Burden of War Women are twice as likely as men to have PTSD. You just don’t hear about it. BY Alex Hannaford

june | 2014 IN THIS ISSUE ON THE COVER: Illustration by Edel Rodriguez

Above: Crystal Bentley, who spent most of her childhood as a ward of the state, now advocates for improving foster care in Texas. Photo By Patrick Michels

18Fostering Neglect Foster care reforms are supposed to fix a flawed system. They could end up making things worse. by Emily DePrang and Beth Cortez-Neavel

Don’t Call Them Victims culture Women veterans are twice as likely Building a better brick in Mason as men to experience PTSD. Nobody by Ian Dille Observer 10 wants to talk about that. 26 by Alex Hannaford ONLINE Check out award-winning REGULARS 07 Big Beat 34 The Book Report 42 poem work by The 01 Dialogue Immigration reformers The compassionate Drift MOLLY National Political need to do it for imagination of by Christia 02 Journalism Prize Intelligence themselves Sarah Bird Madacsi Hoffman 06 state of Texas by Cindy Casares by Robert Leleux winners—chosen 08 Tyrant’s Foe 43 State of THE Media by a distinguished 09 Editorial 32 Film 36 Direct Quote Rick Perry throws good panel of judges 09 Ben Sargent’s Joe Lansdale’s genre- Buffalo soldiering in money after bad and announced at loon Star State bending novel Cold Balch Springs by Bill Minutaglio our annual prize in July jumps to the as told to Jen Reel dinner June 3—at big screen 44 Forrest for the Trees texasobserver.org by Josh Rosenblatt 38 postcards Getting frivolous with The truth is out there? Greg Abbott by Patrick Michels by Forrest Wilder 45 Eye on Texas by Sandy Carson A Journal of Free Voices since 1954

OBSERVER Volume 106, No. 6 dialogue Founding Editor Ronnie Dugger Liberal Ploy Revealed Editor Dave Mann

Managing Editor Brad Tyer So-called global warming is just a secret ploy by wacko tree-huggers to make Associate editor Forrest Wilder America energy-independent, clean our air and water, improve the fuel effi- Multimedia Editor Jen Reel st Web Editor Jonathan McNamara ciency of our vehicles, kick-start 21 -century industries, and make our cities PoliticS WRITER Christopher Hooks safer and more livable (“What Climate Change Means for Texas in 11 Charts,” staff writer Melissa del Bosque

Staff Writer Emily DePrang May 8, texasobserver.org). Don’t let them get away with it, right-wingers! (For Staff Writer Patrick Michels the educationally impaired, you might want to do some research on the differ- Publisher Emily Williams

CONTROLLEr Krissi Trumeter ence between weather and climate change.) Karey Cummins p o s t e d at texasobserver . o r g Membership Manager Jacqueline Galvan

Art Direction EmDash Poetry Editor Naomi Shihab Nye Who, Us Sue? A Good Rep COPY Editor David Duhr “Licensed to Kill” (May 1, texasobserver.org) is a Sad that Lon Burnam won’t be back in the House Contributing Writers cautionary tale about so-called tort reform and (“Lon Gone: An Ode to the Texas House’s Loneliest Lou Dubose, Saul Elbein, what happens in Republican-controlled states Liberal,” May 8, texasobserver.org). We need more Alex Hannaford, Carolyn where corporations have rights but citizens don’t. people like him to fight for the rest of us true believers. Jones, Steven G. Kellman, Robert Leleux, James Jack Hughes Lou Anne Savage McWilliams, Bill Minutaglio, p o s t e d at texasobserver . o r g p o s t e d at fa c e b o o k . c o m / texasobserver Priscila Mosqueda, Robyn Ross, Ellen Sweets

Contributing Photographers Alan Pogue, Matt Wright-Steel Bring Back the Bias Making the Scene The idea that a political journalist could report his What an excellent story (“Laid to Rest in Contributing Artists subject without becoming involved in it has always Huntsville,” March issue). Last year I spent several Michael Krone, Ben Sargent struck me as a bit weird (“Reviewing The Watchdog hours at Peckerwood Hill, trying to take it all in. interns That Didn’t Bite: The Financial Crisis and the Disap- There are surreal sights just about everywhere you Mikaela Rodriguez, Krystal Carr, Beth Bond pearance of Investigative Journalism,” March 27, texa- go in Huntsville, starting with the Walls Unit being sobserver.org). And anyway, even if one could, why right there in the heart of town, and Robyn Ross Texas Democracy Foundation Board would anyone want to read the resulting drivel? Bet- captures it all: the frat house, the busy street, the Carlton Carl, Melissa Jones, ter to have a Glenn Greenwald-type who says, look, numbered crosses and collapsed graves. I guess it is Susan Longley, Jim Marston, here are my biases, read while understanding them. redundant to point out the irony of the dignity and Mary Nell Mathis, Ronald Rapoport, Peter Ravella, Katie Ronald Pires respect extended to the dead here in Texas, where Smith, Vince LoVoi, Ronnie p o s t e d at texasobserver . o r g far too many people are warehoused in prisons for Dugger (emeritus) drug offenses, and the state continues the medieval Our mission practice of capital punishment. We will serve no group or party Jesse Sublett but will hew hard to the truth Dallas’ Charter as we find it and the right as p o s t e d at texasobserver . o r g we see it. We are dedicated Starter to the whole truth, to human hat happens in allas will spread ot for har values above all interests, to W D (“H C - the rights of humankind as the ter: Inside the Radical Play to Reinvent Dallas foundation of democracy. We Schools,” March 19, texasobserver.org). It will kill will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never public education, placing it in the hands of an un- will we overlook or misrepresent elected few. It is in the interest of all Texans to help the truth to serve the interests us stop them. The Texas GOP has had over 20 years to of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. do something with schools. Now the powerful few say Sound Off they can’t live under the system they helped to create? contact us 307 W. 7th St., Austin, Texas Diane Birdwell [email protected] 78701, (512) 477-0746 p o s t e d at texasobserver . o r g or comment on facebook.com/texasobserver and texasobserver.org june 2014 the te xas observer | 1 Political Intelligence

Border Dispatch In Search of Asylum On May 3, a group of 61 men, women and children the United States is the safer choice. walked across the Hidalgo International Bridge near But many never reach their destination. In McAllen to seek political asylum. At least 48 of the Mexico, Hondurans and other Central Americans immigrants were fleeing Honduras, which has the are often beaten, raped, kidnapped or even highest murder rate in the world. killed by police and organized crime members, READ more about conditions in Honduras The men, women and children who arrived in the especially while riding on top of the north-bound at txlo.com/hon Rio Grande Valley on that first Saturday in May had freight train known as “The Beast.” On April 15, been on an odyssey through Mexico that began in about 1,000 Central American migrants, Catholic mid-April. They were part of an exodus of Central priests, activists and reporters began a Viacrucis Americans, and Hondurans in particular, many of del Migrante—via crucis is Latin for “stations of whom are robbed, extorted and persecuted on the the cross”—marching from Mexico’s southern journey through Mexico to the U.S. border to Mexico City to protest the mistreatment Since a 2009 coup ousted democratically elected of Central American migrants. Along the way the Hundreds of Central President Manuel Zelaya, Honduras has unraveled. protest swelled to at least 1,500, with more Central American migrants walk through Chiapas, Mexico, The country of eight million now has the greatest American migrants joining after they had recently on their way to the U.S. income inequality in Latin America, and crime and been barred by the railway companies from riding on April 18. Many are now seeking asylum. violence have skyrocketed. An increasing number of The Beast north. The Mexican government also © Prometeo Lucero/Zuma Hondurans are fleeing; they believe the risky trip to began a massive roundup of Central American

2 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org Political Intelligence migrants, many of whom were beaten, arrested and many other components, the law mandates that busi- TRIVIATEXAS deported, according to reports in the Mexican press. ness owners let people use bathrooms matching the Is Rick Perry But instead of stopping at the capital, a core group gender they identify with and express rather than running in 2016? of about 400 protesters kept marching north into the the gender assigned them at birth. Woodfill zeroes When asked on state of Tamaulipas, which borders Texas and is one of in on this exclusively, claiming, “[t]here are many Meet the Press the most dangerous regions of Mexico. On May 2, they examples of men who have gained access to women’s recently about arrived on the outskirts of Reynosa, where gun battles bathrooms and other facilities because of ordinances running for were raging between the military and splinter groups like the Mayor’s,” then gives an example of a person president, Perry of the Gulf Cartel. The city is suffering its worst episode who committed sexual assault in a women’s bath- said Americans of violence since 2010, when the Zetas split from the room, apparently conflating the two actions. believe in Gulf Cartel. Most of the protestors fled for Mexico City San Antonio faced a similar bathroom-based “second the next day, but 61 migrants—the majority of them fracas in September when its City Council passed chances.” That Hondurans—chose to cross the Hidalgo International protections based on sexual orientation and gender may be, but Bridge to ask for asylum in the U.S. Their chances are identity. The difference is, San Antonio already had second chances slim; the U.S. only approves a small fraction of Central a non-discrimination ordinance and was merely are rare in American asylum claims. Last year, 70,658 Hondurans extending protections. Houston is the last major U.S. were deported from the United States and Mexico— city without any such law. presidential nearly twice the number of Hondurans deported in Despite opponents’ fixation on the gender-iden- politics. Perry 2011, said Aracely Romero, an advocate with the Center tity provision, few if any who testified against the failed to win a for Returned Migrant Services. ordinance at a late April City Council meeting sug- single primary or Carlos Spector, an El Paso immigration attorney gested stripping out LGBT protections. Instead, they caucus in 2012. who specializes in political asylum cases, has volun- asked to kill the law outright, saying those provisions Since 1960, how teered to help the asylum seekers. Spector says they that aren’t wrong or dangerous are unnecessary. many candidates have a good chance of winning because they’re part Woodfill’s letter quotes a pastor asking, “‘Mayor have failed to win of a political movement. “They’re fleeing authorized Parker, where is the discrimination? Why impose a a single primary crime—gangs in complicity with the state who are per- massive new set of onerous regulations on the pri- or caucus in secuting them,” he says. “This is one of the strongest vate sector for a fabricated problem?’” a presidential cases I’ve seen in a decade.” —Melissa del Bosque But the Greater Houston Partnership, the city’s race and then, most powerful business group, doesn’t appear to in a subsequent think the law is onerous. Its executive committee election, won the Non-discrimination Files voted unanimously to endorse the ordinance. And White House? civil rights advocates say the problem it addresses Equal Fights definitely isn’t fabricated. Even if it were, they note, When Houston Mayor Annise Parker recently the law would simply go unused. a. Two drafted the city’s first non-discrimination ordinance, Its mechanism is simple. People who believe they’ve b. One she was thorough. The ordinance, which the City been discriminated against would file a complaint c. None Council was expected to pass at the end of May, pro- with the city. The Office of the Inspector General d. Three hibits bias based on any of the following traits: sex, would investigate and offenders could be fined up to race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, familial $5,000. Churches and religious organizations would status, marital status, military status, religion, disabil- be exempt generally, and small businesses would be ity, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, or exempt from the employment provisions. genetic information. The federal government already prohibits But according to the Harris County Republican unequal treatment based on race, ethnicity, religion Party, that panoply of characteristics, and all the and sex, but a local ordinance would help people people it represents, boils down to just one group: who can’t hire a lawyer and file a federal lawsuit sexual predators. every time they’re denied housing or shut out of a In late April, Harris County Republican Party club. Fred Lewis, of the nonprofit civic engagement Chair Jared Woodfill sent supporters an email with group Texans Together, calls the law a “quick, the headline “Mayor Parker Pushing Sexual Predator effective remedy.” Protection Act!” He summed up the new law, which “Will it solve every problem?” he asks. “No. We live

would make discrimination in housing, employment in a world that frankly is fallen. But I do think it will glasses. new looking plus side, he does have sharp- have does he side, plus

n the the n O or public access to businesses a Class C misdemeanor, set a norm, and I do think it will be enforced, and I do presidency. the win to

as an “ordinance that provides an opportunity for think it will benefit people. We have people of every back come 2012 in did Perry

sexual predators to have access to our families.” hue and persuasion and background who live here. If as badly as out flamed who ever before has a candidate candidate a has before ever

Woodfill is referring to the inclusion of gender anyplace needs to have laws to prevent arbitrary dis- N R: E SW AN one. N c.

identity among protected characteristics. Among crimination, it’s here.” —Emily DePrang

june 2014 the te xas observer | 3 Annals of School Reform talk oF Texas The Next Crusade Mazel Tov! Edition For 20 years, Texans for Lawsuit Reform (TLR) has been protecting our hospitals and business leaders from meddling trial lawyers, convincing the Texas Legislature to cap damage awards and closing the courthouse doors to some potential plaintiffs. For “[Georgia] con- two decades, TLR has been wildly successful, per- haps the most successful special interest in Texas. Having conquered the civil justice system, TLR is gressional candi- moving on—to education. Texans for Education Reform launched midway through the 2013 legislative session, shares lobby- date Allan Levene ists, board members and a spokeswoman with TLR. (TLR president Dick Trabulsi, for example, sits on READ more about Texas’ top dark money the school reform group’s board.) They also share a contributors at few of the same deep-pocketed donors, who helped txlo.com/darkmoney is proposing to cut the education group raise nearly $1 million for its new political action committee; one-fifth of that money was distributed to candidates ahead of this the Gordian Knot year’s March primary. It might seem strange that Texas’ preeminent tort reform advocates have taken a keen interest of Middle East in public schools, of all things. But TLR’s move into education mirrors a nationwide trend over roughly the last decade: Advocacy groups and business lead- ers have spent big money trying to apply business peace by creating principles to schools, a particular brand of reform built around school choice and fewer job protec- tions for teachers. a second State of In the past few years, as other states tried bold school reform experiments, Texas—despite being a free-market laboratory in so many other ways—has Israel on the east- done little. But that could be changing fast. Texans for Education Reform emerged last year to make up for lost time and to shake schools from the status quo. “Most of the other interest groups ern coast of Texas, in this space weren’t advancing agendas; they were restricting bills,” Texans for Education Reform consultant Anthony Holm told The Texas Tribune which he would last year. The group dispatched 19 highly paid lob- byists to the Texas Capitol, pushing charter school expansion, online learning and state takeover of call New Israel.” low-performing schools. The group’s spokeswoman, Sherry Sylvester, — Jewish Journal, April 25 declined to discuss what the group will go after next session, offering only that it will advocate “research- proven reforms that empower parents, reinforce “New Israel can be the new local control and provide pathways for interven- promised land, where peace tion in chronically failing schools within a morally responsible timeline.” and prosperity can dominate, Whatever that means, Texans for Education Reform not risk, war and fear that will likely find itself in agreement with Democrats for Education Reform, which recently launched a chapter exists in the State of Israel in Texas. That group has already distinguished itself today and in the future. And as Texas’ No. 2 “dark money” spender in this year’s elections. Dark money is cash culled from undisclosed no, I’m not Moses II.” contributors. In a flurry this spring, Democrats for —Excerpt from Levene’s “New Israel” plan Education Reform dropped $114,000 in anonymous cash on phone banks and mailers supporting four candidates: El Paso Reps. Marisa Marquez and Naomi “It’s a land swap for peace.” Gonzalez; Ramon Romero, who upset longtime Fort —Levene’s “New Israel” plan Worth Rep. Lon Burnam in March; and Erika Beltran, a Teach for America alum who’s worked on school reform in Dallas, in a race for the State Board of Education.

4 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org Across the country, and now in Texas, this flavor and many indigent victims, we think in some ways the of school reform has been a bipartisan effort, happily order was backwards, focusing too much on the defen- blending progressive urges to aid poor communities’ dant’s interests and not giving enough attention to the troubled schools with the conservative promise of victims’ interests,” Cassell says. better, cheaper education with a little private sector The U.S. Department of Justice, which prosecuted know-how. It’s a potent combination that leaves little the case, wouldn’t comment on whether it intends to legislative muscle behind populist ideals like strong appeal, but sources say it likely won’t. neighborhood schools and teacher unionization. The Bill Miller, a retired Environmental Protection money behind school reform is party-blind, and it’s Agency attorney who worked on the Citgo convic- just starting to flow into Texas’ elections. tion, says if Citgo’s sentence goes unchallenged, it As Joe Williams, who heads Education Reform will send the message that some corporations are Now Advocacy, told the San Antonio Express-News in too big to punish simply because it’s too hard to April, “My hope is we’re talking two years from now determine how much they profited from commit- about being involved in a lot more than just a handful ting crimes. “It basically emasculates environmental of races in Texas.” —Patrick Michels crime prosecution in the United States completely,” he says. —Priscila Mosqueda

Environmental Crimes Unit Too Big to Punish After seven years of waiting, Corpus Christi pollution victims finally learned recently what restitu- tion they’ll receive from Citgo Petroleum Corp.: nothing. In late April, a federal district judge determined that residents of a neighborhood exposed to toxic chemicals from Citgo’s Corpus refinery weren’t due any compensation, including medical expenses or relocation costs. In 2007, a federal jury convicted Citgo of violating the Clean Air Act, a first for a major oil company. The company had illegally stored oil in two uncovered tanks, exposing nearby residents to toxic chemicals, including the carcinogen benzene. It took seven years for U.S. District Judge John D. Rainey to sentence the company, finally ruling in February that Citgo owed $2 million—a paltry sum next to the $1 billion prosecutors argued the company had earned from its illegal operation. Judge Rainey then denied victims any restitution, including funding to pay for annual cancer screenings and other diseases that could be linked to the Exceptional organic & cooperative coffee roasted to order in Austin. chemical exposures. he also rejected prosecutors’ requests for a fund to cover relocation costs, and another for victims’ future medical expenses, totaling $30 million in restitution for victims and $25 million for the government. Ironically, Rainey wrote in his decision that deter- mining how much victims are really owed would “unduly delay the sentencing process” and “outweighs the need to provide restitution to any victims.” The Citgo case is also noteworthy because it’s the first time victims of air pollution were recognized as victims of crime under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act and allowed to present oral testimony in court. Rainey had originally rejected victims’ request for that status, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Rainey to reconsider. He eventually granted more than 800 residents victim status, but in his lat- est ruling Rainey says Citgo’s operation of the tanks caused only short-term health problems. Paul Cassell, a University of Utah law professor and a former federal judge who is representing 20 of the victims in the case pro bono, says he is appealing the ruling. The judge unrealistically required indigent victims to present expensive expert testimony, he says. “In this situation, when you have a wealthy company june 2014 State of texaS: Child abuse in texas By Emily DEPrang anD BEth CortEz-nEavEl Child abuse deClined in Texas between 2011-2013, according to figures from Child Protective Services (CPS). Though abuse is down, the frequency with which we’re removing kids from their homes is significantly up, and the people making these decisions for the state are very inexperienced.

Number of child abuse or Neglect victims iN texas per 1,000 childreN

14.8 13.8 14.0 2011 2012 2013

perceNt of the time state removes childreN after aN iNvestigatioN

5.6% 6.3% 8.6% 2011 2012 2013

perceNt of cps employees who Work there Work there Leave 1 year 3 years each or less or less year 24% 53% 26%

6 | Source:the te Texasxas Department obser vofer Family and Protective Services wwwIllu.teSTraxTIasobseron by Joannav Wojtkowiaker.org State of texaS: Child abuse in texas By Emily DEPrang anD BEth CortEz-nEavEl Child abuse deClined in Texas between 2011-2013, according to figures from Child Protective Services (CPS). Though abuse is down, the frequency with which we’re removing kids from their homes is significantly up, and the people making these decisions for the state are very inexperienced. cindycasares big beat Number of child abuse or Neglect victims iN texas per 1,000 childreN Immigration Reform from the Ground Up

sk veterans of the civil rights movement and they’ll tell you that the plight of undocumented immigrants is not so different from what African-Americans experienced 50 years ago. Alabama interfaith leader Scott Douglas III 14.8 13.8 14.0 has provocatively called Hispanic immigrants “the new 2011 2012 2013 Negroes,” and Joseph A. Califano, who was a special assis- tant to Lyndon Johnson from 1965 to 1969, recently told me at the LBJ Library Civil Rights Summit that the current immigration policy is a “total violation of social justice,” perceNt of the time state removes childreN after aN iNvestigatioN meant to separate Hispanic families just as Jim Crow did to black families. AYet even as four U.S. presidents gathered at the of a massive, vocal group of people, politicians have no Maybe it’s summit to praise the bravery of the men and women reason to heed their demands. who fought for the rights of African-Americans in “History shows that without mass mobilization, time we the 1950s and 1960s, immigration reform remains Obama will be less likely to remember promises made,” stalled in Congress. wrote Chicago-based Labor Express Radio producer took it upon Americans who want to see some kind of immigration Jerry Mead-Lucero in 2009, after that year’s May Day reform often blame Republicans and President Obama march in Chicago attracted the lowest turnout since ourselves for the political gridlock. But perhaps “we the people” 2006. Mead-Lucero observed that, among other things, expect too much of our leaders. It took decades of advo- the election of President Obama had diminished the 5.6% 6.3% 8.6% to advance cacy to garner enough popular support so Congress could movement’s momentum: “The attitude is, we did our pass the civil rights bills. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and part in November, now let’s let Obama make good on 2011 2012 2013 the cause of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, among others, were the his promises and give him some space and time.” result of years of marches, activism, sit-ins and beatings. Civil rights activists had the same problem when civil rights for It’s becoming clear that elected leaders in Washington they helped elect President John F. Kennedy on his won’t pass immigration reform unless they’re forced to. platform of civil rights reform in 1960. Once elected, immigrants. So maybe it’s time we took it upon ourselves to advance JFK was afraid to commit to the Civil Rights Act for the cause of civil rights for immigrants. fear of alienating Southern Democrats. It took thou- perceNt of cps employees who For a brief moment, in 2006, when imminent danger sands of activists engaged in nonviolent protests to loomed in the form of a House bill that threatened to make the federal government enforce desegregation turn undocumented immigrants into felons, millions laws already on the books. marched through America’s cities. The bill died in the Tens of thousands of Americans were arrested, beaten Work there Work there Leave Senate, but the reform movement stalled out too. By and even killed for their beliefs. Martin Luther King Jr. 2009, 100 days after President Obama was sworn into was arrested 30 times during his activist career. When office, the number of May Day immigrants’ rights march- President Johnson finally passed the Civil Rights Act in 1 year 3 years each ers in Los Angeles had dwindled from an estimated 1964, he credited Dr. King and the incredible organiza- 500,000 in 2006 to 6,000 in six disjointed marches. It tion of activists for turning public sentiment in favor or less or less year was indicative of the lack of focus that has plagued the of reform. Dr. King went on to rally supporters for the immigration reform movement in recent years. Voting Rights Act of 1965, and was working to do the Since then, the most consistently vocal activists for same for the Fair Housing Act when he was assassinated. immigration reform have been the various groups of One week later, Johnson used the public’s outpouring of young people who would qualify for the DREAM Act sympathy to pressure Congress to vote it into law. if Congress passed it into law. Even among that group, Our civic duty doesn’t end on Election Day. For however, there are several factions, none of which a democratic society to work, the people must be 24% 53% 26% seem to be working together very well. And while a thoroughly engaged. It’s time we stopped waiting on small minority of American-born activists is lobbying Congress or the president. We need to build grassroots state and local politicians to discontinue participation support that will force our leaders to pass the immigra- in federal deportation programs, without the support tion reform we need.

Source: Texas Department of Family and Protective Services IlluSTraTIon by Joanna Wojtkowiak june 2014 the te xas observer | 7 Tyrant’sFOE

Saving lives in Brooks County n the summer of 2012, longtime community organizer Eddie Canales received a call for help from California. Rafael Hernandez—founder of The Desert Angels, a San Diego-based humanitarian search-and-rescue organization—told Canales he’d received several calls from immigrant families whose relatives had gone missing in South Texas’ rural Brooks County. “‘People are lost, they’ve disappeared. I’m getting all of these calls. Can you help me find out what’s going on there?’” Canales remem- bers Hernandez asking him. ¶ The 66-year-old Canales lives in Corpus Christi, just 80 miles from Brooks County, yet like most Texans he was unaware that hundreds of bodies of unidentified migrants had been found on the Icounty’s rugged ranchlands over the past decade. In 2012 the number of deaths began to climb. Violence and poverty in Central America and Mexico, and a crack- down on other corridors along the U.S.-Mexico border, had funneled even more migrants through Brooks County, 70 miles north of the Rio Grande. They must hike through the brush to avoid a effort to save lives. Canales, who subsists on his union Border Patrol checkpoint near the small town of pension and Social Security, is the sole employee. He Eddie Canales Falfurrias, in Brooks County. Smugglers drop off relies on his own money and donations to keep the established the South migrants south of the checkpoint, and they must doors open. At least three days a week, he makes Texas Human Rights walk north for several hours through scrub brush the hour-long drive from Corpus Christi to work in Center to aid migrants. and deep sand to escape detection by immigration the center, and he has big plans for the future. For agents. Many get lost or sick in the rugged terrain and the past year, Canales has been working with local perish from heat exposure and dehydration. In 2012, ranchers to put out water stations along the migrant 129 bodies were recovered from ranches in the area, routes to help prevent dehydration and save lives, and in 2013, 87 bodies were found. Many of them especially during the summer when the tempera- remain unidentified. ture soars above 100 degrees. He’s also working with “People are dying out there,” Canales says. “We a coalition of volunteers in 13 South Texas counties need to rescue them.” Some human rights orga- to make sure that unidentified bodies receive DNA “People are nizations and advocates decided to get involved, tests and that the information is put in a database so including Maria Jimenez, a human rights activ- families can find their loved ones. “There’s no telling dying out there. ist from Houston, and the nonprofit Texas Civil how many unknown graves with John Does are out Rights Project. The first step was to push the there,” he says. We need to county to conduct DNA tests on the unidentified Canales also hopes to change the mindset of resi- bodies so families could locate their loved ones. dents in rural Brooks County and surrounding areas rescue them.” They made great strides, but Canales realized that about the undocumented people passing through there was no one on the ground in Brooks County their ranches, which many see as a nuisance or a to keep the movement going. Jimenez, a longtime threat. “It’s a complicated issue that many families friend, suggested the recently retired Canales do are divided on. Some ranch owners don’t want any- it. “My friend Maria the organizer organized me,” thing to do with setting up a water station on their he says, laughing. land. They see it in only black and white: [immi- In November 2013, Canales opened the South grants] broke the law coming into this country,” he Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias. The one- says. “While others are more sympathetic to their room office across from the county courthouse has situation. Most of these people just want to work.” become the center of a concerted humanitarian —Melissa del Bosque

8 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org editorial The Economics of Climate Change

e often hear that the message is alarming: Climate change is already affect- Texas economy is a mira- ing Americans’ lives. Average global temperatures Companies cle. It seems that Gov. Rick have risen 1.5 to 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, and Perry’s reason for being is could increase as much as 10 degrees by the end of the and people to brag on Texas’ economic century if we don’t curb emissions. The projections growth and to lure compa- are dire. In Texas, rising sea levels—caused partly by won’t be nies from California. It’s a melting polar ice—will alter the coastline, and pro- precious thing, this economy of ours. Its importance longed droughts will ravage agriculture. moving andW apparent fragility are the reasons Texas’ elected Texas’ Republican leaders were predictably dis- leaders, Perry included, often cite for their inaction missive of the report. Thanks to their inaction, Texas to Texas on perhaps the greatest public policy challenge of remains the country’s top emitter of greenhouse our time: climate change. Limiting greenhouse gas gases. Texas leaders’ intransigence is a hinderance. anymore when emissions will cost too many jobs, we’re often told. The U.S. can’t begin to reduce greenhouse gases unless We can’t risk economic decline, even as we begin to its top emitter recognizes the problem. drought has see the impacts from climate change all over Texas. Climate change isn’t just an environmental issue. In the past two centuries, the notion that certain It’s a national security issue, a public health issue burned away gases, including carbon dioxide, trap heat has become and, most of all, an economic issue. Companies and irrefutable. The more carbon dioxide emitted into people won’t be moving to Texas in droves anymore the water and the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, the when miserable summers last six months, when air warmer the planet. As the amount of carbon dioxide conditioning bills consume entire paychecks, and plant life. in the atmosphere has spiked since the Industrial when drought has burned away the water and plant Revolution—from about 270 parts per million to life. Climate change, left unaddressed, will eventu- near 400—average global temperatures have risen ally suffocate the precious Texas economy. Capping alongside. These facts are also irrefutable. greenhouse gases may cause some short-term eco- In early May, the federal government released nomic pain. But doing nothing, in the long run, will its latest National Climate Assessment, and the lead to economic ruin. loon star state Ben Sargent

june 2014 the te xas observer | 9 Hope After Violence Women veterans are twice as likely as men to experience PTSD. We just don’t talk about it. By Alex Hannaford | Photos by Erin Trieb Heather Diamani, photographed in Austin. Heat her Diamani is not a victim. In fact, she’s reluctant to even repeat the acronym PTSD, so loaded has the term become, so likely is it to elicit sympathy—or worse, the assumption that she’s somehow broken and needs fix- ing. Diamani survived the Army. She survived two tours of Iraq. She survived the roadside bombs that tore through her Humvee.

And she is surviving the aftermath back home in Austin: the nightmares in which she believes she has lost her limbs; the chills she feels when a helicopter passes overhead; or when a motorbike backfires and she freezes, thinking, for a split second, it is a bomb; and whenever she smells burning trash and it takes her back to the Coyote Road—that dusty, deadly thor- oughfare on the outskirts of Baghdad. The condition is as old as war itself. It was once known as shell shock, a term coined during World War I to describe how combat frays the nerves of soldiers. It’s now called post-traumatic stress disorder or, more commonly, PTSD: a broader, more wide-ranging term that, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, is defined as damage to the brain’s natural “fight or flight” response, and which develops after a terrifying ordeal that involved physical harm or the threat of physical harm. A person doesn’t have to be physically hurt to develop PTSD—an injury to a loved one or close Women are friend can cause it. The latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders says that more than this disturbance, “regardless of its trigger, causes clinically significant distress or impairment in the twice as likely individual’s social interactions, capacity to work or other important areas of functioning.” to have PTSD About 7.8 percent of Americans will experience PTSD at some point in their lives. For veterans of the as men. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that number rises to 20 percent. And women are more than twice as likely to have PTSD as men. Women with PTSD are especially prevalent in Texas, which has the largest population of women veterans in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (Texas has 191,757 compared to California, the next largest, with 184,774). Yet in the media coverage of PTSD and the toll this debilitating condition takes on military veterans, we rarely hear about women. For instance, an Observer review of news stories about veterans with PTSD in the Austin American-Statesman, Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle the past three years found that 73 percent reported solely on men; only 6 percent of the 71 stories sampled featured women exclusively. That may be because we don’t normally think of women serving in combat roles. Until Congress lifted the ban in January 2013, women were forbid- den from serving in combat. But of course they did. In Iraq and Afghanistan, many women regularly came under enemy fire on the

12 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org frontlines. Like Heather Diamani, they drove trucks; veterans have reported being sexually harassed. they worked as medics, radio operators and mechan- And some of them go on to develop PTSD. Women ics. Eight hundred women were injured in Iraq and veterans are the silent sufferers—survivors—in the Afghanistan; 143 died. aftermath of America’s military adventures in the While the combat trauma these women experi- Middle East. enced on the battlefield accounts for some of the PTSD diagnoses, it doesn’t account for all. According Heather Diamani was born to the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit in Massachusetts and grew up in New Hampshire. that conducts social-science studies, approximately She wanted to travel and have a challenging career, one in four women veterans has military sexual so she decided to enlist in the U.S. Army. She was ath- trauma, defined as sexual assault or repeated, letic and liked the idea of what she calls “the mental threatening sexual harassment that occurred while game”—the way the military breaks you down and Sgt. 1st Class Marty Bellanger yells instructions they were serving. Estimates of the prevalence of builds you back up. to his troops following sexual assault in the military among women vet- When she entered the Army, she says, she was “the the explosion of a roadside bomb in Logar Province, erans range from 20 percent to 48 percent. Either nicest, happiest person. I was raised to be non-judg- Afghanistan, in way, it’s staggeringly high. Eighty percent of women mental, open-minded, loving.” At the basic training September 2009.

june 2014 the te xas observer | 13 base in Missouri, her friendliness caused one supe- never forget it. When the blast hit, the vehicle lifted rior to tell her it seemed like she was flirting. “So I off the ground. The IED had detonated under the went really quiet,” she says. “And I went from quiet front of the Humvee. “It was nuts,” she says. “I just to bitter.” remember my first reaction was to look down at my Diamani went into advanced individual training legs, and I saw they were still there and started laugh- where she learned to drive trucks and administer first ing. It was the only thing I could do.” aid. She practiced rollover drills, and learned how to Diamani had been trained to keep driving no mat- insert an IV, treat a punctured lung and apply tourni- ter what damage had been done, so she drove out of the quets. “They prepare you for everything,” she says, “but kill zone to safety. Diamani and the other two soldiers nothing prepares you for explosions and people dying.” with her inside the Humvee eventually got combat In spring 2005, she deployed to Iraq. One night, action badges. Her vehicle was assessed for damage, just a week in, mortars rained down on the pod of but nobody asked how they were feeling. “It was always, trailers that served as her unit’s sleeping quarters. ‘What’s the situation? Can we find the person who did Diamani ran outside and saw soldiers from various it? How’s the truck?’ I never once was asked whether I platoons running toward a bunker. “All I could think had any injuries,” Diamani says. “Was I hurting? How was, ‘Holy crap, this is my platoon. They’re like my was I mentally? Nothing. It was weird.” brothers,’” she says. She grabbed her gear and ran After six years in the Army and two deployments to “They toward the bunker too; that’s when she saw a lieu- Iraq, including a promotion to sergeant, she felt the tenant from another platoon lying on the ground, grueling routine of war—driving a truck hundreds of prepare and then she saw a captain, the lower half of his body miles, carrying a 50-pound pack (Diamani weighs 115 missing. “Everyone’s shouting ‘Get in the bunker, pounds), holstering a weapon on her shoulder and you for medics are coming.’ And I’m like this is insane. I wearing a flak vest—begin to take a toll on her body. don’t know if they ever made it.” At one point she was hospitalized in Baghdad. Her everything, Another time, Diamani was preparing for a mis- back would swell so badly she couldn’t walk. The doc- sion when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the tor at the walk-in clinic gave her a shot of cortisone but nothing outer gate of the military compound. “There was this and ice packs, and she lay on a gurney. “And all of a huge hole in the ground,” she says, “and so many peo- sudden this guy gets wheeled in, and he has a gunshot prepares ple scattered around injured.” wound in the neck,” she says. “He’s right beside me, She still has nightmares about the captain, except in and I just look over and think, ‘Oh my God, that’s the you for her dream, he’s lying not outside the pod of trailers but saddest thing.’ I asked the nurse if he was going to be by the gate in the aftermath of that second explosion. okay and she said it wasn’t looking good. explosions And in the dream, Diamani tries to save him but can’t. “I got off my bed, went over to him and held his “My counselor says it’s survivor’s remorse,” she says. hand. I don’t remember how much time passed but and people The first time an improvised explosive device (IED) all of a sudden he starts going. They start freaking out, hit her truck, Diamani says, it wasn’t such a big deal— and he’s dead. It was so heartbreaking. That’s when I dying.” “like a little shake, pathetic.” That first year her Light started crying my eyes out. I asked the medic how she Medium Tactical Vehicle, a large desert-colored truck was able to do that job, and she said they get numb to it. with a flat bed, wasn’t even armored. Another time she “I just felt like an asshole being in the medic sta- was driving a Humvee and someone fired a rocket- tion with a back injury, so I left. It’s so weird how that propelled grenade at the vehicle. “I kept telling upper gave me the strength to mentally get over the pain I command I didn’t think it was a good idea driving that was feeling. That’s kind of how I deal with stuff now. route,” Diamani says. “We’d been at the same check- When I start to feel any pain now, that’s how I deal point every day, and we were like squatting ducks. I with it. That’s how I cope.” didn’t have a good feeling about it. And sure enough ” Out of the Army and living in Austin, Diamani is The missile went over the truck and into an adja- reminded of her tours every day. There’s a smell she cent field. Diamani and her unit spent the rest of the can’t forget; it’s burned into her senses: the smell night driving around looking for the perpetrators. of human carcasses. She still has physical injuries: On another occasion an IED exploded between a crooked spine and cartilage degeneration in her Diamani’s vehicle and a trailing tank. The blast hit neck. She also suffered damage to the nerves in her the rear of the Humvee, but no one was injured. shoulder where she carried her weapon for years. Next time this happened though, it was, in Then there were the mental injuries. her words, the big one: “We were on the route to She went to therapy, but ended up splitting from her Tarmiyah [about 15 miles north of Baghdad]. On first husband, also a soldier and also suffering from Coyote Road—the most dangerous route.” A few PTSD. She says she lost sight of who she was and found months earlier, Diamani had lost her friend Joey herself alone. But that’s when she began to turn her Cantrell on that same route. Cantrell was a 23-year- life around. The first year was the hardest, but she says old medic, and his Humvee struck a roadside bomb. the Department of Veterans Affairs was there for her, Diamani had traveled to Qatar with Cantrell and providing support and treatment. The daytime flash- another colleague after winning a soldier-of-the- backs are gone, but she has no control over the night. month commendation. They’d become a tight-knit “I can’t stop the nightmares,” she says. “They happen group and had promised to stay in touch after the weekly. They’re always going to happen. war. His death devastated her. Yet here was Diamani “I still get night sweats a lot. I wake up, throw the driving the same Coyote Road on which Cantrell had covers off and look down at my legs. That’s my big- been killed. She had her headset on—one earphone gest nightmare. I keep thinking my legs have been scanning her military radio, and the other to listen to blown off.” When she was deployed in Iraq, Diamani her music: Audioslave’s “I Am The Highway.” She’ll received word that her uncle had been in a bad car

14 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org accident, and he’d woken up in the hospital to find acknowledgement of their service and appreciation that his legs had been amputated. That, she’s con- for their sacrifice.” vinced, is the trigger for her dreams. More than half of women veterans say they expe- “There’s not a day that I don’t feel physical pain, but rienced some type of “interpersonal violence” before I don’t talk about it,” Diamani says. “I walk around, they even enlisted. Between 27 percent and 49 percent and I play sports regardless. I’ll live my life, because I were subjected to sexual abuse as a child, and as adults still have the ability to do that. I refuse to take painkill- 24 percent to 49 percent were sexually assaulted, ers, and I feel that if I don’t identify myself by a disease according to the American Institutes for Research. or an injury I can have the best life possible. I’ve seen Frank Ochberg, a leading trauma psychiatrist who was people pilled-up in bed, and I can’t live like that. I’ve part of the board that defined PTSD in the late 1970s, been chosen for a reason to still be here. I remind says there’s a difference in the trauma that can lead to myself of that, because it helps me cope.” PTSD. “PTSD is one way of showing the pain of having dealt with evil or cruelty or sudden tragic loss, but there Kimberly Olson, a retired are other ways as well,” he says. “The kind of trauma U.S. Air Force colonel and pilot, says that in Iraq and where you’re confined, overpowered—when you are held Afghanistan women were always in combat. Now down and then hurt, it’s different from being out there chief executive and president of Grace After Fire, a and suddenly from out of nowhere there’s an IED or an Texas-based nonprofit that helps women veterans, explosion. When you are captured first and denied the Olson says women may have been working primarily chance to fight or flee, as is the case with military sexual in support roles during the wars, “but right next to trauma, the odds of a PTSD response go right up. And it is the door-kickers was the female linguist. And she’s at women who are facing that. just as much risk as the door-kickers. Women were “And,” Ochberg says, “I would add this: When it’s going to get killed, maimed, and exposed to what men military sexual trauma, it’s our own guys doing it to have been exposed to in warfare.” our own women. It’s in the family, so it’s like incest, Olson says women who experience traumatic injury and it has all the problems associated with incest. after their military service show it in different ways The military depends on being a family, so when it’s than men: “A lot of us don’t self-identify as former your father figure or brother figure doing it to you, it’s military, unlike our male counterparts. Forty percent like your father or brother doing it to you at home. of women veterans have school-age kids. We step back “When that happens, it’s not just sex. It’s secrecy, into being a wife, a mom, the breadwinner. We bury our shame, dishonor, and in the theater of military action, military service 10 items down in terms of who we are.” honor is so important. It’s what you fight for. It’s what Male veterans with PTSD, Olson says, “are pissed holds you together. When you break that code of off with the world. Women don’t do that. We bury it honor, it takes away the reason you risk your life.” in our guts. We get depressed, overweight. We suffer from hypertension. We don’t act out like a guy will. Jenn Hassin is not a victim, But that’s how men normally handle stress—as exter- either. She never served overseas and therefore she nal behavior. I’m generalizing, but women tend not never had, as she puts it, “bullets flying by my head,” to act out. They isolate themselves. And an isolated but she survived sexual assault by a superior and is veteran is a suicide risk.” surviving the effects of her PTSD. One study, published in 2010 by the journal Life was tough growing up in the small Texas com- Psychiatric Services, said female veterans between munity of Eagle Lake. Hassin was sexually assaulted as ages 18 and 34 are three times more likely than their a child. Her family was poor, and she was waiting tables civilian peers to commit suicide. One of the reasons, before she turned 12, helping pay the water bill in the Olson says, is that women who have been in the mili- two-bedroom trailer where she lived with her mom, tary understand weapons. They’ll put a gun to their dad and siblings. She has three elder brothers, each of head rather than swallow pills. whom joined the Navy, and two younger sisters. In February, a survey of women service members She joined the Air Force in 2005 and was sent to returning from war coordinated by the Houston Area train at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. One Women Veterans Community Council attempted to of her female instructors would shout at her, but a convey what it described as the “unique challenges male instructor was nice to her from the outset and faced by female veterans returning from active duty.” initially she felt relieved. “A few days later I realized Seventy percent of respondents said they found return- he was flirting,” she says. “I just kind of ignored him ing to civilian life more difficult than anticipated, noting at first, then a week later he was asking what kind of “the general lack of support for women, along with an music I wanted to listen to during training.” array of issues related to physical and mental health. The instructor began asking personal questions “Female veterans face an array of challenges that about her home life. There was an elderly man from are separate and distinct from those experienced by her hometown who had always treated Hassin like their male counterparts,” the report said. “Military a granddaughter and sent her mail while she was Sexual Trauma [MST] was high on the list of expe- going through basic training. Her instructor—who riences that prevent a smooth transition. Lack of she doesn’t want to name for fear of repercussions— targeted mental and physical health services is unde- would tease her with the letters, pretending that he niable, and there appears to be a discomfort within wasn’t going to give them to her. “And he was kind of the traditional male branches of the military when flirting the way he’d do it,” she says. it comes to addressing women’s unique physical Then one evening his voice came over the inter- and mental health requirements. It is not surprising com, instructing Hassin to come to the charge of that female veterans feel betrayed when it comes to quarters office where he was stationed for the night. june 2014 the te xas observer | 15 Jenn Hassin, photographed She reported to the office at 9:15 p.m., just 30 minutes I told him flat out: If he sent me to med flight—where at her studio at Big Medium in Austin. before taps played—the tune, on a solitary bugle, that I’d get med-boarded out of the military—I would is broadcast at dusk on military bases to honor ser- report him. I’d only been in less than 90 days. I’d get vice members who have lost their lives. no benefits. And secondly, I said, if you make one “He told me to stand at ease and began making fucking move on me, I’ll tell on you.” small talk,” Hassin says. “He didn’t have anything for Hassin completed her training in Wichita Falls— me to do, so I asked what it was about.” Her instruc- “running, doing push-ups, all on my torn ACL”—then tor said he needed a cover story to bring her to the trained as a dental technician and was sent to RAF office, and she told him that was inappropriate. As Lakenheath, a base in England. Once she arrived, she taps began playing and Hassin stood to attention, went to see the base psychiatrist and that’s when she he moved toward her. “He started feeling me up and first explained what had happened to her back in Texas. “I’ve been grasping at me,” she says. “He started bending me “She told me to think about it rationally: that my train- over the desk, and I freaked out. I told him to get off ing instructor was probably doing this to someone else,” chosen for a me, but he was completely forceful, violent, and I Hassin says. “She told me I was a strong chick, but that he completely wigged out and began crying. He started was probably doing it to somebody who wasn’t as strong. reason to kissing me. It was pretty traumatic. He didn’t rape And I hadn’t even thought about that. He’s just a filthy me, but he was all over me and groping me, and he asshole, just messing with people. That he’s just doing still be here. told me that we would see each other again and that this ’cause he can, because he’s got this power as a train- he knew I wanted him.” ing instructor, and the Air Force doesn’t even know.” I remind Hassin says the instructor told her not to tell anyone. Hassin had to testify against the instructor at a “Typical fucking stuff,” she says, “and of course I didn’t hearing, and that’s when she discovered he’d tar- myself of say anything. I didn’t report him. Then a couple of days geted other women too. “There were several girls at go by, and he was still acting like nothing happened, that his court martial,” she says. “He tried to say he wasn’t that, because everything was fine, and he gives me my mail.” guilty. He had an on-base address, with a wife and Included in her mail was a letter from him with family, and it turned out this apartment he’d writ- it helps a map and directions to his house. She told him she ten down for me to visit wasn’t his. He sublet it from wouldn’t go, and he said they’d have to find some some other guy—this piece of shit apartment in San me cope.” “alone time” on base instead. But the next day Antonio where he just took girls to fuck them. He was Hassin and her squadron were practicing marching a piece of shit. Now I know this asshole did it to so moves when she tore her ACL and was sent to medi- many girls. I didn’t do shit wrong. Predators know cal quarters: “He was alone with me in there a couple how to seek out girls and that’s the truth of it.” of times, and he came up to make a move on me, and In 2007, he was handed a prison sentence for the

16 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org sexual assaults. In fact, sexual assault was a rampant into a system that can help them—if they’re not even problem at Lackland, which in 2011-2012 was the sub- part of that network—what chance do they have? “When you are ject of a major scandal. Seventeen instructors would Jacob’s group has talked to women who have expe- be convicted of misconduct with trainees. According to rienced both sexual and combat trauma and have captured first Air Force Times, reports of military sexual assaults rose submitted two PTSD claims, one for each trauma. But by 50 percent last year. Pentagon officials have said the Jacob says many dropped the sexual trauma claim and denied the increase was the result of more troops coming forward because they didn’t think they had a chance of getting to report sexual assaults, seeking help and offering infor- treatment for it. And statistics show they could be right. chance to fight mation for prosecuting offenders. Jacob’s group submitted two Freedom of Information Although she’s no longer in the military, Hassin Act requests that show a disparity: the VA is more likely or flee, as is still deals with the trauma. When she hears taps to approve claims for PTSD caused by combat than today, it brings the memories flooding back. “It’s so claims for PTSD caused by sexual trauma. the case with fucked up because that tune honors service mem- Jacob’s information request showed that at the bers,” she says. “For a little while, it bothered the VA regional office in Waco in 2012, 75 percent of Military Sexual shit out of me every time, but now I’ve learned to let combat PTSD claims were approved versus 67 per- it go. I’m not a victim any more. I’m totally OK. And cent of sexual assault PTSD claims. The year before Trauma, the believe it or not, I wouldn’t change anything about the disparity was starker: The Waco VA approved 77 my past—not anything that happened when I was a percent of combat claims but just 47 percent of those odds of a PTSD little girl either. Because I’m stronger.” who wanted treatment for sexual assault trauma. “And they’re far from the worst,” Jacob says. “St. response go Olson, the retired Air Force Paul, Minnesota, had a 20 percent approval rating for colonel, says what happens to people like Jenn Hassin [sexual assault] PTSD claims. The gap in approval rates right up.” is a betrayal of trust in a system to which these women for [sexual assault] PTSD claims and combat PTSD swore to give their lives. “More women are raped claims is huge. And there shouldn’t be any inequity.” and assaulted in training environments than they Today Jenn Hassin is married, has a 5-year-old son, ever were overseas,” Olson says. “And not only is that and works as a mixed-materials artist in Austin. “I bad, but there’s a second victimization where [many once thought I’d go back into the military as an officer,” women] can’t get justice and can’t move on. Justice is Hassin says, “but I didn’t want to be a mom in combat important to civilians just like it is to military women. boots. Plus I’d probably have been deployed, and my The system can’t seem to be accountable to itself.” husband would never be okay with me joining up again. Olson says there are three things that need changing: “I’ve become a survivor through time and through In training—and the Marines, she says, have one of the telling my story and through realizing that it’s not the worst reputations—the military uses the female gender end of the world and that I have this whole life ahead to motivate men. “They call them sisters, women and of me. It’s not worth living in the past because there’s sissies. They portray the female gender as less valuable nothing I can do to change it.” even though she’s wearing the same uniform.” She points to a piece of artwork on the shelf at her Olson also says that women’s needs in recovery are studio. It’s a picture of a bird with nails hammered different than men’s, and the military needs to acknowl- into it. “Every single one of those nails represents edge that fact. “If women are wired to nurture and love,” somebody who was raped in Austin last year,” she she says, “[trauma] probably does have a greater impact tells me. “There are 209 large nails. The 645 smaller on them. That’s where the system is failing. There is not nails represent the 645 children who were reported enough research around women in warfare. They treat molested in Austin last year. And they are just the them like small men. But they’re not.” numbers that were reported. Greg Jacob, a former U.S. Marine and now policy “They’re nailed into a red dove. Red is for courage director of the Service Women’s Action Network and the dove is for hope—because in my opinion that’s (SWAN), says the Department of Veterans Affairs what it takes to get past sexual violence and become a was historically designed to help men—in both poli- survivor; that there’s hope after violence.” cies and treatment. Though the Veterans Health Contributing writer Alex Hannaford lives in Austin. Administration has been responsive to issues of sexual trauma—Jacob says it provides sexual trauma coordinators and now screens for sexual assault— “there are still issues.” Only 15 percent of women eligible forV A care actually get it, he says. In the veterans community, it’s difficult to get women to identify as veterans largely because they were banned from combat roles. “But we have more than 250,000 women veterans in America who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there’s likely to be half a mil- lion when both those conflicts have wound down,” Jacob says. “They’ve been on the front lines, experiencing injuries, visible or invisible wounds. And yet at the VA, they’re being asked if they’re waiting for their husbands, or they get hit on. These are major problems.” Then there are the societal problems—home- lessness, unemployment, suicide—that affect all veterans. As Jacob says, if women aren’t even plugged june 2014 the te xas observer | 17 18 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org Fostering Neglect Texas’ foster care reforms were supposed to fix a deadly system. Instead, they might make it worse. by Emily DePrang and Beth Cortez-Neavel

ystal Bentley is poised. She sits up straight at the formal din- PHOTOS BY ing room table of Angel Reach, a transitional home for former PATRICK MICHELS foster care youth in Conroe, and speaks with the measured voice of earned authority. In the little kitchen nearby, birdsong drifts through an open win- Cdow. It’s a peaceful setting in which to describe her nightmarish childhood. It’s a story she’s told before, to advocates and policymakers, anyone who might change the system, and Bentley is an experienced, almost regal storyteller. “I’m really comfortable with my life story,” she says, “because my situation is not the same anymore.” Bentley never lived at Angel Reach, but she goes there for counseling and to volunteer. The nonprofit helped her find an apartment and a flexible job with acareer prep agency. Before that, she lived at a women’s shelter. Bentley is 23 now, independent, raising her three children and taking college classes, but for most of her childhood she was a ward of the state. Abandoned by her mother at age 4, Bentley grew up with Texas Crystal Bentley outside Angel Reach, for a parent. Texas placed her in a series of homes its the Conroe facility employees inspected and deemed safe. Texas paid where she volunteers helping former foster people to feed and clothe her. Texas sent a caseworker care youth. june 2014 the te xas observer | 19 to check on her once a month, and when Bentley told but foster children face more common horrors every that caseworker she had been abused, which hap- day. They enter the system abandoned, abused or pened often, Texas moved her. neglected, then are passed from home to home and With no choice in the matter, Bentley became school to school. Children are often separated from an expert on the state’s suitability as a parent. She their siblings or locked up in residential treatment and other foster care alumni and advocates travel to facilities and medicated to control their behavior. And Austin every chance they get to tell legislators what’s many, like Bentley, allege physical, sexual and emo- wrong with the system, and beseech them to fix it. The tional abuse at the hands of their caretakers. lawmakers listen politely. Then Bentley goes home. The entire child welfare system is chronically, She says the most urgent problems—the ones that severely underfunded. Turnover is high among over- have to be fixed now, the ones that should never have burdened caseworkers who see the kids in their care been problems in the first place—concern basic child only a few minutes a month. The licensing depart- safety. Foster families should be more meticulously ment responsible for investigating abuse of foster screened. Caseworkers should be responsible for kids is overwhelmed and understaffed. Things are fewer kids and have more time to spend with them. not getting better, either. State officials say the foster Children who report abuse should be believed. care system already has a $20 million deficit for 2014 Abusers should be punished. because legislators didn’t budget for growth. They say Many child welfare advocates list the same pri- 2015 will be even worse. orities. Texas’ foster care system needs more The solution is not, according to state lawmakers accountability at every and administrators, more fund- level, they say; the system ing. The solution is rather a few At best, needs better screening, bet- new rules, more caseworkers, ter training and, for God’s and “foster care redesign,” an foster care sake, more money. The ambitious term for an amal- advocates’ goal is so basic gam of changes, the product of redesign is it’s almost pitiful: that when a decade-long push to privatize Texas removes children Texas’ foster care system. a gamble. At from their homes because The privatization effort of maltreatment, life should began after a rash of child worst, it get better, not worse. deaths in 2004. Gov. Rick Life should, at the very Perry called for an emergency may hurt the least, continue. In the overhaul of the system, and state’s 2013 fiscal year, the Texas Legislature passed very kids 14 children died from a bill to reorganize and priva- abuse or neglect while in tize management of every Texas set out Texas’ custody. One was aspect of a child’s life under Alexandria Hill, taken from state care. But in 2006, more to save. her parents because they children died under the watch smoked marijuana and of private agencies, and the one had seizures. In a rage, changes were put on hold. In Alexandria’s foster mother 2011, lawmakers returned to smashed her head against privatization as a cure-all, but the floor, killing her. She this time it wasn’t called priva- was 2. Another of the 14 lost was Karla Vasquez. tization. It was redesign. Available records say only that she died of neglect at Currently, most children in foster care are moved to a residential treatment center that had been investi- a home or facility under the direction of one of a few gated six times in the past five years for allegations of hundred private child-placing agencies around Texas. physical abuse, sexual abuse and neglect—but never Under redesign, another layer of private bureaucracy disciplined. A third was Orion Hamilton, whose head will be added to the system. One large “lead agency” was crushed under the knee of her foster mother’s will contract with the state to assume three major boyfriend, Jacob Salas. He had been arrested twice responsibilities: overseeing all the child-placing agen- for family violence but never screened by Child cies in its region; making sure foster children and Protective Services despite listing the foster home families have the social, medical or psychological ser- as his official address. Orion was less than a year old. vices they need; and exceeding the state’s performance In the 2012 fiscal year, another 14 children in foster on metrics like keeping sibling groups together and care died of abuse or neglect, Eight children died in placing kids closer to their original communities. It’s 2011. In 2010, the number was 15. an appealing, ambitious wish list. Most attractive, per- Some of these children died from injuries sus- haps, is that lawmakers don’t have to figure out how to tained before they were removed from their homes. pay for it. The legislation passed in 2011 specifies that Others died at the hands of those paid to protect the new system can’t cost more than the old one. them. According to records from the Department of In short, Texas is banking on private companies— Family and Protective Services, the agency that over- some of which have to turn a profit—doing more than Bentley as a teenager, in sees foster care, more than one in 20 children killed the state could for its most vulnerable kids without her room at the Boys & Girls by abuse or neglect in Texas in the past five years died adding a dime. Harbor residential treatment facility in La Porte. while in state custody. State lawmakers and administrators seem confi- Courtesy Crystal Bentley These tragedies receive the most media attention, dent that this will work, but there are already warning

20 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org signs. The first company to take a contract as a lead worries child advocate Ashley Harris, with Texans At a May luncheon for Angel Reach, Bentley talks about agency revealed in April that it was losing money after Care for Children. “Just because everything is per- her struggle to transition out just eight months of operation. Even its CEO says the fect on that evaluation doesn’t mean [reunification] of the foster care system. plan will cost more than budgeted. is best for the kid or the family,” she says. “They could More important, many child welfare advocates fear be pushing those kids home when it’s not safe or it’s redesign will make a bad situation worse. The new sys- not right.” tem spreads out what little funds are available among Bentley wishes she hadn’t been returned home more parties, some of which take their own cut. It adds after her first stint in foster care. “I think I would have a layer of bureaucracy between Texas and the kids in its had a better chance of being adopted at a younger age care, and turns over crucial responsibilities to private and of having a healthier childhood,” she says. companies without adding accountability measures. Her family came to the attention of Child Protective And it doesn’t make any of the reforms advocates say Services again when Bentley says her mother’s boy- are desperately needed, like better screening for foster friend molested her. Bentley’s caseworker told the parents and training for caseworkers. The state’s eval- mother to kick her boyfriend out or lose custody of her uation measures may even push kids into dangerous children. “So [my mother] left me and my brothers in situations by rewarding lead agencies for reuniting a parking lot and ran off to California,” Bentley says. families quickly regardless of whether a home is safe. “She chose him instead of us.” At best, foster care redesign is a gamble. At worst, it Right away, Bentley was placed in a foster home may hurt the very kids Texas set out to save. apart from her brothers. She thinks it’s because she’d been abused. “Had I been molested by my brothers, Crystal Bentley’s life in Texas’ custody began that would have been the perfect thing to do,” she says. early. Her mother was a drug addict with four chil- “But as a result of us being separated—and we were dren she couldn’t care for. Child Protective Services hardly ever placed together—we have no relationship. removed Bentley when she was 2, but returned her a I don’t think that was the right decision.” few months later. Foster care redesign addresses the problem of sib- The state tries, whenever possible, to reunite fami- ling separation explicitly, but not very aggressively. lies. After removing children, it works with parents At an April hearing, the Department of Family and to improve their situation, often requiring them to Protective Services showed off an early evaluation take parenting classes or attend counseling or rehab. of Providence Services Corporation, its first fully up- Under redesign, Texas will grade its new lead agencies and-running private lead agency. State workers had on whether they reunite more families than the state’s placed sibling groups together 64 percent of the time, old system did. but had set a benchmark for Providence to do better— That’s one of the many aspects of redesign that by just 1 percent. Providence missed the mark. In the june 2014 the te xas observer | 21 last three months, the company kept siblings together kids where there haven’t been any. “He said, ‘That’s a In the state’s in foster care just 60 percent of the time. concern,’” she remembers. “He said if worst came to worst, what he would do is pull in service providers 2013 fiscal Not that Providence has an easy job. The for-profit from other parts of the country through virtual means, company took on foster care services for a rural swath Skype, whatever. We were like, ‘No.’ I supposed you year, 14 of 60 counties surrounding San Angelo, Abilene and could call that a loophole.” Midland. In the old system, foster kids in such regions Companies like Providence are making this up as children died were often placed far from their hometowns because they go, because providers don’t have to show how the services they needed—medical or psychological they’ll manage the financial and logistical challenges from abuse help, a secure facility, or just an appropriate foster of redesign before getting a contract. But Judge John home—weren’t available nearby. But being far from Specia, commissioner of the Department of Family or neglect the familiar makes foster care more traumatic, and and Protective Services, isn’t worried about it. “They keeps parents and children from visiting each other knew how much money they were going to get paid,” while in Texas’ or attending counseling together, hurting the odds he says of Providence. “They knew what services they of reunification. So one primary goal of redesign is to were going to be obligated to require. So, I mean, it is, custody. place kids closer to home. the burden is on them to produce, and they believe To do this, lead agencies like Providence are expected they can produce.” to work with churches, nonprofits and other groups to Lead agencies will be evaluated—and paid—based cultivate services locally. The process is called “building on metrics including how often they place kids in their capacity,” and not everyone thinks it’s possible. original region. It’s an admirable goal, but like so much Katherine Barillas is a privatization expert at One in redesign, may look better on paper than in practice. Voice Texas, a nonprofit collaborative of health and One of Providence’s regions covers a 39,000-square- human services practitioners. She’s also a member of a mile area. Keeping a kid within that region will count group of experts—judges, state officials, former foster as a success on Providence’s evaluations, but it’s not youth, foster parents, and child welfare advocates— exactly like getting to stay at the same school. that advises lawmakers on foster care policy. “In areas that are already resource-poor, it’s hard to imagine After Bentley’s first placement, “it was just a Katherine Barillas, an expert how a lead agency is going to create something out of constant transition from foster home to foster home,” on foster care privatization, nothing,” Barillas says. She and others from the advi- she says. “Sometimes you’re with people for a month, doubts Texas’ current reform plan can succeed without sory group asked a representative from Providence for three months, six months. It depends.” additional spending. how exactly they planned to provide services for foster Some placements are meant to be brief, but often,

22 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org children move because a foster parent rejects them. “I ignored. The caseworker didn’t believe her until her think a big problem in the [Child Protective Services] cousin raped her so violently she was hospitalized. “They just system is the lack of commitment,” Bentley says. “Just She was 8. because they’re not your child and you don’t quite “He took my virginity,” Bentley says. “He sodomized don’t agree with them all the time, you give up on them. me. [Afterward] he sent me to bed and told his mom, That issue follows us everywhere—being abandoned ‘Oh, she’s just tired. She had a tummy ache.’ My aunt have the or being rejected. Even if [children] were taken took his word even though I’d been telling her that he away [from their parents] by force, they still have that was abusing me. She would beat me for saying that. resources thought, ‘Oh, what was wrong with me?’ Then you go The next day I went to school, and I was bleeding from to a foster home, and you’re immediately thrown out my rectum. It was broken. I had one black eye that to do it. … or moved somewhere else. You’re always some- spread to the next eye. They did not pay attention to body’s obligation, or you’re an inconvenience. We me to the point where I went to school that way, you Nothing is grow up feeling that way.” know? They didn’t even watch me get on the bus. Bentley and other foster youth say they were often “They took me straight from the school to the for free! The moved whenever they alleged abuse. Bentley says hospital,” she says. “I don’t remember ever being she was physically or sexually abused in almost every questioned by a police officer when I was in the hos- state has place she lived from age 4 through 17. Her caseworkers pital. Ever.” did nothing. “If you told them you’ve been abused, it’s Bentley’s rapist visited her in the hospital and to want to your word against the foster parents’ word,” she says. ordered she tell everyone that her biological brother, “If a child says, ‘Hey, I’ve been molested,’ and [foster who was placed with her at the time, had raped her. “I invest, and parents] say, ‘No she wasn’t,’ let’s take a lie-detector told them that it was my brother, and they were like, test. Let’s get a medical opinion about this. Get the ‘There’s no way. There’s no way her 9-year-old brother that’s the police involved in it. This is an accusation of rape. This can cause that much damage.’ I’m pretty sure they is a crime.” had their suspicions but I refused to tell them [because] problem.” But at the time such an allegation is investigated, I was so traumatized by the whole experience.” it’s considered a civil matter, not a criminal one. And When she left the hospital, Bentley was moved back while children may report abuse to their casework- to a home where she’d been placed before. One night, ers, it’s an entirely different group—the Child Care the truth about her rape came out. “I did something Licensing Division—that actually investigates. wrong and [my foster mom] was like, ‘Crystal, I don’t Barillas says those licensing workers are not pre- know if I want you here anymore. This isn’t going to pared for the job. Before getting her doctorate studying work. I’m going to send you back to your aunt’s house.’ privatized foster care, Barillas was an investigator for I was [saying], ‘No! No!’ I remember crawling into a Child Protective Services. She says that Child Care corner, and she walked toward me, and I crawled under Licensing is supposed to get outside help with forensic the bed just to get away from her. I was screaming, ‘I interviews but often won’t. “They’d come into a home can’t go back, I can’t go back!’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said, where there was an allegation of sexual abuse. They ‘Because he’s going to do that to me again!’” didn’t know how to interview those kids. They didn’t Tragically, this revelation made Bentley’s life know where to get them treatment, or who should be worse. “This is when her kids started molesting me doing a physical examination of them. The cases were and having sex with me.” She uses the terms “rape” just a mess.” and “have sex with” interchangeably when talking Though Child Care Licensing investigates abuse, about forced or coerced intercourse. Bentley says her caseworkers are still thought of as foster kids’ main foster brother beat her, but agreed to stop in exchange protectors. Barillas says Bentley’s story—being abused, for sex. “What did I do? [I thought,] ‘Hey, this beats then disbelieved by caseworkers—is common among being beaten.’ A lot of the things we learn as foster former foster youth. “Alumni will tell me, if it was kids is how to survive.” She was 9 years old. between my word and a foster parent’s and there wasn’t Bentley eventually did tell her foster mother. necessarily physical evidence, they’re going to believe “When I told her they were doing that, within the [the parents],” she says. “I’m the ‘troubled child.’ Or I’m week I was moved. I think she just told [the state], going to get moved. And I don’t want to say anything ‘This is not going to work out for me anymore. I don’t because the next placement could be worse.” want her anymore.’ No details, no nothing. Just, that Bentley says having a history of abuse made her less was it. What could I do but just be moved to the next credible to her caseworkers, not more so: “I was raped foster home and accept it? Because that was what was repeatedly by foster brothers and sisters because [they going to be done anyway, with or without justice.” knew], ‘Oh, that’s her history. She’s been molested, so There’s no documentation of the alleged abuse, and we can get away with saying she’s lying because of what to Bentley’s knowledge, her foster siblings were never happened to her before.’ There was no accountabil- punished. Neither was her cousin. “I don’t know how ity whatsoever for anything that was done to me. All many times I’ve been raped by someone, and they’ve the system knew how to do was say, ‘Oh, she accused gotten away with it,” she says, sitting back in her chair. them of rape. We have to move her somewhere else.’ We’ve been talking at the dining room table of Angel Where’s my justice in that? How do I feel like I matter Reach for more than an hour. “I actually ran into my if all you’re going to do is brush it under the rug and cousin on Facebook, just by coincidence,” she says. move me somewhere else that is probably going to do “And I told him, ‘I forgive you.’ There’s nothing I can the same thing to me?” do at this point.” After several moves, Bentley was placed with her aunt. When Bentley told her caseworker that her Ashley Harris, of Texans Care for Children, aunt’s 16-year-old son was molesting her, she was says there’s at least one thing Texas can do for kids like june 2014 the te xas observer | 23 Bentley: spend more money. “It’s consistently chronic Hartman says. Before coming to Texas, he was CEO of “So [my underfunding that allows these tragedies to happen,” a lead child-placing agency during Kansas’ foster care she says. “The less time you’re spending with these privatization effort. Based on that experience, Hartman mother] left children in these foster care placements, the more expects the state to spend more than planned. Other dangerous things can happen.” states, he says, “realize, once they get into it what it me and my For four and a half years, Harris was a caseworker costs in the private sector to provide the service, and for Child Protective Services. Caseworkers are eventually the state is often willing to put more money brothers in required by federal law to see each child in their care into it.” at least once a month, but most advocates say that Providence has been chasing a foster care con- a parking doesn’t happen. There’s no minimum time require- tract with Texas for years. Back in 2005, when the ment for visits, and caseloads in Texas are double Legislature first passed a bill to privatize the entire lot and what’s recommended for child safety. “The less kids foster care system, Providence was the first company you have on a caseload, the more quality work you’re to bid on the casework contract—with a little help ran off to going to get from a caseworker,” Harris says. “Not from its friends. Ousted state Rep. Toby Goodman, just checking in on that child but really knowing the an Arlington Republican, became a lobbyist for California.” dynamics of that family and the child’s needs. Not Providence just two years after helping write the just checking off, ‘Oh I saw the kid.’ I can tell you, that privatization legislation. happened many times for me, when I had 40-plus In 2007, several child deaths and an outcry from children on my caseload where it really was me advocates caused the state to withdraw plans to checking off, me driving by their foster home. ‘Hi, privatize casework. Commissioner Specia says that how are you? Are you doing good? Are you safe?’ And privatizing case management is still completely off go. Because that’s all I could do.” the table. But Hartman thinks now that Providence High caseloads are a longstanding problem has begun its work, lawmakers will change their in Texas. Lawmakers recently approved hiring minds. “I think over time we will probably see the hundreds of additional caseworkers with a goal case management function transferred to the [lead of getting the foster care caseloads down to 28.4 agency],” he says. If that happens, employees of a per caseworker from 33. Still, national experts private company would be making critical decisions recommend caseloads not exceed 15. about the safety of kids in the state’s care. But even when the state hires more caseworkers, Providence, an Arizona-based company oper- it struggles to keep them. The turnover rate at Child ating in 44 states and Canada, formed in 1997 Protective Services is 25.5 percent, and more than specifically to contract with governments looking to half its employees have been on the job three years or privatize human services. It’s been in Texas almost less. Barillas says that’s because caseworkers are inad- since its inception, providing behavioral health, equately prepared and supported for what they face. telemedicine, and workforce development ser- After three months of classroom training, she says, vices to juvenile probationers, Medicaid patients, most of which is departmental policy and how to use and now the foster care system. In the last fiscal the computer system, caseworkers get brief guided quarter, Providence brought in almost $290 mil- field experience and are out on their own. “We have lion. In Texas, though, Providence is losing money. such a high turnover rate that your supervisor is proba- Hartman won’t say how much, but he testified in bly 10 minutes older than you and has been there three April that administrative costs are higher than days more than you,” Barillas says. “So the supervision expected, and that Providence’s budget doesn’t structure is a mess. You have no background. You have fully cover the foster care services it provides. no support. You have no training to do your job, and at After that hearing, Commissioner Specia at first about nine months is when we see people just dropping sounded like the state wasn’t considering paying off. I think most workers out there are very hardwork- more. “[Providence] wanted this contract,” he says. ing, and they’re passionate. They want to do right. They “They said they could do this with the resources that just don’t have the resources to do it.” were given them. So they went into this with their But having enough well-trained, experienced case- eyes completely open.” But when pressed about workers is expensive. “Nothing is for free!” Barillas says. Hartman’s testimony, he acknowledges, “We’re in “The state has to want to invest, and that’s the problem.” negotiations with them, and if we can see a legitimate If lawmakers don’t make these pricey reforms, the reason why they should get some more money we’ll courts may do it. Children’s Rights, Inc., a New York- look at that.” based advocacy group, has filed a federal class-action The foster care redesign funding scheme hinges on lawsuit on behalf of the state’s foster children. The a change to how child-placing agencies are paid. In suit alleges that kids in the system are abused and asks the old system, children were assigned a level of care the court to force reforms like capping caseloads and based on the intensity of their needs—basic, moderate, raising standards for employees of Child Protective severe or intense. A basic-level child had no serious Services. Children’s Rights, Inc. has won settlements physical, psychological or emotional problems that or judgments in such suits against a dozen states. The required extra services or supervision. An intense- case is slated to be argued in December. level child usually had a severe medical or psychiatric illness needing round-the-clock care. Agencies were Texas may escape legal action, but its plan to paid more per day for needier children, providing a fix the foster care system without increased spending financial incentive for agencies to keep kids at higher looks doomed. Among the many who think so is Robert levels—that is to say, sicker—and institutionalized, Hartman, CEO of the state’s own contractor, Providence. rather than placed in private homes. To remove that “Financially, we’re struggling with that arrangement,” incentive, foster care redesign replaces the levels

24 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org with a “blended rate” that’s far lower and lets the lead to Providence and one to the nonprofit ACH Child agency negotiate to get more money for individual and Family Services for the Dallas area. Despite stake- children with expensive problems. The goal is to holder objections and financial warning signs, Texas target more money to the kids who really need it. The plans to start taking bids for the next redesign region freed-up funds are supposed to bankroll the rest of this summer. redesign’s objectives. At the hearing, Bentley testified and drove back to But some fear Texas has traded one financial Conroe, just like she has before and will again. The conflict of interest for another. State Rep. Elliott system desperately needs reform, she says, but, “I’m Naishtat, an Austin Democrat, worries about having not going to say that 100 percent of foster care was a for-profit company policing the same groups bad, because when I met my real family, I was grate- they’re funding. Under redesign, lead agencies like ful that I grew up in foster care, hardships and all.” At Providence oversee all the other private child-placing 16, Bentley met her birth mother, father, and siblings. agencies in its area. If an agency had an expensive “[My siblings] went to foster care, but [my mother] problem, the money to fix it would come out of the got them back. Now, I grew up abused. I grew up lack- lead agency’s budget. “It is not unreasonable to ing certain things. But I can honestly say that while I think that at least occasionally, the [lead agency] will was in foster care, I didn’t starve. I was always some- perhaps not recognize or report all of the possible where that had lights. My brothers and sisters grew deficiencies or problems,” Naishtat says. up without the bare necessities.” Commissioner Specia says state oversight will Bentley was adopted at age 11, but when her adop- prevent that. “We are involved all over, in each of the tive mother gave birth to a child, she turned Bentley steps,” he says. “I think there’s a fantasy or there’s back over to the state. “I don’t think she knew how some feeling that we’re giving it all to the [lead to love me anymore after she got what she really agency] and stepping back. The fact of the matter is, wanted,” Bentley says. From 13 to 17, she lived at a res- we’re going to monitor the contract, they still have to idential treatment facility. After that, she lived with meet all the licensing requirements, we’re still going partners and her now-estranged husband. For a while, to monitor the [child-placing agencies].” she worked weekends at a 24-hour Walmart while her In other states, privatizing child welfare without mother-in-law watched the kids. Since she didn’t have more investment has been disastrous. In Kansas and a car, she’d be dropped off and stay overnight at the Florida, lead agencies struggled financially, declared Walmart until the weekend was over. When her hus- bankruptcy, or canceled their contracts altogether. band kicked her out, she contacted the state. “I went In Nebraska, foster families and service providers to CPS because I had no one else,” she says. “I went to quit the system after a lead agency pulled out, causing someone who had raised me, and I said, ‘I’m having a In other problems with payment and coordination. problem. I don’t have a place to live with my daughter. Barillas wrote her doctoral dissertation on foster I need help. I need guidance.’” But instead, she says, states, care privatization in other states. She believes an opti- “They opened a CPS case investigating me.” mal child welfare system would involve the private Bentley was living at a women’s shelter when she privatizing sector, but says history suggests foster care redesign read about Angel Reach online. She credits the center, in Texas will fail. and God, with her survival. “When I sit down and tell child “Although our state has never said that one of people my life story—and you’ve only heard bits and their objectives is to save money, most states have pieces—they can’t see how it is that I’m in my right welfare privatized with that being one of their objectives,” mind, that I’m sane. I can only give credit to Him. Barillas says. “And they’ve all realized you can’t do it.” “Some of us can’t handle it. I have foster brothers without Moreover, “No state has seen better outcomes under and sisters who’ve committed suicide, who’ve over- a privatized system than under a public system. No dosed on drugs. I don’t know why God equipped me more state at all.” with the strength to endure.” Unless Texas turns out to be the exception, it’s in Ashley Harris of Texans Care for Children says, investment trouble. A 2013 report from the Legislative Budget “The reality is for many foster youth—and especially Board noted, “Every state that has implemented state- those aging out of care—they were just lucky that they has been wide privatized foster care services has experienced didn’t die.” Child deaths get public attention, “but the failure of a lead agency,” a possibility it says the there’s so many more kids that are being neglected disastrous. state isn’t ready for. “The Department of Family and and abused and not having their emotional needs met Protective Services lacks sufficiently detailed interven- in foster care. I mean, we heard directly from these tion and contingency plans to implement in the event kids. There were alumni who came to the hearing say- of a financial emergency, or problems with a lead agen- ing, ‘This happened and it’s still happening. Why?’ cy’s performance or service quality.” They’re asking the policymakers, ‘What more is it Should Providence ever want out—say, if it keeps los- going to take?’” ing money—Texas won’t have long to prepare. Either Bentley says, “We can’t save the world, you know? party can exit the contract with just 30 days’ notice. I can’t save the world, but I can use my voice. It’s like therapy for me to go to these legislative meetings Crystal Bentley attended the legislative hearing and show them, ‘This is a result of what you’ve done. in April evaluating foster care redesign. She waited for This is what I’ve had to go through. But look at me hours as child welfare advocates, parents, academics, now. Look at me rise above the situation you put me clergy and former foster care youth asked lawmakers through. You lacked. My parents were inadequate, but to pause the rollout of redesign until they could see this system is clearly inadequate as well. You tried to whether it made life better or worse for kids. So far, take me out of an abusive situation, but you put me the state has awarded two lead agency contracts—one into another one—a worse one, even worse.’” june 2014 the te xas observer | 25 culture

Building a Better Brick by Ian Dille

ent Rabon, stocky and square jawed, pushed open the heavy wooden doors and stepped out of the tiny white chapel into the West Texas sun. He shielded his eyes and looked out across the vast Chihuahuan Desert rimmed by red moun- tains. Rabon, 61, had spent the past 35 years as a builder, erecting custom homes from stacks of pine two-by-fours and plywood. He’d come here, to Marathon, in the spring of 2003, on a sojourn in search of meaning. Inside the chapel, he’d sought a moment of personal reflection.

Standing outside the chapel, Rabon noticed a man was a builder as well. He called the brick material Kacross the street stacking bricks, building a wall with a papercrete, and he showed Rabon how he made it, material unlike Rabon had ever seen. The bricks were mixing shredded newspapers, lottery tickets and old homemade, 80 percent lighter than traditional con- telephone books with Portland cement and sand. He crete blocks, highly insulating, and they rivaled wood poured the resulting gray sludge into square forms Hydraulically compressed and concrete in strength. The walls formed archways and let the bricks dry in the desert air. Then he piled Greenstar Blox, ready for and transitioned smoothly into domed ceilings. Rabon the bricks into walls using wet papercrete as mortar. construction, at the Mason Greenstar facility in Mason. walked over and said hello. Rabon learned that Curry and his wife, Kate, were Photo by don dille The man, Clyde T. Curry, weathered by the desert, erecting a bed and breakfast, Eve’s Garden, which now

26 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org 32 FILM 42 POEM 34 THE BOOK 43 state of the REPORT me dia 36 DIRECT QUOTE 44 f orrest for 38 POSTCARDS the Trees culture 45 Eye on Texas has seven suites surrounding a babbling koi pond. materials—including adobe, straw bale and paper- The papercrete structures intrigued Rabon, but crete—fall under code section 104.11, “alternative The Lubbock he didn’t immediately see any reason to change his materials.” Building inspectors approve such alter- methods. He knew traditional materials, and he knew native materials, or don’t, on a case-by-case basis. If building how to make money using them. In Rabon’s view, you want to build a papercrete house in Dallas, you’ll wood framing, fiberglass insulation and concrete were need to provide the local building inspector with test inspector normal. Even so, he spent an hour talking with Curry. data documenting the material’s load-bearing capac- As Rabon said goodbye, Curry handed him a home- ity and fire-resistance rating. After reviewing the approved made papercrete brick to keep as a souvenir. He told tests, and perhaps requiring more of them, the build- Rabon he’d been hoping to meet someone who owned ing inspector will decide whether you can build your Greenstar Blox a concrete plant. With a commercial concrete mixer, home out of papercrete or not. a person could mass-produce papercrete bricks. And In part due to this bureaucratic onus, most build- for use in a if a person could mass-produce papercrete bricks, it ers stick with traditional materials. Today, most just might change the way people build their homes so-called green construction focuses on energy effi- 4,000-square- and offices. ciency. The materials from which many green homes Rabon had someone in mind. are built still represent unsustainable depletion foot million- of natural resources and additions to atmospheric The origin story of papercrete is archived greenhouse gasses. Cement, for example, accounts dollar on homemade websites filled with dancing icons, for up to 8 percent of the globe’s carbon dioxide emis- excitement and wonder, where anything seems sions, and is the second-most consumed substance residence—the possible, even houses made of paper. According to on Earth (after water). The building industry consid- the Internet’s cache of papercrete history, the first ers wood a sustainable product, since we can grow second Blox- patent for a papercrete-like material was established more, but not all lumber is harvested sustainably. For in 1928, but no commercial industry ever emerged, the example, in 2012 IKEA used nearly 1 percent of the built urban story goes, because there was no money in papercrete. world’s lumber supply in its products, and less than a Making it was easy, and anyone could do it. quarter of that wood came from certified sustainable home approved Also, paper was expensive in the early 1900s. wood suppliers. Then, during the late 1980s, various individuals in In 2012, the ICC published a green-building code. In under ICC’s Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona independently municipalities that have adopted the green code, cer- rediscovered the process and began experimenting tain construction efficiencies have become mandatory. alternative with papercrete. More patents were filed, but they But the green code, as well as rising consumer inter- were never enforced. Assorted papercreters sometimes est in green building, has had little impact on global materials code. gathered for seminars on the material and shared ideas quantities of concrete poured or forest harvested. In in the Yahoo group “Papercrete Info exchange.” part because of the difficulties that alternative materi- Though they lived all across the U.S., in a sense the als pose to the code process, no sustainable structural papercreters were unified by location. They tended building material—like papercrete—has ever gained a to live on the fringes of the grid, or off it entirely. widespread commercial foothold. Most resided in jurisdictions with lax building codes, or no building codes at all, where they could build When Kent Rabon returned from Marathon without restriction. to his home in Mason, a small town about 120 miles Papercrete is not commonly encountered by northwest of Austin, he showed the papercrete brick city and county building inspectors—the cops of Curry had given him to his son, Zach. Unlike his dad, residential and commercial construction. Though Zach—thickly built and blond-haired with a sleeve building inspectors are often considered the bane of tattoos on his arm—eschewed building-industry of DIY builders, they perform an important pub- norms. He’d long envisioned a greener method of lic service: enforcing standards that minimize the building. In 1999, he graduated from Texas Tech risk of collapsing ceilings and electrical fires, for University with a degree in environmental conserva- instance. The bible of nearly every building inspec- tion of natural resources. Unsure how to apply his new tor in the United States is produced by the nonprofit knowledge, Zach moved back to Mason and joined his International Code Council (ICC). Cities across the dad’s construction business. In 2002 he bought the U.S. have adopted the ICC codebook into their local local Ready Mix concrete plant. building ordinances, making it, essentially, construc- Zach was astonished by the papercrete brick’s light tion’s law of the land. weight and strength. With the knowledge of cement That law accounts primarily for conventional additives he’d gained from the Ready Mix business, building materials such as steel and wood and he felt confident he could produce an even stronger poured concrete. A host of other structural building version. Zach traveled to Marathon and spent three

june 2014 the te xas observer | 27 weeks with Curry (whom he calls “the guru”), learn- zero net energy consumption metropolis near Most ing all he could about papercrete. Back in Mason, Abu Dhabi, in Dubai. But by 2010, Integrity Block Zach partnered with a college buddy, Josh Hargrove, had ceased operations. The company sold off the papercreters who’d also taken an interest in papercrete. They began hydraulic equipment used to press its earthen throwing homemade bricks off of buildings and shoot- blocks and shuttered its sleek website. resided in ing bullets into them. They tried, unsuccessfully, to set Schmitz blamed his company’s demise on the “dirty the bricks on fire, and tossed them into ponds to see tricks of the entrenched building industry”—an indus- jurisdictions how they held up in water. try Schmitz said was threatened by Integrity Blocks. In 2005 Zach decided to set aside his successful Schmitz also said the building industry wouldn’t with lax building concrete business and focus solely on the goal of be happy to see his story in print. When I pressed commercializing papercrete. When he told his wife, him further, he said he was slammed with work and codes, or no she left him. Heartbroken but undeterred, Zach couldn’t talk. founded a company with Josh (who remains as chief I later came across one of the dirty tricks Schmitz building codes technology officer), named it Mason Greenstar, and had referenced. In the September 2008 newsletter started hand-manufacturing thousands of 10-inch of the Concrete Masonry Association of California at all, where by 14-inch by 4-inch papercrete bricks. Zach called and Nevada—an organization representing compa- them Greenstar Blox, and when he indulged his nies that produce and build with traditional CMUs—I they could wildest ambitions, he imagined them changing the found a two-page opinion piece titled “Product construction industry forever. Warning—Some ‘Green’ Building Materials May Not build without Be Safe,” in which the association’s executive direc- In 2008, as Zach Rabon’s somewhat crude-look- tor, Kurtis K. Siggard, repeatedly uses the word “soil” restriction. ing Greenstar Blox baked in the sun in a Mason field, to describe Integrity Blocks’ primary component. The a pair of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs named Randy pejorative inference is unmistakable. Schmitz and Trevor Stout were preparing to mass- market a product called Integrity Block. At the time, Integrity Block was touted on environmental blogs and at green- building trade shows as a game-changer for the construction world. In a recent telephone interview, Schmitz told me that Integrity Block was “the most sustain- able building block ever made.” Today it’s little more than a cautionary tale for companies like Mason Greenstar. Integrity Blocks, like papercrete, relied on recycled materials for the bulk of their content. The alternative building “The design and construction industry are being process that Integrity Block modified for commer- duped by promoters of compressed soil materials,” cial use is known as rammed earth. In rammed-earth Siggard wrote, insisting that the structural test- construction, builders take local soil, filter it for con- ing standards that Integrity Block claimed to meet sistency, and compact it into dense bricks. Aggregate were written specifically “for Loadbearing Concrete quarries churn up refuse soil by the ton, and Integrity Masonry Units, not for Compressed Soil Products.” Block aimed to mix these unused soils with cement In closing his argument, Siggard played up the tree- and press them into blocks for individual sale. hugging stigma of green building and turned the Integrity Block patterned the design of its prod- words of Integrity Block promoters against them, uct after concrete masonry units, or CMUs, those writing that the product had been developed by large, hollow, concrete blocks that typically compose “people who would be happy to be called ‘hippies.’” the walls of big-box stores like Best Buy and Target. Siggard suggested that builders stick with a known Integrity Block claimed the product met existing stan- entity—concrete—rather than risk trying some- dards for concrete masonry units. Thus, Schmitz and thing new. Stout reasoned, it should be cleared by code officials In clouding Integrity Block with skepticism, for use in most municipalities. Siggard was highlighting an inherent bias in the ABOVE: The covered In 2008, Stout told the now-defunct California building industry against new and innovative mate- papercrete courtyard at Eve’s Garden Bed & Real Estate Journal that Integrity Blocks were rials. An Integrity Block is not a CMU. Builders could Breakfast in Marathon. slated for use in an 800,000-square-foot shop- not simply begin using Integrity Blocks in place of RIGHT: A papercrete staircase at Eve’s Garden. ping center, and the company sought a deal to sell CMUs under existing building codes. Testing stan- Photo by ian dille Integrity Blocks in Masdar City—an experimental dards and building codes are written specifically for

28 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org june 2014 the te xas observer | 29 conventional materials, like concrete, and even if believe that competition in the certification world A section of the Integrity Blocks met the same rigorous standards, as can only help foster innovation. One such person is the company claimed to have done, the product would the former CEO of the ICC, Bob Heinrich, who once office wall is still be subject to the case-by-case code approval oversaw that company’s evaluation services. required of alternative materials. When I spoke with Heinrich on the phone, he blackened and To garner code compliance, an alternative material seemed hesitant at first to criticize the ICC, but he must undergo an ICC evaluation process. A company ultimately spoke candidly. “The company I used to scarred where seeking to bring an alternative material to market be involved with has, to some degree, lost sight of must develop specific tests for its product and pay a who their true constituency is, and it shows. It shows prospective recognized third-party laboratory to administer them. in the evaluative services side, fairly predominantly, Based on the results of the tests, the ICC will issue an and it has left a hole in the industry,” Heinrich told clients and evaluation report that code officials can refer to when me. “The focus is off the consumer and more on ‘what reviewing building plans. If the product proves suc- can the industry give us,’ because over the last few investors have cessful, the evaluation report will be written into the years the economy has been hard on the ICC. Every ICC code itself. The ICC evaluation can cost as much time I turn around, I have someone in the building whacked the as $250,000 and take more than a decade to complete. industry saying, ‘All the ICC wants is another dime, The process is beyond the wherewithal of most start- another dollar out of me. It’s not that they care what blocks with a ups and leaves the bulk of innovation in the hands of will work for me as their client. It’s how much money established companies with little incentive to intro- I will make them.’ The ICC is a nonprofit organiza- sledgehammer duce new products to a market in which established tion that’s supposed to be lessening the burdens of materials hold an effective monopoly. government, and I think that focus may have been and tried to burn Due to the bureaucracy, cost and time involved lost a little bit.” in the ICC evaluation process, a competing orga- Reflecting on how his former colleagues might them with a nization, Underwriters Laboratories (UL), has perceive his comments, Heinrich said, “That one is started offering similar product-evaluation ser- really going to get me in trouble.” blowtorch. vices to building-industry entrepreneurs. Though UL standards aren’t universally recognized by city Undeterred by Integrity Block’s fate, Mason code officials, who have the final say about howa Greenstar pressed forward. In 2009, Zach Rabon home is built, many people in the building industry built a wall of Greenstar Blox in a FEMA-accredited

30 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org lab in Lubbock for impact testing. There, engineers the office’s front door. simulated severe hurricane conditions by firing “We were like rock stars,” Zach said of his trip to 9-pound two-by-fours into the wall at more than 100 Vegas. He says the company’s booth attracted hordes mph. None of the boards penetrated the wall. Back in of attendees who snapped photos with the Greenstar Mason, Zach built his own 3,200-square-foot home Blox and asked Zach to autograph their World of out of Greenstar Blox, leaving the bricks unpainted to Concrete backpacks. Shortly after returning to see if they’d deteriorate in the weather. Kent, who first Mason, Zach learned that Mason Greenstar had won scoffed at his son’s obsession with papercrete, even- the award for Most Innovative Product in the category tually became a convert. He built his own papercrete of Masonry Materials and Equipment. home and became Mason Greenstar’s chief operations Zach said that major paper companies are now officer, overseeing job sites. Later, Zach hired Clyde vying for Mason Greenstar’s attention—a develop- Curry, his Marathon papercrete guru, as the compa- ment that could make papercrete even cheaper and ny’s chief innovation officer. greener. Paper companies have a problem: They gen- In 2011, Zach received a patent for his proprietary erate tons of wet paper fibers that are too short to turn papercrete blend (after his lawyer warded off a pat- into notebooks or tissues, and so end up in landfills, ent challenge from the purveyors of HardiePlank, a or are dried and burned. Eager to save millions in dis- common wall siding composed of concrete and fiber). posal costs, such companies might prefer to give their That same year, with assistance from the Angelo State paper waste to Mason Greenstar. University Small Business Development Center, Potential competitors have also come call- Mason Greenstar received a $50,000 Eureka Grant ing, seeking to purchase or partner with Mason from the State Energy Conservation Office. Then the Greenstar. Zach has already met with one of the Lubbock building inspector approved Greenstar Blox country’s best-known brick manufacturers, but, he for use in a 4,000-square-foot million-dollar resi- says, they face a dilemma: If the company starts dis- dence—the second Greenstar Blox-built urban home tributing papercrete blocks, how will it continue to approved under ICC’s alternative materials code. sell clay bricks? In 2012, Texas Tech’s department of civil and envi- Zach is optimistic that his products will one day ronmental engineering performed further tests on be enshrined in standard construction codes. “We’ll Greenstar Blox. A team of professors and graduate write the code for papercrete and force everyone else students crushed the bricks to measure the pressure to meet our standards,” he said. His dad, Kent, is less they could withstand and subjected them to an ardu- diplomatic: “We need that ICC approval, even though ous freeze-thaw cycle. After determining that the Blox it’s a bunch of bullshit,” he said. are of suitable strength for residential structures, the If Mason Greenstar gains ICC code approval and university purchased a small percentage of equity in succeeds in mass-producing a commercial papercrete Mason Greenstar and opened the school’s scientific block, it may yet change the way we build homes, with La Loma del Chivo, a papercrete hostel resources to the company. less reliance on wood framing and more on recycled in Marathon. In 2013, Mason Greenstar purchased a custom- products. Yet papercrete remains just a step toward Photo by ian dille designed hydraulic press and developed a slate of new the ideal of a construction method that doesn’t pollute products, including a papercrete brick modeled on a the planet. Cement still makes up 20 percent of every traditional CMU. The new product is sharp-edged and Greenstar block, and a pound of carbon dioxide enters smooth-looking. Mason Greenstar claims its auto- the atmosphere for every pound of cement produced. mated press can churn out two of these blocks every Greenstar Blox are like a car with incredible gas mile- 40 seconds. Following Lubbock’s lead, the City of age, not a car that uses no gas at all. Fredericksburg has green-lighted Greenstar Blox for And Mason Greenstar may soon encounter a new residential construction this year. competitor in the sustainable building materials busi- At the end of January, Zach Rabon loaded up ness. Integrity Block has reemerged as an entirely his Blox and headed to Las Vegas for World of new company called Watershed Materials. The new Concrete, the industry’s largest trade show, held in CEO, David Easton, told me that, this time, “We’ve a 500,000-square-foot exhibit hall, where Mason been careful not to make any enemies in the build- Greenstar would compete against established ing industry.” Watershed Materials qualified for grant companies for the convention’s Most Innovative Product award.

A few weeks after Zach returned from Vegas, I visited him at his office in Mason. The office is built of papercrete. A pet pygmy alligator greets visitors. (A 4-foot Nile crocodile used to reside at the Mason Greenstar office, but it escaped during a flood and was shot by a local rancher after it turned up in a stock pond.) A section of the office wall—Zach calls it a “truth window”—is blackened and scarred where he has allowed prospective clients and investors to whack the blocks with a sledgehammer and try to burn them with a blowtorch. A wrinkled piece of notebook paper, on which Curry first scribbled papercrete’s ingredients for Zach, hangs in a frame. The brick that Curry gave to Kent in Marathon sits on a mantle above june 2014 the te xas observer | 31 funding from the National Science Foundation and and his employees show the kids how they shred aims to form national partnerships with quarry com- the paper, mix it with cement and sand, and turn it panies. Inside of two years, Easton told me, Watershed into bricks. Mason Greenstar hopes to provide the Materials plans to produce a block containing no building blocks of a new wing being planned for cement at all. the elementary school. One day, the students may As I leave the Mason Greenstar office, a bus full of attend classes inside that building. To them, by then, students from the town’s elementary school arrives. a classroom made of recycled paper may seem com- Zach has remarried, and his new wife is a teacher at pletely normal. the school. The students have been collecting recy- Frequent Observer contributor Ian Dille has also writ- cled paper and delivering it to Mason Greenstar. Zach ten for Outside and Texas Monthly.

Monstrous Mash by Josh Rosenblatt

hat they don’t tell you is day will find you at the furniture store, shopping for that you have to clean it a new couch. After every tragedy comes the inevi- up yourself. table banality. If you shoot a man in This kind of juxtaposition, done right, can make for your living room—even if a perfectly unnerving cinematic moment. Especially the man was an intruder, in a thriller like Cold in July, which creates its feeling creeping around your of danger and depravity by unapologetically mashing house in the middle of the night looking to visit who up genres and emotional tones. The movie is based on knowsW what sort of mayhem upon you and your fam- a 1989 novel by East Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale, who ily; even if your house is located in East Texas, where has never met a genre he couldn’t blow all to pieces shooting intruders is considered a God-given right; (if you don’t believe me, check out Bubba Ho-Tep, his even if the cops eventually clear your name and the 1994 novella about an elderly Elvis and a black John press declares you a hero—you’re still responsible F. Kennedy battling an Egyptian mummy at a nursing for getting rid of the blood. Which means that the home). Over his 30-year career, Lansdale has written most traumatic night of your life is going to end horror, crime, Westerns, young adult, even comics. Michael C. Hall and Sam Shepard in Cold In July. with you scrubbing and mopping and pouring buck- Cold in July, like much of Lansdale’s work, is an emo- Courtesy of IFC Films ets full of bloody water into the toilet. And the next tionally and thematically scattershot affair—part

32 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org horror film, part pitch-black comedy, part stalker thriller, part Southern noir, and part grindhouse revenge movie—and I mean that as a high compli- ment. Together, these elements add up to something brash and different. Because in Lansdale’s world, genre conventions don’t mean anything. The only thing that matters is the thrill. Cold in July, which entered limited release in May, stars Michael C. Hall as Richard Dane, a family man whose world is turned upside-down after he kills an intruder and is then terrorized by the intruder’s father. The father, Ben Russel, played by Sam Shepard, Cold in July is an emotionally and thematically scattershot affair—part horror film, part pitch-black comedy, part stalker thriller, part Southern noir, and part grindhouse revenge movie—and I WE KNOW mean that as a high compliment. WHAT YOU WANT has an air of supernatural evil about him. At one point he appears in Dane’s son’s room in a flash of lightning, only to disappear again, like some mythic demonic force. He’s as much the manifestation of Dane’s guilty conscience as anything else. Hall has said that he took the part of Dane because he wanted to play some- one “normal” after portraying serial killer Dexter 1401 B ROSEWOOD AVE. 78702 Morgan on the TV show Dexter for the previous six years. Which makes me wonder if he read the whole script before accepting the role, because Cold in July is about how quickly a “normal” man can turn into a 5312 AIRPORT BLVD. STE G 78751 killer under the strain of exceptional circumstance M E N U and increasingly close proximity to monsters. 467 8900 Dane and Russel eventually join forces, taking up 1809-1 W. ANDERSON LN. 78757 with a colorful private investigator named Jim Bob (played brilliantly by Don Johnson, who is in the midst of a quiet career renaissance) to track down the truth about the break-in. The journey takes them into a sordid underworld of corrupt cops, snuff porn and a shadowy organization called the Dixie Mafia—a world where the distinction between good guys and bad guys grows increasingly vague until morality becomes meaningless and pretty much everyone is just another guy with a gun. Soon the body count is rising and blood DONATE is splattering everywhere and Cold in July is careening from revenge film to Southern Gothic apocalypse—all of it pulpy and seedy and joyous in the extreme. your Cold in July may not be high art, but it triumphs because of the delight it takes in its own mad energy. In refusing to let itself be categorized or contained, it becomes a movie overflowing with the simple joy of to being a movie. This is entertainment for entertain- THE TEXAS OBSERVER ment’s sake, a midnight exercise in deviance, happily RIDE spitting in the face of rules and expectations and making it impossible for any reasonable movie lover to look away. Your vehicle donation is tax- To learn more please go to Longtime Observer film critic Josh Rosenblatt lives in deductible and supports some texasobserver.org New York City. of the sharpest reporting in the or call TOLL FREE 855.500.RIDE june 2014 strangest state in the union! the te xas observer | 33 the book report The Compassionate Imagination of Sarah Bird by Robert Leleux

hen I first began Sarah Bird’s lyrical new novel, Above the East China Sea, I was struck by the time- liness of its theme. The “double colonization” of Okinawa was recently front-page news as the U.S. and Japan dickered over the best spot to build a new U.S. air base on this Japanese prefecture— a term with troubling imperialist implications. ¶ But then I realized that the exploitation of Okinawans has been a perennial topic since at least 1879, when Japan annexed the Ryukyu archipelago. Indeed, Okinawa seems a lightningW rod for tragedy and exploitation. During World War II, Bird writes, “more people were killed [there] than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

So, to the many Okinawans who don’t identify as whose mother is stationed at Okinawa’s Kadena Air Japanese, and who feel that their small, long-suffer- Base. Luz (whose name tellingly suggests both loss ing land (the poorest province in Japan) has too long and light) is despairing over the recent death of her served as a pawn in the petty squabbles of First World sister, Codie, killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan. powers, negotiations over a new U.S. air base are gall- The details of Codie’s death are hazy—it’s even pos- ing. Especially given the abuses so often suffered by sible she died by her own hand. Luz is devastated and impoverished “host” nations who strain under, to contemplating suicide herself. (Here, too, Bird’s fic- quote Martin Fackler’s recent New York Times article tion mirrors front-page tragedy. Last Veterans Day, on the subject, an “unfairly onerous American base Amy Goodman reported on Democracy Now! that Above the East China Sea presence.” In Okinawa, which hosts 75 percent of the suicide among U.S. military personnel and veterans By Sarah Bird U.S. military bases in Japan, the disadvantages of this has achieved epidemic proportions—22 U.S. veterans Knopf arrangement are legion. now commit suicide every day, and more active U.S. 336 pages; $25.95 According to a recent article by Australian jour- servicemen and women killed themselves in 2012 nalist Matthew Carney, Okinawans are “sick of the than were killed by “the enemy.”) noise, the military accidents, and the crime U.S. The circumstances of Luz’s suffering, then, servicemen bring”—the most infamous example would be all too common on any military base. But being the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old girl by three in Okinawa, where thousands committed suicide U.S. soldiers (one of them from Woodville, Texas). in 1945 to escape Operation Iceberg, the deadliest But that’s not the only variety of hardship inflicted battle waged in World War II’s Pacific theater, it upon Okinawans by the U.S. and Japan. Not long ago, possesses an especially dreadful resonance. Carney writes, locals found 83 barrels of toxic waste Okinawa’s brave and heartbreaking history is beneath a soccer field, a lethal memento of the U.S. embodied by Above the East China Sea’s other prin- stockpile of Agent Orange on the island during the cipal character, Tamiko, a pregnant 15-year-old Vietnam War, and just one of dozens of toxic waste Okinawan living in the midst of Operation Iceberg, for sites discovered by Okinawans over the past decades. whom “not a single leaf of green hope has survived.” Under the scandalous terms of the U.S. partnership Like Luz, Tamiko is weighing the option of suicide, with Japan, Carney writes, our government is not due largely to the loss of a beloved sister ripped from legally responsible for cleaning up or compensating her during battle. Almost immediately, despite the for such pollution. decades separating them, Luz and Tamiko’s storylines This sad state of affairs—imperial power’s refusal converge. Over the three days of Obon—a traditional to clean up its messes—is really what Bird’s latest Buddhist holiday during which the dead are granted book is all about. Above the East China Sea is the free rein over the earth—hopelessness drives both story of Luz James, a 21st-century Air Force brat these young women outward, into the arms of their

34 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org families, and inward, toward a spiritual awakening gifted at, the social skill we’ve mastered better than that ultimately provides their salvation. By story’s end, any other, is unmaking friends. We’re geniuses at Above the both girls, one living and one dead, have found peace, if leaving people behind.” not closure—closure being an exceedingly American, One can observe this knack for detachment in East China Sea 21st-century concept that most Okinawans would find Luz’s behavior, as she withdraws from the world in distastefully foreign anyway. In the heightened meta- order to keep from being hurt. And I wonder if this showcases all physical reality of Bird’s novel, humans and ghosts habit of constantly looking over one’s shoulder, of walk among each other, and mortality proves no hin- feeling a bit detached from one’s own circumstance, of Bird’s gifts in drance to resolving family dramas. In fact, Okinawans’ is an experience common to many great writers. “We relationship to death, at least as presented by Bird, require nothing,” Luz says of her military kin. “Not spades—her seems somewhat offhand, as though the great cosmic even real roots. We’re air ferns.” divide is actually a very thin veil between our world One senses that Bird’s itinerant background helped unmistakable and the next. This aspect of the girls’ shared experi- create a capacity for identifying with the suffering of ence is reminiscent of Faulkner’s great line, “The past all sorts of characters, from the spoiled socialites of voice displays is never dead. It’s not even past.” How Perfect Is That to the loners and refugees of Above Like Faulkner, Bird is a writer whose métier is the the East China Sea. She’s as adept at crafting social sat- warmth, wit, American South, though, also like Faulkner, her writ- ire set in Austin as she is at inventing historical drama ing possesses an expansive worldview. To my mind, in Okinawa. The experience of this author’s lifetime and that rare Bird is the finest living Texas novelist, and Above the seems to have inspired a kind of free-floating compas- East China Sea showcases all of her gifts in spades— sion that isn’t reliant upon any specific geography. variety of her unmistakable voice displays warmth, wit, and And so it’s appropriate that by the conclusion of that rare variety of irreverence that possesses real Bird’s latest novel, such anchoring concepts as fam- irreverence that heart. These traits were most lately exhibited in The ily and home have been challenged and unmoored. Gap Year, a charming 2012 novel about the chasm of Returning to the air base from a day spent paying possesses misunderstanding and devotion that yawns between homage to a landscape of unspeakable pain and mothers and daughters. That book features (indeed, hardship, “the red glow from Kadena’s twenty-four real heart. many of Bird’s books feature) seemingly thick-skinned thousand feet of runways feels,” to Luz, “like a youths who’re dying (sometimes literally) for connec- fire burning in the hearth, welcoming [her] home.” tion. In The Gap Year, that longing lassoes Austin’s And though she isn’t blind to the moral complexi- foodie culture and a cult resembling Scientology into ties of this sensation—of her attachment to this seat its narrative. of imperialist injustice and domination—she wants This is not, by the way, an unlikely pairing in Bird’s “the coming-home feeling to go on” forever. universe—no more unlikely than suicide and Oban. Contributing writer Robert Leleux is the author of The But then, her work has always displayed a serious- Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy and The Living End: A ness that critics sometimes overlook in the face of Memoir of Forgetting and Forgiving. her humor. She is, it seems to me, one of those artists whose reputation has been hamstrung by her abil- ity, appreciated more for her lively, hilarious prose than for her depth and intellect. This is a common plight of funny writers. Bird’s work sells briskly and is praised widely by critics, but hers are not the sort of books often shortlisted for national prizes. It’s a phenomenon that even P.G. Wodehouse, surely one of the ablest (and funniest) practitioners of the lan- guage, bemoaned, noting that, regardless of their quality, his books were “looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at” for being humorous. Bird is a military brat herself, and one sometimes supposes that her remarkable range—she’s written, after all, such diverse novels as The Yokota Officers Club and The Flamenco Academy—was made pos- sible in part by skills she must have developed as a wayfaring child: to blend in and observe. There is a suggestive passage in Above the East China Sea in which Luz addresses the social pitfalls of being a military brat: “There’s a myth that, because we move so much, military kids are geniuses at making friends In the end, though, what all military kids are truly june 2014 the te xas observer | 35 Brettdirect Parker q divinguote for golf balls at The Lakes at Castle HillsSoldiering golf course in Lewisville. On as told to and photographed by Jen Reel

am Allen served nearly 40 years as a police officer and administrator before retiring in 2008 and join- ing the police department of Balch Springs, near Dallas, as a community service director. He’s tasked with cre- ating and expanding programs and events that bring people together: crime-watch units, a citizen-police Sacademy, public celebrations of the Fourth of July, Cinco de Mayo and Juneteenth. It’s the with our personalities and imperson- Juneteenth event, on June 19, where he’ll ate the officers. There was a soldier that wear the uniform he’s worn hundreds of was with the 10th Cavalry a little over times: robin-egg blue wool trousers, a 10 years. He got promoted to the rank of navy blue coat with yellow piping and sergeant. His name was Samuel Allen. cavalry hat. Allen has volunteered since This guy was a good leader, so I saw the 1980s as a living-history educator myself in this position. We even have and youth leader, telling the rarely heard the same name. The irony of it all is that stories of the black soldiers—nicknamed I can’t trace any family members back “buffalo soldiers” by Native Americans— to the buffalo soldiers. who fought in America’s Civil War and “What I know about Sam Allen the Indian wars. buffalo soldier is what I found in the “My brother got me started on this. military records. He started in the He was a City of Dallas police officer military because he felt that is what he and started a youth program there. We needed to do. In fact most of the col- started working with these kids, teach- ored soldiers, as they were called in that ing them life skills, teaching them time, felt they had to prove something how the buffalo soldiers had taught to this country. That they were good, themselves how to read, how to live. they were brave, they cared about this We taught everything from personal country. A lot of them were ex-slaves, hygiene to how to use a fork and a couldn’t read or write, had never been knife. Some of these kids, the only time off the plantation. Kind of like the kids they ate at a restaurant was fast food. we dealt with. The more they ventured They had no clue how to use a fork out, the more they learned. So sergeant and knife. We took them everywhere, Samuel Allen of the 10th Cavalry, I don’t fishing, camping. We bought a couple know where he came from other than of wagons and would buy horses and Tennessee. And what happened to him teach the kids how to maintain the after that, I don’t know yet. saddles and take care of their horse. “We used to have a bunch of volun- There’s something about a kid and a teers working with us, but it’s tapered horse, especially a kid with problems. off. I’ve been trying to wind down after If he had that 1,200-pound animal that 25 years. I’ve sold most of my wag- he could control, it made him think ons. I have one left, and I keep telling that he could control more in his life. my wife I need to sell that one. But I “We do living histories at schools, haven’t. If given the opportunity, I’ll events, parades, different programs. talk about the buffalo soldiers until Sometimes we set up a whole encamp- your ears fall off. But now if you want ment. What we do is we pick a certain to know something you can just pull it buffalo soldier, and we’ll give a bit about up on the Internet. What I want to be the history of the soldier and the Indian able to do is tell as much as we can so wars. We would always choose some- we can find someone like myself that body we could read about or know a will want to carry it on.” little bit about so we could match them Interview has been edited and condensed.

36 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org june 2014 the te xas observer | 37 Del Rio postcards Aliens without Borders by Patrick Michels

t is cold, dark and silent in downtown Del A few years later, the tourism director in nearby Rio, even on a Friday night. The former Presidio emailed Torres about building a festival Guarantee department store sits vacant on around the incident. Torres had spent enough time in Main Street, as it has for decades. The hair Roswell to make the necessary connections and deduce salons that now occupy the old service stations the winning formula: slideshows and research papers are all closed for the day. for serious ufologists, parades and costume contests for A few shadowy figures break the stillness, the kids. Two years after that first gathering in Texas, speaking in murmurs. Bundled against the January some of the top UFO and alien researchers of the day Ichill in knit hats and overcoats, they turn a corner and have returned to the border to do it again. file into an old firehouse on Garfield Street. A party is They include: Travis Walton, an Arizonan whose just getting started, and they—some of the world’s lead- harrowing 1975 abduction was dramatized in the ing UFO and alien researchers—are the guests of honor. 1995 filmFire in the Sky; wry and professorial Stanton The 92-year-old firehouse building is now home to Friedman, who worked with military contractors on the Del Rio Council for the Arts, fronted by a gallery defense projects in the ’50s and now loves nothing Torres had lined with abstract paintings. Flying saucers crafted more than skewering official denials of UFO incidents; from CDs hang on strings from the ceiling. Samples and Carlos Guzman, enticingly billed this weekend as spent enough from the nearby Val Verde Winery help fuel the party, “the Stanton Friedman of Mexico.” and volunteers circle the room carrying trays of “alien I recognize all three from their photos on the con- time in Roswell eyes”—deviled eggs with sliced olives set in bright- ference website. Hoping to get a read on the rest of green yolks. A young guitarist on a stool in the corner the crowd, I introduce myself to a middle-aged couple to deduce sings Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” and Ryan Adams’ near the front of the gallery. They’re Ray and Melanie “When the Stars Go Blue.” The travelers set their Young, just arrived from El Paso. Ray is a retired elec- the winning coats aside and get to mingling. trical engineer, and Melanie is a nurse. She is also the Many of the faces are familiar to them from other keeper of an artifact known as the “Starchild skull,” an formula: UFO festivals in other cities, including Roswell, New almost-human-looking but sort-of-alien-shaped skull Mexico, which hosts the nation’s biggest UFO festival that was liberated from a Mexican cave in the 1930s slideshows each summer. But Roswell is far from alone, and since by a curious American girl who kept it for decades 2012 the alien circuit has expanded to cities along the in a cardboard box. Young acquired the skull in the and research Texas-Mexico border: Laredo, Presidio, Edinburg, and 1990s, and today she and a small team of researchers now, for the first time, Del Rio. To border-town tour- are trying to figure out whose head it used to be. As the papers for ism directors anxious for a reputation more savory Starchild moniker suggests, they have their theories. than cartel crime, the alien invasion is welcome. For years, Young was a sort of understudy to para- serious Souvenir T-shirts skewer the political world’s obses- normal researcher Lloyd Pye, who dedicated years to sion with immigration, legal and otherwise, with a giving talks on the skull and daring academics to come ufologists, slogan: “UFOs Have No Borders.” up with a worldly explanation for its origin (the most The godfather of Texas’ Border UFO Series presides common such, also unproven, is that the skull is from parades and over a table set with empanadas and alien eyes in one a hydroencephalitic child). Young tells me her mentor of the gallery’s back rooms. Noe Torres—high school died just a few weeks earlier—he gave his final Starchild costume librarian by day, UFO historian by night—wears his talk in Presidio last October—and now the job has fallen authority casually in wire aviator glasses and a pink, to her. The next day, Young devoted part of her talk to contests for short-sleeved, button-down shirt featuring the Roswell Pye’s memory. “He spent the last 15 years of his life try- UFO Festival logo. He’s in demand tonight, greeting ing to figure out what this is,” she told the crowd, “and it the kids. speakers for tomorrow’s lecture series and snapping hurts me to say he didn’t make it.” photos, making sure everyone is having a good time. Talking to Young is a good reminder that, beyond themselves. The Del Rio UFO Festival is the sixth such the alien kitsch, this gathering has coalesced around a festival Torres has hosted in Texas, most of them in hard core of people solemnly devoted to proving that partnership with Ruben Uriarte, a California-based we’ve been visited from other worlds. UFO researcher and Torres’ co-author on two books Not once over the course of the two-day festival about UFO crashes near the Texas-Mexico border. do I hear the question, “Do you believe?” By the end, In 2007 the pair released Mexico’s Roswell, which it feels inappropriate to ask it so tactlessly. If one describes a 1974 UFO crash in the Chihuahuan Desert. does believe that aliens have visited Earth and even

38 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org wrecked spaceships here, and that the government suit, he looks as though he might beam back up at Presidio’s resident alien mannequin, E.B.E., enjoys a has hidden the evidence for more than 50 years, and any moment. West Texas sunset. that a handful of people know the truth and have even Photo by Brad Newton/ seen the aliens and been pulled aboard their ships, The official mothership of the 2014 Del Rio Presidio Municipal well, it’s pretty cool to be in a room with so many of UFO Festival is the greatest Ramada hotel I’ve ever Development District those people at once—and really quite a coup for the seen. Though the swim-up bar is closed for the sea- Del Rio Chamber of Commerce. son, the empty swimming pool is lit with dancing neon The guitarist excuses himself and turns his mic over party lights. Room-service enchiladas are just $6, and to Donna Langford, the town’s tourism director, who the hotel bar—the White Horse Lounge—looks to be offers a ceremonial opening to the festivities, nam- equally popular with townies and guests from the great ing the locals who helped make it happen. She says beyond. When I return from the downtown reception, she was easily convinced to bring the border UFO I find a few conference-goers on the patio comparing series here, but admits that outer space is a bit out- notes with a couple of locals. The conversation moves side her wheelhouse. “I knew I wanted to have a UFO freely from the grassy knoll to Building 7, ticking off conference, but I had no idea what I was going to do,” the conspiracy bingo squares, it having been previously Langford says, but she likes it so far, and expects it to resolved that the government is full of shit and the truth be “the first of many.” is out there—all you have to do is Google it. At her side, the festival’s speakers are lined up Ingrained mistrust for authority will emerge as awaiting their turns to say a few words. Among one of the weekend’s biggest themes, as much a part them is Travis Walton, standing in front of a well-lit of the festival as goofy alien puns—“border crossings painting. Caught in the spotlight in his baggy brown of the third kind!”—posing for photos with alien june 2014 the te xas observer | 39 dummies, and wondering, aloud and in earnest, about bluff. A few feet farther on, its domed canopy rested the mysteries of the universe. in the dirt. With the sunlight waning, Willingham and A young Air Force pilot named Robert Willingham his partner left the craft to fly back to their airfield in became a believer one mid-1950s spring afternoon Corsicana—but not empty-handed. Before climbing in the sky above West Texas. Willingham, from back into his plane, Willingham picked up a curved Holliday, near Wichita Falls, was accompanying a half-inch-thick chunk of silver-colored metal about B-47 cross-country when he spotted a strange air- the size of his hand. He later subjected it to heat tests craft approaching at a speed Willingham estimated at and found it un-meltable. As an amateur metallurgist, 2,000 mph. He watched as it made a 90-degree turn Willingham was captivated by the question of what in midair and sped off toward Mexico. Willingham the scrap was made of. He finally turned it over to an got permission to abandon his bomber and tail the Air Force lab for more tests. He never got an answer, UFO. Willingham watched it go down in Mexico, and he never saw the scrap again. The scientist he’d just across the Rio Grande from the site of Judge contacted seemed to disappear. The only evidence Roy Bean’s famous saloon in Langtry, some 60 miles he had left of the strange crash came in the mail two from Del Rio. Later, after swapping his jet for a single- years later in the form of an anonymous note that engine Aeronca Champion, Willingham and a partner read, “I don’t know what kind of metal it is, but I’ve returned and landed near the wreckage. never tested anything like it before.” In 2008, Willingham—by then long retired and Willingham, 88, now lives in a nursing home in denied his government pension, he says, for breaking Oklahoma. His memory was already getting spotty Del Rio doctor Aurelio Laing, left, being interviewed with a military code of silence around the crash—described when he gave his interviews for the book—he was no his wife, Stormy Laing, after what he saw for Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte, who longer sure, for instance, of the year of the crash—and winning the Del Rio UFO Festival costume contest. related the tale in their second book together, The his health has declined since then. But it’s thanks to Photo by Patrick Michels Other Roswell. Willingham’s story that there’s a festival in Del Rio at all. Townsfolk, by and large, had no idea about the crash. And that’s what makes the Texas festivals differ- ent from, say, the Roswell UFO Festival, or any number of researcher gatherings. Torres and Uriarte hold their festivals near purported alien sites to tantalize alien hunters, but the events also illuminate little-known bits of hometown history for locals. Sometimes new witnesses are even convinced to come forward. “Folks will come up and start saying, ‘You know what, I’ve never shared this experience with anyone, but I want to share it with you,’” Uriarte says. “They come to a venue like this where it’s open, and they hear other people talking, they feel safer. They’re not going to be ridiculed.” That’s what happened in Presidio, after a festival commemorating the 1974 midair collision between a flying saucer and a small plane. Torres and Uriarte pre- sented the evidence they’d put into their book Mexico’s Roswell, and at the end of the day local schoolteacher Johnnie Chambers and her son John walked up from the audience to say they remembered seeing explo- sions that day over the mountains in Mexico. In Presidio, as in Del Rio, most locals didn’t know their hometown was a landmark of such potentially Over the years, Willingham’s story had been the interplanetary significance. Brad Newton had only subject of a local news report in Dallas and a documen- heard rumors of the UFO crash when he took over as tary on Japanese TV. But Torres says UFO researchers the town’s tourism director in 2009, but he quickly had fudged the date of Willingham’s sighting to better saw an opportunity to draw out-of-towners to explore position it within the lore of alien visits. Torres, whose Big Bend’s mysterious side. Anyway, he figured, writing career began with books about Texas history Presidio needed to fill the void left in its fall calendar and baseball in the Rio Grande Valley, tries to avoid where the annual Onion Festival used to be. (Presidio unsupported leaps from evidence to conclusion when once claimed the title of “Onion Capital of the World,” writing about encounters with alien ships. In his book but the onion business, and the festival, withered after about a reported UFO sighting near Laredo, he con- labor laws enacted in the ’90s sucked the profit from cludes that aliens may not have been involved at all. the crop, which till then had been picked by low-wage “We don’t do a lot of editorializing and theorizing on workers who crossed the border for the work.) what might or might not have happened,” he says. “We A UFO festival offered a chance to celebrate a less just tell the story from the witness’ perspective.” fraught cross-border relationship. Newton worked Though cautious at first, the Mexican authori- with the mayor of nearby Ojinaga to host the festival’s ties surrounding the downed UFO let Willingham first night on the Mexican side of the border before approach—out of deference, the pilot figured, to his moving to the U.S. side for the second day. The arrange- Air Force uniform. At the end of a trail of debris, a ment saved some speakers the trouble of getting papers 25-foot-diameter saucer was wedged into a sandy for a cross-border visit, and it was a charming gesture

40 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org of the towns’ shared history; Newton says the challenge crowd of 400 or so is wearing a headband with green facing border-area tourism directors is to embrace alien heads bouncing on springs. Onstage, Del Rio’s “These aren’t their proximity to Mexico, not deny it. “The ‘Laredo is own alien mannequin—this one is named Phish— Safe’ campaign was well intentioned, but the people in presides silently over the affair. There are plenty of crackpots. Laredo didn’t realize they weren’t [considered] safe,” retirement-age couples in the crowd, and almost as Newton says. “Our sister city here, Ojinaga, is definitely many people of high school or college age. Whole fam- They’re credible safe. The bogeyman doesn’t live here.” ilies have turned up with little kids, too, to spend the But a 5-foot alien does. Decked out in Mardi Gras day at an event that—despite the offbeat subject mat- people that beads and a Presidio Art Fest T-shirt—but no pants— ter—is basically a lecture series. he travels around town posing for photos promoting Tonight there’ll be a parade, then a costume contest have seen Presidio’s next big UFO party. Most of the time he and a party in the park. stays in Newton’s office. “In his nakedness, he’s a little To Uriarte, the alien-head headbands and costumes something bit intimidating to have everywhere,” Newton says. are the cost of doing business, but a little embarrass- When Newton was planning Presidio’s first UFO fes- ing nonetheless. “It’s almost like you have to develop a that they can’t tival, he scored a deal on the mannequin, which takes carnival-type atmosphere to attract people, and that’s the glassy-eyed, scrawny-but-potbellied form of what just part of it. You almost have to look the other way, explain, and it’s extraterrestrial aficionados call “the grays.” Newton seeing the guy with a tinfoil hat,” he says. “But on the named it E.B.E., for “Extraterrestrial Biological other hand, they’re there to learn.” a really good Entity,” and decided it was male, though that choice Saturday’s programming is dense. Each of the pre- seems physiologically arbitrary. To save on shipping, sentations, stacked one after the next with a short opportunity E.B.E. arrived in Presidio riding a Greyhound bus. break for lunch, deals obsessively with dates, times Newton, a fifth-generation Texan raised in Fort and other forensic minutiae. Even Travis Walton— for folks to Stockton, has fun hamming it up every October, now relating the story of how he was knocked unconscious, that the UFO fest has become a Presidio tradition. He sucked aboard an alien ship, awakened on an operat- share their appears in character every year as a Man in Black, pos- ing table, and how he scrambled for freedom through ing for photos with a stern face in a dark suit and black the ship’s corridors—spends half an hour picking apart story without fedora. With Presidio’s festival so close to Halloween, police records and the faults in Hollywood’s treatment a costume contest is a natural fit. After the lectures of his ordeal before delving into the crowd-pleasing ridicule.” are done, the visiting researchers pile into convert- territory of UFO layout sketches and existential ibles and flatbed trailers for a parade through town. dread. Stanton Friedman gives two lectures—one a They investigate the Marfa Lights, check out the pre- sort of primer on UFO evidence, the other romanti- historic cave paintings around Cibolo Creek Ranch, cally titled “A New View of the Cosmos”—both full of and hunt for ghosts at Fort Leaton, the 1848 outpost facts and photographs of primary documents. Faced built atop a former Spanish mission where, accord- with broad skepticism, ufologists like Friedman rely ing to one story, Ben Leaton exacted revenge on a on precision and exactitude in defense. group of Native Americans by inviting them to dinner, then unloading his cannons into a roomful of his own In their quest to make sense of the universe, guests. There, the party joins with the annual Dude today’s mainstream scientists peel away history frac- of the Dead Music Festival, where musicians from all tions of a second at a time, back toward the inscrutable around Big Bend—usually including Presidio Mayor moment when everything began. Before the earliest John Ferguson and his mariachi band—converge on moment we can grasp, there’s only speculation and Fort Leaton for late-night jam sessions. “I really don’t faith. For most of us, the existence of life on other know what the Burning Man thing is, but it’s been compared to that,” Newton says. HAS A In Big Bend, such gatherings are in keeping with a long tradition. “We have the dark skies here,” Newton says. “You can see the Milky Way from horizon to horizon. The moon comes up, you get a moon tan.” Faced with such a display of the universe’s scale, it’s T-Shirts only natural to look up and wonder. The festival is a chance to wonder together. $15-$17.50 “These aren’t crackpots. They’re credible people that have seen something that they can’t explain, and THE TEXAS it’s a really good opportunity for folks to share their story without ridicule,” Newton says. OBSERVER It’s the same story at the Del Rio UFO Festival, which features a Friday night ghost hunt in down- HAS A town’s 67-year-old Paul Poag Theatre. Saturday’s lectures include one by Torres and Uriarte, who relate Willingham’s tale of the UFO that crashed about seven years after the theater was built, and just NEW! a few miles away. Vendors sell snacks and hot coffee in the lobby—the CHECK OUT OUR NEW DESIGNS! heat is out and the theater is freezing—and a few of STORE the speakers sell their books at a line of tables. Even the most otherwise serious-looking member of this Available on T-shirts, Koozies, and Tote Bags at www.texasobserver.org/store june 2014 the te xas observer | 41 planets—big, sentient animals with spaceships who nearby, posing for photos and signing books. Friedman Travis Walton can come find us—is another such mystery. We reach tells me later that this is his favorite time of any festi- for an answer, collecting clues along the way, but never val: chewing over mysteries with the locals. Though he relates the quite know. The question we ask each other, in the remains as pedantic offstage as on, he’s charming one- absence of proof, is whether we believe. on-one and seems younger in this context than his 78 story of Friedman and many others in this Del Rio theater years. As Friedman fields metaphysical theories from already have their answer. The more maddening ques- strangers, Walton answers questions about his abduc- how he was tion is why others disbelieve so fiercely. Friedman has tion. The small crowd leans in to hear more, locals and been fighting skeptics for decades, and he must have out-of-towners, devout believers and agnostics alike, knocked long ago tired of repeating the same old debates, but sharing the glow of the trees strung with lights, won- it’s still startling to hear the ferocity with which he dering together at the darkness all around. unconscious, lays into someone like popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson for doubting the UFO record. But sucked aboard after putting his reputation on the line for so long, it’s no wonder Friedman takes it personally. “If they can’t Drift an alien ship, attack the data, [they] attack the people,” he explains. “They think we’re idiots. I don’t think we are.” by Christia awakened on Melanie Young, keeper of the Starchild skull, seems similarly bedeviled by skeptics. “This is seri- Madacsi Hoffman an operating ous science,” she reassures us during her talk. “It is not a hoax.” She complains about how much time I was in the old neighborhood last night table, and how she spends online, trying to set the skull record straight. She reserves particular scorn for what she It glowed with new lights he scrambled calls “Wackipedia.” “There is a conspiracy, if you will, against the that weren’t lit when I was there for freedom Starchild skull,” she says. I’d naively hoped to get a look at the skull this week- I felt the weight of change through end, but as Young proceeds through her PowerPoint it becomes clear that won’t be happening. Eventually, settling in my heart and head the ship’s she casually mentions that of course none of us will see the Starchild skull at an event like this—a roomful What would I do if I lived here still corridors. of human DNA could contaminate it. “Are you worried about the government seizing it?” How can this shift happen so swiftly in my absence someone asks at the end of her talk. Young pauses before answering: “None of us are as if I’d never been standing on this corner willing to die for it.” Her words hang over what feels to me like an running in the morning uncomfortable silence before the applause takes hold and she leaves the stage. by the quiet of the street In June, Edinburg’s new convention center will play host to the next UFO conference, with headlin- walking in the open fields ing experts on the Roswell crash and alien abductions. Del Rio will repeat its UFO festival next year as well. dogs unleashed and free Uriarte says they like to vary the subjects—government conspiracies, alien sightings, cattle mutilations—and We couldn’t do that now find new speakers to keep the programming fresh. On Saturday night in Del Rio, the packed theater A steady stream of cars empties onto Main Street and the crowd parades to a downtown park. The festival’s VIPs ride a flatbed flows down fresh roads trailer complete with a lit-up silver UFO. Beside a pagoda, Langford announces the winner of the cos- no longer ours to fill with our own voices tume contest: a local family doctor who, like his wife, is wearing bright-green face paint, an olive-green I’m not sure how to feel about the pace of drift jumpsuit and a pair of antennae. Their little black dog is wearing an alien costume too. For besting the other in a place I once called home contenders, the doctor wins tickets to Roswell’s UFO museum, a Fire in the Sky DVD, and a free trip to the Christia Madacsi Hoffman is a graphic designer, writer, Gatti’s Pizza buffet. copy editor and actor in Austin. She is also the co- Walton and Friedman hold court at a folding table founder of MamaLingua, an app development company.

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42 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org billminutaglio state of the media To Each According to Greed

he New York Times dutifully took note of Toyota’s late- April announcement that it will move its corporate headquarters from Southern California to Plano over the next three years. The nation’s paper of record reported that as many as 4,000 employees may be relocated, and then added a cele- bratory couple of sentences: ¶ “The move is a victory for Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and his campaign to woo businesses from California. Toyota considered several sites in the United States before deciding on the Dallas area, where taxes, real estate and other costs are considerably lower than California’s.” TThe Times piece neglected to mention that the two days before the Toyota announcement asking move by Toyota—a company posting $23 billion in whether Davis or Abbott would have offered the grant. Precious few 2013 profits—will be greased with $40 million from The paper boldly said that Perry’s “pet” project needed Rick Perry’s Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF). “a strict accounting of all profits and losses.” Texas reporters The TEF is an under-scrutinized program that But why aren’t Texas news outlets doing their own Texas’ mainstream media routinely ignores. Worse, audits of every dollar Perry has handed to Oracle, have explored the fund’s “successes” are often celebrated blindly. Dow Chemical, Home Depot, Visa, Frito-Lay, Kohl’s Perry advertises the TEF as a carrot to lure jobs to Department Stores, Facebook, Petco, Lockheed Perry’s Texas. But critics have long maintained that it’s more a Martin, T-Mobile, even the U.S. Bowling Congress? Perry slush fund designed to help political patrons. The Lauren McGaughy of the Houston Chronicle, the largesse, and TEF has drawn the attention of Mother Jones, which did state’s biggest paper, did a story in which Toyota a takedown last year. And critics on the left and the right admitted that the car giant didn’t actually care about whether the have called it one of the biggest examples of corporate the $40 million, thank you very much. “That wasn’t welfare in America. For example: In 2012, Apple, Inc. one of the major reasons (in) deciding to go to Texas,” Toyota money— got $21 million from the TEF (despite having more Toyota spokesperson Amanda Rice told the Chronicle. cash in its coffers than the United Kingdom has in its Texas Monthly, meanwhile, opined that TEF’s Toyota one of TEF’s treasury) to help open a new Austin campus, and last grant is “Expensive, to be sure, but hopefully the invest- year Chevron ($240 billion in 2012 revenue) picked ment will put a muffler on critics.” And mirroringThe biggest gifts up $12 million in TEF money for an office expansion New York Times, The Dallas Morning News wrote that in Houston (see “Oiling the Skids for Chevron in “Toyota’s decision to build a new North American head- ever—could be Houston,” July 29, 2013, texasobserver.org). quarters in Plano gives Gov. Rick Perry more bragging The problem is that there’s little evidence the TEF rights .” The TEF is mentioned in that piece’s ninth put to better money does what Perry says it’s supposed to. And paragraph, but with no reference to its controversies. since the money is appropriated by the Legislature Echoing the others, Forbes posted a horserace use. out of the state’s general fund, it’s effectively taken out piece concentrating almost exclusively on the “Texas of the hands of desperately necessary and chronically vs. California” angle. Forbes trotted out one of the underfunded programs throughout the state: children’s state’s stalwart quote machines on economic devel- health insurance, environmental remediation, men- opment, Southern Methodist University’s Bernard tal health services, anti-poverty programs, and on and Weinstein, who told the magazine that Texas could on. But in the recent breathless media coverage about offer Toyota “some excellent suburban school sys- Toyota, precious few Texas reporters have explored tems where, I assume, most of the kids [of Toyota Perry’s largesse, and whether the Toyota money—one staffers] will be attending.” See the recipients of Gov. of TEF’s biggest gifts ever—could be put to better use. It was perhaps an unsubtle nod to the fact that the Perry’s Texas Enterprise Fund grants at txlo.com/fund Even fewer members of the Texas media are holding white-collar Toyota employees coming to Texas will Wendy Davis and Greg Abbott to account about their be earning salaries in the six-figure range. respective plans for the TEF once Perry leaves office. And maybe it was an unsubtle reminder as well The Texas Tribune did take a stab at it earlier this that the Texas media needs to do more to report on year, and in a more recent and incredibly prescient whether it’s good public policy to throw money we instance, The Beaumont Enterprise ran an editorial can’t afford at companies that don’t need it.

june 2014 the te xas observer | 43 forrestwilder Forrest for the trees

Greg Abbott’s Frivolous Lawsuits reg Abbott is applying for a new job, as Texas governor, and he’s been very clear about what he does in his current position as Texas Attorney General: “I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home.” ¶ We get it. Greg Abbott really hates Obama and is proudly litigious. And that’s probably enough for most of the folks who show up to vote in Texas. ¶ But what about that job per- formance thing? Anyone can sue. How many lawsuits has he won? ¶ Fact is, Abbott’s record in court is mixed at best, and arguably pretty terrible on the biggest cases. In all, Abbott has sued the federal Ggovernment 33 times. In the most charitable light— change—an area where Texas Republicans have Anyone the one that Abbott’s Attorney General’s Office been bananas of late. uses—he’s had 10 outright victories and seven losses; Consider, for example, Abbott’s quixotic fight can sue. one partial win; six losses in the lower courts that against the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations. First, a have been appealed; three voluntary dismissals; and little background: In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled How many six lawsuits pending with no court ruling yet. in Massachusetts v. EPA that the EPA does have the But this count is misleading. For example, Abbott authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate cli- lawsuits has counts as “wins” two instances in which he asked mate-altering greenhouse gas emissions from cars. a federal court in Washington, D.C., to give Texas It was a victory for the 12 blue states—the dreaded he won? “preclearance” under the Voting Rights Act for a California among them—that sued the Bush EPA to redistricting plan and the state’s controversial voter force some action on climate change. ID law. Preclearance is—or was, until last year—a Texas and nine other states, along with carbon- requirement of the Voting Rights Act for states, like intensive industries, sided with the losing Bush Texas, with a history of discrimination at the polls. administration. Still, Texas has kept up a legal guer- If you want to make changes to the election system, rilla war ever since—with virtually nothing to show you can either ask the Department of Justice for per- for it. Texas was the only state to refuse to issue green- mission or sue. In both cases, the D.C. court rejected house gas permits to major carbon-emitting facilities, Abbott’s request for preclearance. Texas got out from a purely political decision that put industry in a bind under preclearance only because the U.S. Supreme and forced the feds to take over and issue permits Court later gutted the Voting Rights Act. themselves. Texas and Wyoming sued the EPA in And Abbott counts the Supreme Court’s uphold- 2010, but the D.C. appellate court tossed out the suit in ing of the Affordable Care Act a partial victory July 2013, ruling that the two states had no standing. because the justices ruled that the federal govern- Earlier that year the Texas Legislature passed a law ment can’t force the states to expand Medicaid. I forcing the state environmental agency to issue green- think it’s safe to say that most legal scholars con- house gas permits. The first state-issued permits were sider the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare mailed out in March. Bottom-line: The whole four- an overwhelming win for Obama, given the conser- year debacle was a colossal waste of time and money. vative bent of the court and the absolutism on the Abbott also suffered a major loss in April when the Republican side. Supreme Court, in a 6-2 decision, reinstated an EPA My tougher tally puts Abbott at six clear-cut wins; program that limits pollution blowing from one state nine outright losses; six defeats in the lower courts into another. Abbott—along with a slew of carbon- that are on appeal; and 12 undecided lawsuits, vol- based industry interests and other states—is facing untary dismissals and cases with inconclusive another big potential loss at the Supreme Court in outcomes. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s a another round of greenhouse gas litigation. losing record. Greg Abbott clearly loves to sue the federal gov- Abbott’s highest-profile wipe-outs have cen- ernment, and it makes for good politics in Texas. But tered on environmental law, especially climate he hasn’t been very good at it.

44 | the te xas observer www.texasobserver.org eye on texas Sandy Carson

WE WERE THERE This project explores the symbiotic relationship between rock-concert fans, bands and photographers at music festivals. Without the band there are no fans; without the fans there is no band. One cannot exist with- out the other. It is also a self-portrait of a music fan, musician and photographer who has been on both sides of the stage, barrier and photo pit. The project’s images were made over the last seven years on assignment at various music festivals in Austin. They were taken during the first three songs of each concert. This photo is of the crowd for Odd Future at the Historic Scoot Inn, part of the Thrasher Death Match showcase at SXSW 2011.

See more of Austin photographer Sandy Carson’s work at www.texasobserver.org/eyeontexas. CALL FOR ENTRIES: Seeking Texas-based documentary photography that captures the strangest state. Please send inquiries to [email protected].

june 2014 the te xas observer | 45 Give like Molly

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