully More than anything, Calderon wants to find per- manent housing where she can live with her children. fund services forces some people with “I miss them,” she says. “They’re my babies.” After losing custody, Calderon moved into a trailer cognitive impairments onto the streets, owned by her father on the eastern edge of Austin. Six months later, he could no longer afford the mort- where survival requires quick wits. gage, and at the start of 2013, Calderon was suddenly homeless. She spent her first night on the streets community-based services, such as employment assis- behind a Jack in the Box. tance, behavioral counseling, dental care and placement In the beginning, she was lost. It took her months to in small group homes with around-the-clock caregiv- figure out the best places to get a meal, the safest places ers. (In contrast, at least 17 other states have waitlists to camp. Afraid of being attacked, she was restless at with fewer than 1,000 people.) For someone signing up night. When Rodriguez entered the picture, she finally today, the wait to receive services could be as long as 14 settled into a routine. For fun, they would watch her years. Some people caught in limbo have families who favorite movie, Blood In Blood Out, on a portable DVD can house and support them in the interim. Others, player. They would visit a storage unit she rents in including Betty Calderon, make do the best they can. South Austin. It’s piled high with the stuff that to her There is no official estimate of how many people means home — a BMX bike, a TV that doesn’t work, on the list are homeless. But experts say that Texas’ old luggage. failure to fully fund services forces some people with cognitive impairments onto the streets, where sur- When I met Calderon in May 2014, she had recently vival requires quick wits. found her way to Parker Lane United Methodist. She Dennis Borel, executive director of the Coalition and Rodriguez had been camping near a creek in a of Texans with Disabilities, says that underfunding leafy park until a police officer ordered them to leave. social services and housing support means that tax- At Parker Lane, they built a makeshift structure out payers spend more when people end up in jails and of scavenged cardboard and a blue plastic tarp strung hospitals. “This is a huge problem for the state of between the church and a retaining wall. Texas,” Borel says. The church’s groundskeeper alerted Pastor Tina Meanwhile, Betty Calderon is used to waiting. Carter. The next morning, Carter poured a cup of She’s been waiting her whole life, it sometimes coffee and walked the 200 feet from the parsonage to seems, for someone to help her. the temporary shelter. “Hello,” Carter said as she approached the couple. Calderon is a large woman with an easy smile and a “I’m Tina, what are your names?” calm demeanor, who often looks at her feet when She told Rodriguez and Calderon that although sharing details about her life. She grew up in Austin, they couldn’t camp on the church property, she the third-youngest of nine children. As a kid, Calde- would help them find housing. ron didn’t like school. Her special education classes Carter has a stepson with autism and knows more were boring but she stuck with it and eventually than most about people with cognitive disabilities graduated from high school. and the obstacles they encounter when trying to get

26 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG services. Many people with mild intellectual disabili- managing money. Advocates say such an approach fos- ties, including Calderon, read at a grade-school level ters independence, social inclusion and self-esteem. at best, and applying for services is often an exercise While most advocates welcome the shift, a fun- in gathering and filling out paperwork. An advocate, a damental problem remains: chronic underfunding. friend or family member, is almost essential to navi- Texas ranks 49th in the country for spending on gate the process. community-based services for people with intellec- Carter thought a well-run group home in a resi- tual disabilities, according to a 2013 report from the dential neighborhood with around-the-clock access University of Colorado. to a professional caregiver might be ideal for Calde- In July 2014, two months after meeting, Carter ron. It would get her off the street and potentially and Calderon went to an appointment with a social save her life. worker at Austin Travis County Integral Care, the Texas relies largely on 13 campus-like facilities local authority that coordinates state services for the — once called state schools and recently renamed intellectually disabled. The explanation of the group State Supported Living Centers — to care for the home placement process — full of acronyms and intellectually and developmentally disabled. These contingencies — was mystifying, even to Carter. institutions have been the sites of horrific abuse, “I’ve got a Ph.D. in applied chemistry and a mas- with hundreds of documented cases in which staff ter’s degree in divinity,” Carter says. “If I couldn’t neglected, beat and even killed residents. In the most understand it, the chances that Betty had were pretty notorious example, staff at a Corpus Christi state much zero.” facility organized a late night “fight club”; residents Still, Carter helped Calderon track down the iden- were encouraged to violently attack each other. tification she needed — a Social Security card and a Things were so bad that in 2009 the U.S. Department photo ID — and fill out the paperwork to get on the of Justice sued the state for civil rights violations waitlist. Even if she qualified, she could wait up to 14 and, as part of a settlement, now requires close moni- years to get placed in a group home. toring and inspection of the state schools. Several weeks later, I ask Calderon about the In the last few years, Texas has worked to move peo- paperwork. ple with intellectual disabilities from the state schools “I don’t know where it is,” she says. to residential settings, including small group homes She never did find it. And Carter got busy with her Betty Calderon, who grew up with caregivers who provide supervision, support church duties, a sick daughter and her own health in Austin, has been homeless for two years. She finds occa- and the encouragement to perform daily tasks such issues. Without an advocate, Calderon had no idea sional shelter at churches and as preparing meals, practicing personal hygiene and how to pick up where she left off. her parents’ apartment.

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 27 isn’t pleasant, but it’s safer than the street, where “I’ve got a Ph.D. in applied chemistry she’s been robbed and violently harassed. She once landed in the emergency room after not having and a master’s degree in divinity. anything to eat for three days. Still, Calderon prefers the uncertainties of life If I couldn’t understand it, the chances on the street with a man who chokes her to the suffocating atmosphere of her parents’ place. that Betty had were pretty much zero.” “I like to be close to someone,” she says. On the day Calderon goes to visit Rodriguez in jail, For two months, she found safe harbor in a small she’s smiling. She hasn’t stopped smiling all day. room next to the church gymnasium. Carter laid out She stands in line for 20 minutes, expecting to simple rules for the couple, who were still together get a visitation number and wait a few hours. She then. There was to be no alcohol and no violence. hadn’t made an appointment. She didn’t know she They were happy, until Rodriguez lost his temper. “I could. She finally gets to the receptionist, who sits just got angry and I choked her,” Rodriguez told me. behind a bulletproof glass wall and passes her ID By October they were back on the street again. through a slot. Without making eye contact, the The next time Rodriguez hurt Calderon, he would woman feverishly types on a keyboard. After several end up in jail. minutes, she looks up at Calderon. “You can’t see him,” she says, “You have an E.P.O.” Since Rodriguez’s arrest, Calderon has been stay- Calderon didn’t apply for an emergency protective ing temporarily at her parents’ apartment in south- order. (It’s standard procedure for police handling east Austin. The pungent three-bedroom space is domestic abuse to file protective orders.) home to nine people, including her parents, siblings There’s nothing the receptionist can do. and nieces. Her sister has schizophrenia and life- The smile disappears from Calderon’s face. threatening obesity; her 6-year-old niece, still in dia- “I didn’t want for him to get locked up. I still want pers, is epileptic and has to be fed through a tube in to be with him,” she says. her stomach. As she leaves the jail, she pushes open the heavy Calderon sleeps on an inflatable mattress in the glass doors and a burst of cold air hits her in the face. Little Stacy Neighborhood living room. She leaves a light on at night to keep the “I’m trying to get a social worker that can help me Park, in South Austin, is a favorite camping roaches away. get my kids back,” she says, “and maybe we can all spot for Calderon. Crashing on the floor of her parents’ apartment even get a place together.”

28 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG Homegrown BoyhoodThe Best I Recall Texas on the Table PAustineople, Places, Music andPosters Recipes 1967 Celebto 1982ratng the Flavors TwelveA Memoir Years on Film edited by alan schaefer photographsby gary cartwright by matt lankes of the Lone Star State byessays terr byy thompson joe nick patoski anderson and Over two hundred images tak- nels jacobson In this lively, humorous, and photos by sandy wilson en on set over twelve years, as From mind-melting psyche- often eloquent memoir, a leg- One of Texas’s leading cook- well as commentary by Ethan delia and surreal treatments endary Texas journalist looks book authors presents 150 Hawke, Patricia Arquette, of Texas iconography to back at a career that ranged recipes that showcase the Ellar Coltrane, and others, inventive interpretations of from sports writing with Bud state’s bounty of locally grown create a behind-the-scenes rock and roll, western swing, Shrake, Dan Jenkins, and meats and produce, artisanal portrait of a critically ac- and punk, this book offers Blackie Sherrod to a twenty- cheeses, and award-winning claimed feature film—Richard the definitive, long-overdue five-year stint as Senior Editor wines, along with fascinating Linklater’s Boyhood. survey of music poster art by at Texas Monthly. stories of the people who are 214 color and b&w photos legendary Texas artists. 15 b&w photos enriching the flavors of Texas. $50.00 hardcover $29.95 paperback $27.95 hardcover 189 color and 14 b&w photos $45.00 hardcover Border Odyssey Texas Mexican Americans Travels along the U.S./Mexico Divide and Postwar Civil Rights by charles d. thompsonThe jr. Courthousesby maggie of rivas-rodriguezCentral Texas This compellingby bchroniclerantley hightower This book sheds new light on of a journey Talonghis archite the entirectur al survey of fifty Central Texas couthe rlocalthouses activism uses that pro- U.S.-Mexico consiborderstently shifts scaled elevation and site plan drawingspelled to the describe national and civil rights the conversationcompare away these from hi storic seats of county governmentmovement, for the firas swellt time. as on the danger and fear92 plans to the and shared drawings, 61 maps birth of an organization that histories and$45.00 aspirations hardcover that has been at the forefront of bind Mexicans and Americans Mexican American and Latino despite the border walls. civil rights. 45 b&w photos 16 b&w photos All Tore Up$27.95 hardcover Where Texas $24.95Meets paperback the Sea Texas Hot Rod Portraits Corpus Christi and Its History Theby g eCityorge in b Texasrainard Border Contraband A History A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande foreword by billy gibbons Demonstrating how the by david g. mccomb by george t. díaz Iconic portraits of greas- growth of a midsized city The award-winning author In this first history of smug- ers and gearheads, families can illuminate urban de- of Texas, a Modern History gling along the U.S.-Mexico and pinup girls, rockers velopment issues across an and Galveston: A History border, Díaz shows how illicit and regular Joes capture entire region, this exemplary presents the first compre- trade evolved from a common the distinctive people and history of Corpus Christi hensive narrative of urban practice of ordinary people scene around hot rod and explores how competing development in Texas from into a professional, often custom cars. regional and cosmopolitan the Spanish Conquest to violent, criminal activity. 77 duotone photos influences have shaped this the present. 9 b&w photos $50.00 hardcover thriving port and leisure city. 61 b&w photos, 15 maps $45.0032 b&w hardcover photos $50.00 hardcover $29.95 hardcover university ofof texastexas presspress wwwww.utexaspress.comw.utexaspress.com CULTURE Interpreting Violence Binational artist Luz Maria Sánchez grapples with killings that haunt her family and her country of birth. by Michael Agresta

ast spring, multimedia artist Luz the Mexican-American DEA agent Kiki Camarena She could Maria Sánchez took first prize in the was tortured for 30 hours, injected with amphet- first-ever Biennial of the Frontiers amines so that he would not lose consciousness, and almost be in Matamoros, Mexico, for a work eventually killed. “It was a really nice neighborhood, focused on the dearth of coverage of middle class, affluent, and then you had that guy viewed as an narco violence by the news media. The in that house for who knows how long, and he was same week, the mayor of Matamoros killed,” Sánchez says. “That kind of thing permeated avant-garde was nearly assassinated, and on the day of the my childhood years.” Levent’s opening, there was another shooting three In 1982, Sánchez’s father was killed at home while journalist, blocks from the venue. For those who question the she, her sister and her mother were out of the house. broad cultural relevance of the contemporary art There were no signs of a robbery. According to a news- one who world, with its exclusive international fairs and mil- paper article about the killing, the position of chairs lion-dollar auctions, Matamoros provided a stark around the kitchen table indicated that her father had broadcasts rebuttal. People who came out to see the exhibitions sat down to talk with his murderers before they shot literally risked getting caught in the crossfire of a him 14 times. Sánchez, then 11, was the first to enter her dispatches drug war skirmish. the house and discover him dying on the floor. Sánchez’s work was welcomed not just by the com- The murder was never solved. Sánchez suspects from speakers petition’s judges but also by border residents, who that powerful people were involved. “It was more a confront narco violence as a daily reality. It helped political event,” she says. “My mother was never able shaped like that Sánchez’s installation on display, “Unnecessary to figure it out. There were a lot of threats, and she Force” (2014-2015), engages deeply with the prob- decided never to look after justice.” automatic lems they face. “It was good; people went to the Sánchez has not made her father’s murder a cen- opening,” Sánchez says. “You never know as an artist tral part of her biography as an artist. She doesn’t weapons and how people will react when you go to their arena and mention it on her website or in the supporting mate- put the thing there. They were not offended. They rial for her exhibitions. Her motives, it seems, are a collects her were actually proud that things that they have to deal mix of journalistic reticence — an unwillingness to with every day were part of an art show. That, for place herself at the center of the story she’s telling supporting them, was validating.” — and the sort of carefully inculcated fear that per- Sánchez, whose work is now on view in both San meates Mexican life, regardless of social class. evidence in Antonio and Houston, knows a thing or two about “I know here in the States you tend to always talk living with the effects of violence and seeing that about your life,” she told me. “I always try to omit the form of experience transformed into art. Her father, Hiram that information. But that’s one of the reasons I know Sánchez Felix, was a professor at the University of about violence, and I’m cautious about it, and I don’t migrants’ cast- Guadalajara and director of the city’s Casa de Cultura. want to get into it. I’m always looking at it, like, from He collected French literature and wrote several behind. In Guadalajara, in my family, we had violence off garments. plays that were performed on local stages. “He was really close to us.” more to the side of, you know, trying to change the In person and in her art, Sánchez’s style is obser- world for good or whatever,” Sánchez explains in a vational and exact, almost without an expressive tone of hard-earned disillusionment. first-person stance, except for, perhaps, one of Despite the relative peace of Guadalajara, where detached and utterly rational horror. She could many narco-traffickers located their families,- vio almost be viewed as an avant-garde journalist who lence was a fact of life for Sánchez growing up. She broadcasts her dispatches from speakers shaped remembers spending time in her grandparents’ like automatic weapons and collects her supporting house in the prosperous Jardines del Bosque neigh- evidence in the form of migrants’ cast-off garments borhood. In 1985, in a house just around the corner, from the north banks of the Rio Grande.

30 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG 34 FILM 43 THE GRIMES SCENE 36 THE BOOK REPORT 44 LEFT HOOKS 38 POSTCARDS 45 EYE ON TEXAS 42 POEM

Only after delving deep into her work and her life things as I saw them. The process is really long. What story do we begin to see Sánchez as much more than I do is, I just research, read, look, talk. Eventually, I an impartial witness. The cumulative impression of tie together thoughts in a way that — I don’t really her work over the past decade is that of personal grief know how I do it, there’s not a method necessarily. transformed by rigorous intellectual practice into art The real thing is, I research a lot.” that peers unflinchingly into the moral abysses of the Indeed, Sánchez’s journalistic interests have at present century and speaks truth to power. times threatened to sideline her artistic career. From Sánchez gravitated toward journalism at an early about 2009 to 2013, Sánchez worked for Canal 22 age, working for a local radio station as a teenager Internacional in Mexico City, a public-television and continuing through her college years, while she channel aimed at Mexicans living abroad. She led trained as a musician. She did not begin thinking of a department that aimed to expand the channel’s herself as an artist until her late 20s. By then, her viewership. Eventually, however, Sánchez found that grounding in journalism had instilled in her the value her art practice could not coexist with a government of listening, researching and sharing information as journalism job. “I felt like working for the government a way to let the truth come out, rather than forcing was really getting to a point where I could not do the Luz Maria Sánchez and it with partisan bluster. “I don’t see myself as an artwork I was envisioning,” she says. “The two things Artpace board member Lawrence Markey in front activist per se,” she says. “I see myself more as an I was doing were overlapping, and it ethically was not of “riverbank,” the second accurate observer, within my scope as an artist. More good. I started not showing that much, just doing my part of her installation “Diaspora I/II.” than trying to get involved, get in groups or make a work. After I resigned, I was able to get into it.” PHOTO BY MARK MENJIVAR group, I’m more about letting other people look at What she’s gotten into since resigning her post is COURTESY ARTPACE SAN ANTONIO

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 31 an explosive series of works that amounts to a searing climate, viewers can choose to tune out the violence critique of the drug war of former President Felipe if they prefer. For those who visited the exhibit in Calderón (2006-2012) and the more recent efforts of Matamoros, of course, tuning out the real-world current President Enrique Peña Nieto to distract the gunfire in the streets was not an option. national and international news media from ongoing Sánchez’s other current Texas exhibit, the two- episodes of violence. part installation “Diaspora I/II” (2006) on display One such work, “Detritus” (2011-2013), is on view at San Antonio’s Artpace through January, is a relic through November 7 at She Works Flexible gallery from an earlier topic of interest for Sánchez — and in Houston’s Montrose district. This ever-evolving from an important time of transformation for her as project collects thousands of news images of violence an artist. in Mexico. Sánchez has altered the images almost There is no national monument in either Mexico beyond recognition; the effect is similar to the or the United States to the thousands of migrants rotoscope animation style used by filmmaker Richard who have died trying to cross the militarized border. Linklater for Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. They die in limbo, sons and daughters of no nation, At press time, with the help of data visualization often buried without ceremony in paupers’ graves far programmers, Sánchez was building a timeline of the from their families. Since the start of the millennium, photos so viewers could observe for themselves how in the absence of an official remembrance, an the Mexican news media’s coverage of narco violence archipelago of small-scale folk and fine art memorials fell off after the 2012 Pact for Mexico, a political has appeared across the Southwest and Mexico: a accord signed by the country’s ruling party and the wall decorated with crosses and coffins on the road to the airport in Tijuana; a smartphone app that projects digital calaca skeletons on the Southern Arizona desert; an installation of 2,501 life-sized clay sculptures in a Oaxacan ghost town. Sánchez’s San Antonio installation is a particularly wrenching variation on the border memorial theme. The first section, “2487,” is a bare room featuring a white bench surrounded by 16 low-mounted speak- ers. Over the course of hours, the speakers play audio clips of Sánchez reading the names of individuals who died crossing the border. On the bench is a book listing the same names, with hometown, age, date and cause of death, if known. The concept came to the artist while she was living in San Antonio, her home base from 2002 to 2008. (She remains a non-citizen resident of the United States, though she teaches in Mexico City.) She’d been researching border deaths but could not find a comprehensive list of the dead; every nongovernmental organization that kept track seemed to ignore some names and would sometimes repeat names it did include. Sánchez resolved to three largest opposition parties, and the subsequent compile a list that at the very least did not count the tightening of telecommunications freedoms. The same body twice. images are accompanied by violent audio clips from Relying on information from NGOs, she identi- police frequencies in Mexico. fied 2,487 names of the dead, a list she admits is As the Mexican media has grown more and more incomplete — as any list would be, considering the silent about narco violence, ordinary citizens have ease with which a body can disappear in the vast stepped in to fill the void, sharing their experiences Southwestern deserts. Sánchez’s list, like “2487” as on social media of shootouts and police-narco con- a whole, has not grown or changed since 2006. In frontations. This sort of informal citizen journalism 2014, the International Organization for Migration provides the audio content for “Unnecessary Force,” estimated that nearly 6,000 migrants had died cross- the piece that won the Biennial of the Frontiers last ing the U.S.-Mexico border since the start of the 21st spring. The installation is currently in transit to century, with perhaps 447 dead in the previous year Mexico City, where it will be viewable soon. alone. This one border has accounted for perhaps Sánchez’s multi-channel audio installation entitled “2487” In this work, another sound installation, Sánchez 15 percent of all immigration deaths in the world in has recorded the names of eschews traditional wall speakers for an array of 74 this century, according to the group, though recent 2,487 of an estimated 6,000 people who have died while automatic-weapon-shaped audio players, mounted developments in Europe suggest that what has been trying to cross the U.S.- as if in a police or paramilitary arsenal. Each weapon/ a disproportionately local story may be going global. Mexico border since the start of the millennium. The piece speaker is loaded with a unique audio clip, gathered Sánchez has been struck by the different reactions was originally commissioned from YouTube, featuring a citizen-recorded episode she’s witnessed among San Antonio museum-goers by Artpace San Antonio. PHOTO BY TODD JOHNSON of violence. Each audio clip plays only when its gun’s as they encounter “Diaspora I/II.” Non-Hispanic COURTESY ARTPACE SAN ANTONIO trigger is pulled. As in the current Mexican news Texans reported feeling touched emotionally, often

32 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG crying, overwhelmed by the rhythmic insistence of of the Mexican-American underclass in the United Sánchez’s voice or the relatable, quotidian details States; the disenfranchisement from the Mexican of the found-object sculpture. On the other hand, political system of Mexicans living abroad; and, most “Mexican Americans would go and look at the book consequentially for her practice, the eagerness with to see if their family name is there,” Sánchez says. which U.S.-born Mexican-American artists speak “It’s like the Vietnam Wall. ‘Oh look, an Alvarez is out about politics, in contrast to her more reticent there, my family.’” Mexican peers. The second section of “Diaspora I/II,” titled Looking at her native country from across the “riverbank,” features an arrangement of objects border, Sánchez felt provoked to unpack some Sánchez found on a series of trips to the border near thorny problems, asking questions that native Laredo in 2006. Probably all of these artifacts, from Mexicans sometimes fear to ask. “Being here in toothbrushes and plastic garbage bags to soft drink Texas, for the first time I was able to see Mexico with bottles and countless articles of underwear, belonged another set of eyes,” she says. “The time that I spent to people who survived the crossing. here in San Antonio reflecting about these kinds of Sánchez collected them from a small Rio Grande- issues was very important in my career, because I adjacent property that, while private, is within range made this shift toward more social themes, social of Border Patrol motion sensors. The artist herself justice-related.” This process first came to fruition was confronted by Border Patrol while making her during her 2006 residency at Artpace, culminating collections. “That means that as soon as these guys in “Diaspora I/II.” Now that approach informs all get out of the water, there’s really little time before of her work, up to and including the award-winning Border Patrol shows up and says, ‘What are you “Unnecessary Force,” and her “Detritus” project in doing here?’” Sánchez says. Migrants cross in clothes Houston. they intend to muddy up and discard immediately, Looking ahead, Sánchez hopes to keep a foothold she explains. They carry better, dry clothes in gar- in both countries. “For me, the ideal would be to be bage bags on their backs. Once they’ve crossed, they here and there, going back and forth,” Sánchez says dry off, change into these clothes and aim to quickly of her two homes. “I haven’t found a way of doing blend into the general population. it. I really feel, I don’t want to say inspired, because Sánchez stresses that river crossings and border I don’t like that word, but each time I visit I think I deaths were not part of her personal immigration should come and do a project. I’m always thinking experience. She moved to San Antonio with her then- [about] what I’m going to do. I don’t want to lose this husband, an American, after earning her Ph.D. in other lens. Even if I’m in Mexico, the lens that I have Barcelona. But making a new life in Texas compelled is still the one that I got here.” a series of revelations about both her home coun- Michael Agresta, who lives in Austin, has written “Detritus” at Houston’s She try and her compatriots immersed in the American about books, TV, movies and technology for Slate, the Works Flexible. immigrant experience: the fear and powerlessness Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. COURTESY LUZ MARIA SÁNCHEZ

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 33 FILM U.S. Fuel in a Mexican Conflagration by Josh Rosenblatt

hen news broke in July that it “an excuse to prosecute people who are undesir- Mexican drug lord Joaquín able for other reasons.” Morales and Hagelsieb, on “El Chapo” Guzmán had the other hand, somehow manage to maintain hope escaped from a maximum- in the face of overwhelming hopelessness. Their sto- security federal prison in ries would probably be inspirational if their efforts Almoloya de Juárez, Mexi- didn’t seem so futile. cans were barely surprised. According to Mexican media figures, tens of thou- In the United States we may expect our captured sands of people, among them thousands of innocent gangW leaders to stay captured, but in Mexico, where civilians, have been disappeared by the cartels and an ultra-violent drug war has been raging for years, the government since 2007, many raped, hanged, citizens resigned themselves years ago to government beheaded, chopped up and never seen again, not collusion with criminals. They know that drug lords even as corpses. Yet Morales, taking her life into like El Chapo, called the “most powerful drug traf- her hands, keeps advocating for their families and ficker in the world” by the U.S. Treasury Department, demanding answers from officials who have zero have teams of police officers and government officials interest in digging up mass graves or going in search of “narco-kitchens,” where bodies are burned to prevent discovery and identification, lest their own complicity come to light. Morales is searching for justice in the face of fear, violence, corruption and Mexicans’ complete lack of trust in their leaders and institutions. Hagelsieb, meanwhile, fights the war with more conventional means — guns and raids and investiga- tions and prosecutions — but his hope doesn’t have the same religious glow as Morales’. It’s still there, but time and overwhelming circumstance have con- spired to wipe away some of its luster. When a ranking member of the Department of Homeland Security in El Paso admits on film that he and his department and everyone fighting the drug war are just “pawns It was the United States that trained the future in the game,” you know things have reached cataclys- mic levels of despair. members of the Zetas, Mexican military soldiers And how could they not? We on this side of the bor- der love to fool ourselves into thinking that Mexico’s who switched to the side of the cartels in the late drug trafficking problems have nothing to do with us. But if Kingdom of Shadows makes anything clear, it’s 1990s before becoming a cartel themselves. the pathological delusion fueling that belief. After all, it’s the United States that supplies the greatest in their pockets. As a result, a deep and profound sense demand for Mexico’s cocaine, heroin and marijuana; of resignation and sadness seems to have taken up it’s the United States that floods Mexico with guns residence there. (to the tune of 2,000 a day); it’s the United States It’s the same sadness that permeates Kingdom of that insists on treating a public-health crisis like Shadows, writer/director Bernardo Ruiz’s excellent it’s a war, even decades after that approach has been new documentary about the devastation wrought by exposed as a tragic failure. It was even the United the Mexican drug war. To put a human face on what States that trained the future members of the Zetas, has become an inhuman tragedy, Ruiz follows three Mexican military soldiers who switched to the side of people through the bloody maze: Sister Consuelo the cartels in the late 1990s before becoming a car- Morales, a nun in the ravaged city of Monterrey tel themselves — one which, perhaps more than any who has become an advocate for families of civilians other, is responsible for Mexico’s current nightmare. disappeared by the cartels and corrupt law enforce- Not for the faint of heart, Kingdom of Shadows, ment officials; Texas rancher Don Henry Ford Jr., which will be screened over three nights this month who smuggled marijuana across the border in the in Austin, San Antonio and Dallas, is a disheart- 1980s, before the drug trade became an uncontrol- ening trip down the rabbit hole of a failed state, lable bloodbath; and Oscar Hagelsieb, a Department where money and corruption and terror have joined of Homeland Security anti-narcotics officer (and son forces to break the hearts of the Mexican people. of an undocumented Mexican worker living in South Meanwhile, we sit, safe and sound on our side of the Texas) who spent years infiltrating Mexico’s most border, shaking our heads, wagging our fingers, doing violent cartels as an undercover agent. our drugs, and wondering why our neighbors can’t

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF Ford, who watched his children grow up from jail, get their act together. PARTICIPANT MEDIA seems resigned to the futility of the drug war, calling Josh Rosenblatt lives and writes in New York City.

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Sandra Cisneros’ newest book, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, is a collection of essays about the people and things that held unusual significance for her — huipiles, paintings, brujas, bright colors, flowers, fellow writers — and therefore became part of her various homes. The book spans the years from 1984 to 2014, when she lived in, among other places, a shared apartment in Provincetown and a cottage on the Greek island of Hydra. The essay excerpted here is about her violet house in San Antonio.

f the universe is a cloth, then all humanity “Why are our Mexican colors okay for our city’s is interwoven with different-colored threads. Fiesta, but not for our own houses?” a local radio Pull one string, and the whole cloth comes deejay asks his listeners. undone. That is why I believe in Destiny. Not The Mexican architect Luis Barragán has said that the “destiny” of European origin. But la Div- the sky is the true facade of a house. I moved here ina Providencia de las Américas. Make the from the Midwest, yet felt I’d come home. Light, sign of the cross and kiss your thumb. Each the transparent light of Mexico. Clouds so white it person who comes into your life affects your destino, hurts to look at them, like linen puffed and drying Iand you affect theirs. on a clothesline. Sky and clouds don’t need papers to A friend of mine went to Mexico and was so over- cross the border. At twilight, with whelmed by a vendor’s wares, she couldn’t make When I lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, up her mind. The colors made her dizzy, drove her a native told me houses are painted to match the the clouds crazy. Exasperated, she finally sky. If this is true worldwide, appealed to the shopkeeper. then I was raised in Chicago aflame and the “Which colors go well together, EXCERPTED FROM neighborhoods where build- do you think?” “Señora,” he A HOUSE OF MY OWN: ings are the color of bad sun setting said gently, as if he were talk- STORIES FROM MY LIFE weather. Tundra ice, tornado ing to a child, “let me teach you By Sandra Cisneros pewter, tempest gray, and behind it, my something. All colors go well KNOPF do-not-go-gently-into-that- together.” 400 PAGES; $28.95 blizzard white. house sizzles Color is a language. When I painted my home in San I moved to San Antonio, I Antonio the colors of my Mex- and sparkles, assumed everyone here was bilingual, but when ican memories. I chose strong colors, colores fuertes, I painted my Victorian house in the historic King because the light is fuerte. I wanted something sooth- looks absolutely William neighborhood a twilight shade of blue- ing that would draw together earth and sky, and violet, the Historic and Design Review Commission nourish it — jacaranda violet with turquoise trim. At gorgeous. raised a red flag. They wanted me to choose from an twilight, with the clouds aflame and the sun setting approved palette of colonial colors that included behind it, my house sizzles and sparkles, looks abso- To me. Surrey beige, Sevres blue, Hawthorne green, Fron- lutely gorgeous. To me. tier Days brown, and Plymouth Rock gray — colores Perhaps all houses are drawn from nostalgia. A tristes in my opinion, and ugly. local architect claims the Alamo doors remember blue To some, my “Purple House” needs no transla- paint. The San Antonio missions had elaborate designs tion. Carmen Caballero’s third-grade class at Ball imitating tiles inside and out. Even the building that Elementary, San Antonio, wrote me letters of sup- now houses the San Antonio Conservation Society port. “In my opinion,” one little girl wrote in formal sported a joyful hue of pink stucco before O’Neil Ford Spanish, “you should leave your house purple “restored” San Antonio to fashionably acceptable because San Antonio was once Mexico.” Memories white. History, after all, is layer upon layer of stories. are nudged awake. An old man selling paletas from What one considers history depends on who is telling a pushcart remembers. “Of course there were pur- the story and what story they consider telling. ple houses, right here in La Villita,” he says, citing a To some, my periwinkle home screams rascuache, neighborhood a few blocks from my home. “There the term for making something from readily avail- were houses of many colors when I was young: fresa, able materials. An old tire transformed into a planter. limón, sandia, lima . . .” He names colors as if he were A shed patched with hubcaps. A toy airplane made naming flavors from his ice cream stock. from a beer can. Poverty is the mother of invention. “Vibrant — it gives energy!” A blond jogger shouts Once, when I was little, my mother pasted a travel her approval without stopping. poster in our kitchen with Karo corn syrup because

36 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG we didn’t have glue. Now, that’s what I call rascuache. Colores alegres, happy colors, as opposed to sad colors. Colores fuertes opposed to weak. Colors that look, as my mother would say, like they were boiled for too long. Chillante, literally screaming. Vibrant colors, sensuous, intense, violent, frightening, pas- sionate. Is that blue beautiful because it reminds you of Tiffany’s, or the Blessed Virgin Mary? Is it an Hermès orange, or a Jarritos soft drink orange? It all depends on your memory. The grand dame of Mexican letters, Elena Ponia- towska, says that in Mexico “the people set the colors to fight like roosters: all colors are enemies, andin the end the winner of the battle is art itself, because opposites attract each other and end up embracing.” The border is locked in a passionate embrace of North and South, of desire and rage, and from this coupling a new culture has erupted. I was told that my house was “not appropriate to history,” and that the issue was “not about taste” but about “historical context.” But my point is this: Whose history? Mexico. The local Southwest version waters it down to Mexicans love color so much, everything is awash sorbet, perhaps because the real thing is too strong for Mexicans love with it, including themselves. Long before punk the palettes and palates of the timid. rockers, pre-Columbian women dyed their hair Although Mayan blue pigment has defied 1,400 color so much, green, yellow, and red. Even today the Nahua women years of sun and is still as intense as ever, the glory of of Tetelcingo, Morelos, a town known for its witch- my morning glory house has already faded, settling everything is craft, dye their hair green. Maybe, like punk rockers, to the soft color of a chambray workshirt, a disap- to make themselves more powerful. pointment to the curious searching for the Barney awash with Mexicans have such faith in color, if you visit the purple of their imagination. markets at the end of the year, you’ll see mobs rush- Two years after the original request for permission, it, including ing to buy red or yellow underwear before midnight. the wise urban planning director found the Solomonic If it’s money you want in the incoming year, make solution: submit the colors the house had faded to themselves. sure you’re wearing yellow underwear at midnight. since the original paint job, and, lo and behold, the But if it’s love you’re after, remember to wear red. faded colors were deemed “historically accurate.” Long before And if you’re especially greedy and desire both, My house is still the most intense house on the you’re condemned like me to welcome the new year block, but it looks un poco triste to me now. Next time punk rockers, in two pairs of chones. I’d like to try a rosa Mexicano, a color historically Color is a story. An inheritance. Were the San documented in my neighborhood, and on the historic pre-Columbian Antonio missions rascuache because they imitated king’s row of showcase mansions. the elaborate Moorish tiles they could not afford? Destiny works in strange ways. women dyed Nobody wants to live like they’re poor, not even the When I imagine la Divina Providencia, I think of poor. The poor prefer to live like kings. That’s why una indigena weaving bare-breasted in the comfort their hair they paint their houses with the only wealth they of her courtyard, a back-strap loom tied to a tree. have — spirit. As the Mexican saying goes, “It’s no She is sitting on the ground upon a woven petate, green, yellow, disgrace to be pobre, but it’s very inconvenient.” carefully separating the threads from their groups, Mango yellow, papaya orange, cobalt blue. When distributing them evenly with the aid of a maguey and red. colors arrive from “the nobodies who don’t create art, spine, threads pulled into a tight V with her big toe. but handicrafts, who don’t have culture, but folklore,” Or she is seated on a low stool, legs shamelessly as Eduardo Galeano sardonically says of the poor, they akimbo, cotton skirt gathered and tucked under her don’t count, they’re not valuable until a Rockefeller or crotch. Yes, this is how I like to think of her. a Luis Barragán borrows them and introduces them La Divina Providencia is mapping the motion of into the homes of the rich and gives them status. our lives like moon and sun across the thirteen layers Recent research on the distressed colors popularly of sky and nine of night, weaving a design larger than known as the “Santa Fe look” confirms that in their time our lives, too intricate for the eye to follow, but every the colors were much brighter than we know them. The thread woven with clarity, purpose, and pattern. tones we think of as authentic are actually stronger col- First published in House & Garden and reprinted with Sandra Cisneros’ house in San Antonio. ors that have faded with age and weather. Originally, permission from Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New PHOTO BY RICK HUNTER FOR THE the hues were as intense as the contemporary colors of York City, and Lamy, New Mexico. All rights reserved. SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 37 ANAHUAC POSTCARDS

Epitaph for an Alligator With its display of mangled carcasses, is Gatorfest really the best way to honor the reptile? by Asher Elbein

ven dead, the alligator looked Mark Porter, the stout, silver-goateed owner of huge. It lay in the back of Larry Porter’s Processing & Gator Farm, looked the body Lawrence’s trailer, a leviathan, black over with professional interest. “Now that’s a $300 armor pitted, serrated tail curled. gator,” he said. As Lawrence got out of the truck, Por- But for its tightly shut eyes — and the ter passed him the entry paperwork for the roundup wet, red bullet hole bored through its and shook his hand. “I think that one might win.” skull — it might have been alive. As Visitors appeared on the festival bleachers, chil- The Little Gator Queen, Kenzie Taylor, who beat volunteers watched, Lawrence pulled his truck down dren pressing wide-eyed against the fence that out the competition Ethe gravel drive, past small alligator carcasses on the separated them from the alligator. Young men moved in the 2015 Gatorfest Pageant, poses for grass margin, and parked beneath the electric winch. aside the small carcasses. Others fastened a harness photos while sitting on On the other side of the chain-link fence an air horn around the leviathan’s neck. Humming, the electric top of a dead alligator. PHOTO BY LESLIE blared, alerting visitors at the 2015 Texas Gatorfest winch hauled the alligator up, foot by foot, the body BOORHEM-STEPHENSON that a new carcass had been brought to the roundup. rearing into the air like a dead dragon. The jaws

38 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG lolled open to expose long yellow fangs, bloody water Texas, the American alligator most commonly occurs dribbling down its neck to spatter on the pebbles. in Jefferson, Chambers and Orange counties, where “He been around for a minute,” Michael Moore the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) said, grinning. A cheerful older man in a volunteer estimates the combined population at 283,263 out of shirt, he leaned against the winch pole, casually hold- about 500,000 statewide. It is also the least aggres- By steering ing the control button. He pointed at the bulbous sive of its family; despite its numbers, attacks on skin folds hanging from the alligator’s neck. “Look at humans are vanishingly rare. Deadly aggression in away from the that! Maybe 40, maybe 50 years old. An old man.” alligators is so exceptional that in July the Houston Meat sizzled on a nearby grill. The sun beat down. Chronicle reported the state’s first human fatality in popular image The volunteers lowered the alligator back to the 200 years: an intoxicated 28-year-old in Orange, who ground, stretched it out, and measured it. A whoop shouted “Fuck that alligator,” prior to jumping into of a monster went up from the crowd: 12 feet 7 inches, the largest kill the water with an 11-footer. yet. Working quickly, the volunteers hauled the carcass In fact, alligators are considerably more sophis- lurking in back up onto Lawrence’s trailer. He drove away smil- ticated than their bloodthirsty reputation suggests. ing. In addition to the money he made selling his catch It’s true that adults are powerful predators, happily black swamps, to Porter, he’d won the roundup’s hourly $100 prize for devouring anything that swims, runs or flies across biggest catch, and stood a good chance of winning the their path. (On occasion, they also devour fruit.) Gatorfest $1,000 prize for the longest alligator of the event. They are also one of the few animals known to hunt More pickup trucks had lined up on the gravel with tools. A 2013 paper by behavioral ecologist has instead path, their beds stuffed with dead alligators. The vol- Vladimir Dinets recorded alligators lurking beneath unteers swarmed to the first of them, took hold of an heron rookeries during nesting season, bodies reduced the alligator carcass and got to work for the next hourly submerged, sticks balancing on their noses. Birds competition. that flew down to retrieve the sticks for their nests alligator to a The Great Texas Alligator Roundup is one of received a nasty shock. the most popular events at the Texas Gatorfest, an Alligators have a softer side as well. Female alliga- commodity, annual festival that lures thousands of people to the tors construct large nest mounds, which they guard small town of Anahuac, proclaimed the Alligator until their eggs hatch, then break open to free the a symbol Capital of Texas by the Texas Legislature in 1989. For young inside. Sometimes they guard their offspring for a few days in September, they come for the country months. In general, alligators live life at a slow tempo, of nature music blasting off the main stage, for the barbecue, passing the years according to strict seasonal rhythms: the rides and the vendors. But most of all, they come dormant in winter, territorial battles and courtship conquered and for the alligators — adults and hatchlings, alive and in the spring, laying and protecting their nests in the dead, whole and cooked. The event touts itself as a summer. Alligators live for about 35 to 50 years in the turned into celebration of the alligator in all its forms, where wild. Their growth slows, but never stops. According to hunting trophies rub shoulders with education and TPWD records, the biggest recorded alligator killed in a sideshow cooking. It’s a spectacle that harks back to the days Texas was a 14-foot bull from Jackson County. Such an before unregulated hunting drove the alligators to animal was likely 50 years old. attraction. the edge of extinction, before conservation efforts One factor in that long lifespan nearly proved the brought them back from the brink. species’ undoing. Alligator hides are studded with All of which makes Anahuac the perfect labora- bony plates called osteoderms, which protect them tory for a particularly thorny question: Are events from attack. Tanned properly, however, the skin like Gatorfest the best way to excite people about the makes a fine, supple leather. In the early 19th century, Texas alligator? a hunger for gator leather grew across the country, leading to intense hunting. Hides went toward Anahuac lies an hour east of Houston along I-10, on boots, belts and saddles. According to the Louisiana a vast swath of swampy floodplain cut by miles of Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, alligator fat fields, low marshes and bayous. Serving as the seat for greased the wheels of cotton gins and steam engines. Chambers County, with a history dating to the Texas The industrialization of the leather trade in the Revolution, Anahuac trades on the ecological bounty late 1800s further fueled the boom. Hunters took of the marsh, drawing in sportsmen and birders. alligators indiscriminately, including pregnant and What it really advertises itself with, however, are its nesting females. Habitat destruction exerted a harsh alligators. pressure of its own; forests were cut back, marshes Growing 13 feet or longer, with jaws that can snap drained and filled for pasture. By the 1950s, alligator shut with 300 pounds of force, the American alligator populations had plummeted so low that biologists retains a folkloric menace, a primordial relic explod- feared the species was damaged beyond repair. ing from black waters to pull down unwary prey. It is In 1967, the alligator was formally recognized as a the most common of North American crocodilians, federally endangered species. In 1969, Texas likewise with a historic range blanketing the Southeast. In placed them under strict protection. Eventually

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 39 the alligator became one of America’s conservation Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge. At the far end of success stories. They were removed from the the tent, a large tank was managed by Cooper and a endangered species list in 1987, and managing them few volunteers, who held out young, squirming gators fell to the states. to interested visitors. A 5-foot alligator hissed and In Texas, that meant Amos Cooper. A lean, laconic splashed from inside a small, fenced-in kiddie pool. man, Cooper has been supervising TPWD’s alliga- SUVs and pickup trucks drove down the gravel tor program since 1986, keeping track of alligator drive into the roundup staging area, disgorging farmers, landowners and hunters, both amateur and camo-clad men, local families and kids in fluorescent professional. Alligators are still protected under the T-shirts and sunglasses. The alligators they brought Convention on International Trade in Endangered ranged widely in size, but each bore a neat bullet hole Species of Wild Flora and Fauna, or CITES, which through the skull. The winch hummed, hauling the regulates the shipment carcasses up for the crowd. At one point the winners of threatened animals. of the 2015 Gatorfest Pageant posed with a hanging In order to sell a gator carcass, gingerly turning the gaping cloaca away for processing, Cooper from the cameras before igniting kilowatt smiles. said, you need a CITES Underneath the smell of cooking grease came the tag attached to its hide. wafting odor of reptilian musk and spoiled meat. TPWD issued only 2,200 We sat at the covered picnic tables with Porter this season, some of and the volunteers, watching the hunters roll in. In which went to landown- between operating the winch, Moore told us how ers after an assessment gators sometimes steal the catch off his line when he’s of their property and a fishing, and how nicking yourself on alligator teeth nest survey. Landowners can get the bacteria in your blood, make you lose a can harvest a certain finger. Moore doesn’t hunt alligators anymore, but number of the alligators he remembers the process. After getting permission on their land, either by themselves or by selling the to hunt on a landowner’s property, you scout for a Humming, tags to individuals, who can then hunt alligators on the likely looking alligator, hang a chicken from a pole, property. It’s illegal to hunt alligators on public land or and wait. “You want a little gator, you put the bait the electric take them off of it. down low,” he said. “You want to catch a big gator, Poaching is always a problem, Cooper said, but you put the bait up high. They use those big tails to winch hauled the tags help: You can’t do much without a CITES get up out the water. ... Once they swallow it, they go tag. The real issue is that hunters inevitably want down.” Then you and your friends haul the hooked the alligator the biggest alligators; according to Porter, the cur- alligator up onto the bank and shoot it between the rent market price for an alligator is $25 per foot, and eyes. Generally, the alligator is killed immediately. up, foot by a 12-foot bull goes for about $300. But the biggest Generally, but not always. As we spoke, a truck alligators, all of which are old males, are also rare rolled in with two 6-foot alligators in the back. One foot, the body and important for the ecosystem, Cooper said. The was completely still, its skull stove in by the gunshot. bulls fight and devour smaller males they -encoun But when the volunteers hauled the other out of the rearing into ter during the breeding season. As a result, smaller truck bed, it began thrashing. adults constantly push into unclaimed territories, Everyone froze. A volunteer shook his head. the air like a which keeps the population comfortably spread out. “They’re supposed to dispatch ’em before they come Without big males, the number of 3- to 5-foot alliga- in here.” dead dragon. tors explodes. “Could just be nerves,” one of the others said. But people don’t care about small alligators. They “It’s a reptile,” Porter said. “They do wiggle for a want the big ones. And that’s what the Alligator while.” Roundup aims to provide. The gator gave a particularly powerful wriggle, its claws digging into the truck bed. “Nope,” Moore said. The first Gatorfest took place in 1989, in Fort Ana- “That’s alive.” huac Park. According to the Anahuac Chamber of A couple of men climbed into the truck, piling Commerce, the event attracted 14,000 people and onto the back of the thrashing alligator, holding it stayed open a single Saturday. It’s grown consider- down. Another man brandished a knife and drove it ably since then, and with the expansion, the origi- between the soft plates of the skull. The body kept nal focus on alligators has loosened. Carnival rides moving, tail banging against the plastic bed. The man — swinging spaceships, spinning teacups, mechani- with the knife shoved the blade through the back of cal bulls — crowded the park when I arrived with a the skull, working it back and forth. Blood gleamed photographer. Country music blared, and circus per- harsh and red in the sun. Then the gator went still formers wandered the walk, shadowed by two people and the men carried it out onto the grass to be mea- dressed as folksy reptiles. sured with the rest. The first sign of real alligators came with the food As the hours passed, more hunters sold their kills stands. “Put our balls in your mouth!” declared one to Porter. He makes a decent amount of money off creative notice hanging above sizzling lumps of white of alligators these days. Not only is he a landowner meat. Others simply read “gator on a stick.” Nearby with a spread of prime habitat, he’s also one of three sat the education tent, packed with tables manned alligator buyers in Texas, and the main one for by TPWD officials and park staff from the nearby Anahuac. According to his daughter Kristi, who runs

40 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG the business with him, Porter uses “every part of the animal but the growl.” Hides are sold to the tanners, meat to local buyers, fat to the soap makers, bones for medical research. “We even use the feet,” Porter said. “A man takes those. Builds backscratchers out of ’em.” Porter stumbled into the business through hap- penstance. For 30 years he worked in a chemical plant near Baytown and spent all his free time in the swamps, moonlighting as a fur trapper. After the fur market went bust and alligators became legal game, he began hunting them for sport and selling the car- casses. Then a gator buyer overpaid him by $940, and when informed of the mistake, told him to go ahead and keep it. That lit a fire under Porter. How much were they making, he recalled thinking, to be able to just give away $940? Straight away, he opened up an operation of his own. Porter’s Processing was born at the 1991 Gatorfest. That year they got 600 carcasses in a day. “My little processing plant that I’d started wasn’t much bigger than a trailer,” he said. “I couldn’t handle it. I had to send ’em to Louisiana.” He stuck with it, expanding the operation, even briefly trying his hand at alligator farming. Last year, they processed 1,200 gators with- out a problem. This season, he ended up processing about 800. Most of the processing happens during the 20-day hunting season, a year’s worth of alliga- tors wedged into less than a month. Alligators genuinely interest Porter, and he pep- pered our conversation with stories about their hunting behavior and intelligence. But he has little time for romanticism. Anahuac, he pointed out, is poor, and alligators provide a nice revenue stream. “People like me who are in the business, we want to see alligators here for a long time,” he said. “I could have taken 300 this year… I took five. My area was devastated during Hurricane Ike, we let them build back. Most of my hunters and the people I deal with want their habitat to maintain a population of alli- gators so they’ll have an income coming off of it for And while it is true that an alligator occasionally years. It’s a good little extra income for people.” snatches somebody’s pet, most of the time they The roundup’s grand prize went to E.J. King, who aren’t bothering anybody. “Some people will see a brought in a bull 12 feet 8 inches long. Lawrence’s kill 6-footer just swimming up the bayou, and they want had been beaten by an inch. E.J. King got the $1,000 to call and say, ‘Oh, I’m afraid for my dog,’” Cooper prize, plus $300 for selling his alligator to Porter. The said. “Well, no. He’s in the bayou, doing what he’s alligator got processed. supposed to do. We aren’t going to remove him for you. Even if they call and get a complaint number, This is the argument everyone makes regarding al- when the nuisance control hunter gets there, his ligator hunting: Economic incentives are what job is to re-evaluate the situation to see if it really is prompt people to keep alligators around. It’s a rea- a nuisance. But a lot of these landowners, they just sonable argument. According to Cooper, now that want that alligator gone, and they’ll say anything that the alligator population has reached a healthy num- it takes to get you out there to get it gone.” This is the ber, occasional harvesting is necessary to keep it kind of attitude Cooper wants to forestall, whether LEFT: Zachary Smith, 23, there, and communities might as well make some- through education or economic enticement. guides the body of a large male alligator as it is thing from it. Moreover, alligators are big predators, Sometimes, though, the problem is that people hoisted up to be measured and increasingly there’s friction between them and see alligators solely as a monetary opportunity. As a and displayed at the 2015 Gatorfest in Anahuac. the expanding human presence in their habitat. New result, despite training and certification processes, TOP: Alligator feet residents in alligator territory panic upon finding Cooper said, sometimes his nuisance control hunters backscratchers for sale at Porter’s Processing & Gator small males in their private ponds, backyards and — independent contractors, all — get overzealous. Farm retail tent. pools. People throw fish guts into the water, orin- “We can’t instill morals in ’em, but we try to get ’em BOTTOM: A volunteer holds a baby alligator in the tentionally feed alligators, causing them to lose their to do the right thing,” he said. “A lot of times [they’re] educational tent operated by innate wariness. TPWD is then called upon to deal scaring people, telling them, ‘Oh, this is an aggressive the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. with such “nuisance” alligators, Cooper said, either alligator and we need to get him out.’ Trying to drum PHOTOS BY LESLIE by removing or killing them. up business. Once we changed the nuisance control BOORHEM-STEPHENSON

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 41 program up to where we allowed the nuisance control whispering at the distant armored backs that sculled hunter to charge a fee, pretty much any alligator over silently through the duckweed. It was deceptively 6 feet was going to be a nuisance. And that’s where we easy to look at them and see only their physical size. need to get better as a department.” But they always look bigger alive. Now and then That tangle of appreciation and incentives feels like Asher Elbein is a journalist and fiction writer based in the fuel behind Gatorfest. Many people organizing Austin. we froze, and visiting the festival genuinely love alligators. And yet it was striking how little celebration of the animals pointing and themselves the festival contained. By steering away from the popular image of a monster lurking in black HOW FAR YOU ARE whispering swamps, Gatorfest has instead reduced the alligator to a commodity, a symbol of nature conquered and FROM ME at the distant turned into a sideshow attraction. Commodifying nature is nothing new. And per- by Eloísa Pérez-Lozano armored backs haps my unease is the discomfort of a city person, who doesn’t have to live around big predators or I’ve never had to swim through el río like you, that sculled make a living from them. But it was impossible to your clothes heavy with water and hope shake the feeling that Gatorfest was designed to draw as you wade carefully against the current. silently in city folk and present them with alligators as mas- cots, not as animals in their own right. I’ve never had to run like hell from la migra through the If nothing else, it leaves you hungry to see the Or have a sixth sense for avoiding trouble real thing. Before leaving, the photographer and Because even a whiff of it makes you sick. duckweed. I drove 20 miles south to the wide patchwork of marsh and pastureland contained in the Anahuac I’ve never had to mow terrazas in humid air, National Wildlife Refuge. We walked for hours amid the sun sapping your energy every minute, whispering grasses and salt breeze, staring into the your hand-me-downs soaking up sweat every hour. brown waters. Now and then we froze, pointing and I’ve never looked for chamba outside of Home Depot as you convert passing cars into meals for your family, hoping you look able enough to warrant a stop.

I’ve never toiled in el solazo of the orchard fields, rows of brown bark blurring up into green gardens as branches bend like your back, weary from your load.

I’ve only crossed over el río on foot or by car, answered the Border Patrol’s preguntas with confidence, Offered you limonada during your break from our lawn.

It’s why I always try to meet your eyes with dignity when I see you as I wonder how far you are from home and at what cost, stopping to think you might have picked the apple I’m eating.

Eloísa Pérez-Lozano, who grew up bilingual and bicultural in Houston, has published poetry in aaduna, Diverse Voices Quarterly, the Acentos Review, the Ofi Pressand several anthologies.

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42 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG ANDREAGRIMES THE GRIMES SCENE What’s Your Problem, Man? overnment by the people, for the people. That’s kind of the foundation of this whole democracy thing, isn’t it? The four or five of us who are able to bother with it shuffle on over to the polls every couple of years to elect some folks who are at least supposed to try not to burn this whole place down. Even in Texas, we at least deserve the expec- tation, however naive, that our elected officials aren’t actively trying to make things worse, right? ¶ And yet, To me, it looks three high-profile court cases filed against Texas in the as though last few years have me wondering. There’s our voter ID law, which then-Governor GRick Perry signed in 2011 after years of partisan wrangling. In August, a panel of the problem judges of the notoriously conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the the state has law, which requires voters to present certain kinds of parents are being denied access to their American-born photo identification with a name that corresponds to kids’ birth certificates. The state only accepts certain is with some their voter registration, has a “discriminatory effect,” documents as proof of identification, most of which particularly against non-white voters, and violates aren’t available to people without legal residency in the Texans. Texans parts of the 50-year-old Voting Rights Act. United States, which means Americans — babies and The mostly Republican lawmakers who backed toddlers though they may be — can’t get the most basic who aren’t voter ID said it was necessary to prevent voter fraud. documentation of their citizenship. But what voter fraud? In 2013, the Dallas Morning The state of Texas has countered, in court docu- wealthy white News surveyed nine years of voting irregularity cases ments filed this summer, that its ID requirements pursued by the Texas Attorney General’s Office and for vital records are necessary to prevent nonciti- folks or who found a grand total of four fraud cases that the law zens from fraudulently obtaining documents for might have prevented. A 2012 Arizona State University nefarious purposes. But the state has not been able to aren’t likely project looking into voter fraud nationally concluded produce any evidence that this kind of fraud occurs that ID-related voter fraud is “virtually non-existent.” with any regularity, or even at all. to be turning Voter ID is a solution in search of a problem. What we appear to have here is another solution in Then there’s Texas’ omnibus anti-abortion law, search of a problem. up to vote which Perry signed in 2013. It places strict require- Notably, all three of these “solutions” burden the ments on the way abortion-providing doctors and least privileged Texans, particularly women of color. in the next abortion clinics can operate, ostensibly to improve the All three place significant barriers to accessing some “health and safety” of Texans who get abortions. Two of the most fundamental rights enjoyed by American Republican federal cases against the law have wound their way up citizens: voting, personal privacy and citizenship itself. to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in none of the proceed- To me, it looks as though the problem the state primary. ings so far has the state been able to show that abortion has is with some Texans. Texans who aren’t wealthy is a dangerous medical procedure in need of regulation. white folks, or who aren’t likely to be turning up to To the contrary, mainstream medical research has vote in the next Republican primary. Texans whose shown that abortion is about as safe as a colonoscopy. very existence challenges the long institutional rule According to the state health department’s own data of the good ol’ boys’ club, who make government-by- — collected for the year 2013, before the law went handshake increasingly difficult to pull off. But if you into effect — there were zero deaths resulting from can keep ’em out of the voting booth, struggling to legal abortion, and less than 1 percent of more than raise families and tied up with unnecessary bureau- 63,000 induced pregnancy terminations resulted in cratic hassles, you probably can go a fair way toward any complications. staving off inevitable change. The Texas abortion law is a solution in search of a When taken together with Texas’ already abys- problem. mally low voter turnout rates, these three cases put in And now, families in South Texas have filed a federal stark relief the dismal, and perhaps deliberately engi- suit against the Department of State Health Services neered, state of Lone Star democracy: Government and its Vital Statistics Unit, alleging that undocumented by some people, for the people who look like them.

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 43 CHRISHOOKS LEFT HOOKS Texas Lawmakers Said Medicaid Has No Future — Then Set Out To Prove It hen Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick took to the mic on Texas Independence Day in March, he did so with the air of a man rallying his people before an alien invasion. “On March 2, 1836, a group of patriots gathered at Washington-on- the-Brazos to declare Texas’ independence as a nation standing on its own two feet,” he said defiantly. “That proud and independent spirit has animated the Texas character for the last 179 Honestly, is years.” But it was now under threat, he said. By immi- claims that they care about health care for the needy. gration?W By Jade Helm? Honestly, is there anyone less qualified to manage there anyone Patrick, flanked by a platoon of Republican senators, Medicaid than the Texas Legislature? had come to consider a much more potent threat Among the arguments Patrick, Schwertner and less qualified to the state’s liberty: Medicaid, the program that others make for state oversight of Medicaid is that provides life-sustaining health care to more than 4 waste and fraud diminish Texas’ ability to care for to manage million Texans. For many, Medicaid is the difference those who are truly needy, and that the state is best between getting treatment for diabetes and losing able to find and detect that fraud. Medicaid than a limb to amputation; between receiving physical And yet the Legislature’s cuts, by failing to dis- therapy and using a wheelchair; between a healthy tinguish between wasteful and necessary spending, the Texas pregnancy and a catastrophic one. treated the neediest as collateral damage. And in jus- But to Patrick and the Republicans in the Texas tifying deep cuts to therapy services, the Legislature Legislature? Senate, the program was an “unsustainable, irre- relied on background research that was riddled with sponsible” burden, a parasite on the state’s finances factual errors and faulty premises. at a time when money had to be found to pay for tax Worse, the Legislature’s shaky hand has contrib- cuts. Patrick and the chair of the Senate Commit- uted to the mounting uncertainty about Medicaid’s tee on Health and Human Services, Senator Charles future, even exacerbating the provider shortage Schwertner, R-Georgetown, were demanding that Schwertner emphasized in March. Dena Dupuie, who the federal government relinquish control of Medic- brought suit against the state on behalf of her special aid to the state. needs child, told the Observer in September that a Medicaid’s “long-term viability” was threatened, therapist who helped her adopted daughter cope with Schwertner warned, in part because of a “rapidly severe psychological trauma stopped taking Medicaid declining pool of health care providers.” If the feds even before the cuts went into effect. removed the “gold-plated handcuffs that stand in the Is there waste and fraud in Medicaid? Certainly. But way of common-sense, conservative reforms,” Schw- the state has not proved itself exceptionally competent ertner said, the state could “more effectively manage its here, either. Over a recent five-year period, Texas says Medicaid program and better serve its citizens.” it was wrongfully charged $823 million for orthodontic The feds declined to unlock the handcuffs. But care for kids who didn’t qualify under Medicaid guide- lawmakers succeeded in putting into practice at least lines. But in court, the state struggled to prove its case. one of their ideas. At the last minute, the budget bill Myriad lawsuits against the providers allegedly respon- was modified, partially at the behest of Schwertner sible for the fraud were settled this year for a pittance. himself, to lop $350 million from the Medicaid Acute On top of that, the state recently awarded a $110 million Care Therapy Program, which pays for therapy contract to a company promising to detect Medicaid services for severely disabled children, many of fraud — a company that was, itself, fraudulent. whom need the treatment simply to continue living. Few programs are as critical as Medicaid. Texas’ The backlash has been a dramatic story all summer, stewardship has been consistently ham-fisted, and and it now seems as if the cuts will be at least partially yet lawmakers want more control. Maybe the feds rolled back. But the saga calls into question lawmakers’ should click those handcuffs a little tighter.

44 | THE TEXAS OBSERVER WWW.TEXASOBSERVER.ORG EYE ON TEXAS Guillermo Hernandez

UNYIELDING TEXAS Devine resident Austin Ehlinger and his family took part in a January 2013 Guns Across America rally in Austin. The words underneath the assault rifle on Ehlinger’s banner — “Come and Take It” — were used during the Texas and American revolutions and immortalized on the iconic flag flown in the Battle of Gonzales in 1835.

See more photos from Eye on Texas at www.texasobserver.org/eyeontexas. CALL FOR ENTRIES: Seeking Texas-based documentary photography. Please send inquiries to [email protected].

NOVEMBER 2015 THE TEXAS OBSERVER | 45 DISPATCH FROM TXO WORLD HEADQUARTERS

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