Assassination or a Suicide?
Questions linger about the untimely death of Texas civil rights leader Frank J. Robinson.
by DAVID MARTIN DAVIES
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
EDITOR- IN - CHIEF Gabriel Arana
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Ivan Armando Flores
SENIOR WRITER & EDITOR Lise Olsen
EDITOR-AT- LARGE Gayle Reaves
DIGITAL EDITOR Kit O’Connell
SENIOR WRITER & ASSISTANT EDITOR Gus Bova
SENIOR WRITER Justin Miller
STAFF WRITERS Delger Erdenesanaa, Michelle Pitcher
EDITORIAL FELLOW Arman Badrei
INTERN Ikram Mohamed
POETRY EDITOR Naomi Shihab Nye
STAFF CARTOONIST Ben Sargent
COPY EDITOR Adam Muro
FACT CHECKERS Zein Jardaneh, Christopher Collins
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Dylan Baddour, David Marin Davies, Kim Horner, Monty Jones, and Nguyên Lê
CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS
Clay Rodery, Ibrahim Rayintakath, and Drue Wagner
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Mark Felix, Jesse Freidin, Mark Noble, Shelby Tauber
MANAGING DIRECTOR James Canup
DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Lauren Benavides
OPERATIONS MANAGER Marva Mouser
SPECIAL ADVISOR Bob Frump
TEXAS DEMOCRACY FOUNDATION BOARD
Laura Hernandez-Holmes (president), Carlton Carl, Saneta Devuono-Powell, Reeve Hamilton, Carrie James, Vince LoVoi, Cari Marshall, Abby Rapoport, Ronald Rapoport, Peter Ravella, Ronnie Dugger (emeritus)
FOUNDING EDITOR Ronnie Dugger
When the Rio Grande ran dry last summer, a growing cross-border conflict over water rights came into sharp focus.
As Texas’ population booms and climate change bakes the land, the state’s lifeblood—its rivers—are drying up. In this issue, we inaugurate “Drifting Toward Disaster,” a series that takes a hard look at how regulators, big ag, and big business have long failed to protect the state’s rivers. In the first installment, contributor Dylan Baddour looks at the Rio Grande, which has been drained by development on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border.
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The Texas Observer is a progressive nonprofit news outlet and print magazine covering the Lone Star State. The Observer strives to make Texas a more equitable place through investigative reporting, narrative storytelling, and political and cultural coverage and commentary. We dig
The Texas Observer is also proud to publish the 2021 winner of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference’s Ten Spurs Award, a reported narrative by journalist Kim Horner. And we’re co-sponsoring this year’s contest. Elsewhere, contributor David Martin Davies re-examines the 1976 unsolved murder of civil rights leader Frank J. Robinson, whose suspicious death was ruled a suicide—all evidence to the contrary. Decades later, documents that could prove he was murdered have gone missing, though witnesses remain. Staff Writer Michelle Pitcher traveled to the state prison in Huntsville, where prisoners benefit from restored federal funding for higher education. Photographer Jesse Freidin sat down with trans kids and their families, who under Governor Greg Abbott’s policy are subject to child abuse investigations for seeking gender-affirming medical care.
GABRIEL ARANA Editor-in-ChiefIn lighter fare, Editor-at-Large Gayle Reaves reports on Limpia Crossing, a community where amateur astronomers complement the work of the professionals at the nearby McDonald Observatory. Reaves and Digital Editor Kit O’Connell checked in on indie bookstores across the state, which have enjoyed a resurgence in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
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Laws banning the state from doing business with banks that are dubbed anti-fossil fuel or anti-gun will likely cost hundreds of millions in higher interest rates.
by JUSTIN MILLERRepublicans’ moralizing, “anti-woke” crusade has entered the arena of fiscal governance, and it’s likely to cost taxpayers, pensioners, municipalities, and everyday Texans a big chunk of change.
Last fall, new state laws went into effect that prohibit governmental entities from engaging with financial institutions that the state deems to be anti-fossil fuel, antigun, and, thus, anti-Texas.
These laws, passed overwhelmingly by the Republican-controlled Legislature, are the latest and most expansive in a suite of legislation that makes the state the ultimate arbiter of all that is good and bad. In effect, the power of the purse is weaponized to protect the interests of the conservative cause and punish its enemies. Namely, what the right has cast as the Woke of Wall Street—the big banks and investment firms like Citigroup and BlackRock that ostensibly engage in socially conscious investing, which includes pledges and specialized investment funds that may exclude gun manufacturers or oil companies.
For a party that once claimed the mantle of free markets in Texas, Republicans— led by Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Comptroller Glenn Hegar—are embracing a new form of social, cultural, and economic protectionism.
Its first foray came when lawmakers passed a law back in 2017 that forbade
the government from contracting with any people or companies that engaged in the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” movement that targets Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. Republicans had to dramatically rework that law in the following session when it became clear that it was unconstitutional and practically unworkable. The biggest result was that Airbnb was put on a state blacklist that forbade major state purchases and investments in the property rental giant.
One recent study by a public finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a fiscal analyst at the Federal Reserve estimates that the state’s law banning firms that boycott oil and gas investments—often through what are known as environmental, social, and governance (better known as ESG) funds—have forced out the biggest issuers of local bonds in Texas. That, the researchers found, could cost local government entities—and ultimately taxpayers—as much as $530 million in higher interest costs on debt used to finance new school construction, roads, and other infrastructure.
Some of the biggest bond players in Texas—JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs—have either pulled out of the state or lost significant market share because of the new laws.
In September, the small town of Anna in Collin County declined to give a $100
million bond deal to Citigroup, despite it having offered the best terms, because the state is still determining whether the Wall Street giant has run afoul of its new law forbidding banks from discriminating against the gun industry. After consulting with the Texas Attorney General’s Office and its own legal advisors, the city opted to go with the second-best bid for the bonds instead. The city said that this deal, with Robert W. Baird & Co., would cost about $275,000 more over 25 years, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Bond houses have taken to marketing themselves as certifiably compliant with Texas’ protectionist laws. In its proposal to handle what is likely to be the biggest bond deal in state history—$3.4 billion to securitize the long-term debt incurred by the energy industry in the deadly winter storm of 2021—Jefferies Financial Group touted its compliance with these laws.
“We were not forced to resign from any transactions in the State nor were we identified in the press or mentioned in the State Legislative Hearings,” the firm’s pitch stated, according to Bloomberg. Since the laws went into effect in September 2021, Jefferies has surged from the sixth- to second-largest bond issuer in Texas.
Despite other banks offering more competitive terms, Jefferies ultimately won the deal to finance the long-term financial fallout from the storm and will earn about
$13 million in fees for doing so. That likely means that the cost of this bailout—which average ratepayers will be paying off for decades to come—is higher than it needed to be.
It’s not just local government bonds and utility ratepayers. Retired teachers, publicsector workers, local firefighters, police, and other emergency responders who all
depend on their government pensions to survive could also feel the pain from these laws. Public pensions—ranging from the multi-billion-dollar Teachers Retirement System, one of the largest in the country, to small municipal retirement funds—all have to abide by these laws, which require pension managers to scour their investment portfolios and divest from any problematic
funds, no matter how profitable they are.
In late August, Comptroller Hegar revealed the state’s new anti-oil and gas blacklist, featuring 10 banks and nearly 350 investment funds that were alleged to be fossil-fuel haters. “A vibrant Texas oil and gas industry is a stabilizing force in today’s economic and geopolitical environment,” Hegar said in a statement. “My greatest concern is the false narrative that has been created by the environmental crusaders in Washington, D.C., and Wall Street that our economy can completely transition away from fossil fuels, when, in fact, they will be part of our everyday life into the foreseeable future.”
Despite insisting that it did not discriminate against the fossil fuel industry, BlackRock, the world’s largest financial manager, was included on that list.
What’s good enough for Texas must be good enough for its most powerful politicians, right? Well, apparently not for Lieutenant Governor Patrick, who led the push in 2021 to pass these laws. In a letter, he personally demanded that Hegar blacklist BlackRock, which he called the “worst offender” for “capriciously discriminating against the oil and gas industry.”
“Texas will not do business with those that boycott fossil fuels,” he proclaimed. As the Texas Monthly discovered in September, Patrick had substantial personal investments in BlackRock, including mutual funds that were on the Texas comptroller’s forbidden list.
kept in storage units he rented, looking like he belonged in a jazz quartet.
“He had so much character and soul,” as one of the teachers put it.
said that many homeless people “make it their own choice” to sleep outside on the ground instead of going to shelters. Was Joe really living the life he wanted? Or was he unable to make the best decisions for himself?
By late 2019, years of living outside were taking a toll on Joe. After experiencing pain, he agreed to see a doctor, who found he had kidney stones. Joe needed surgery but first needed to clear up an infection. He stayed with two of his brothers in their impeccable South Dallas home. As soon as his infection cleared, Joe headed back to Laughlin Drive. Over the next several months, he missed so many medical appointments, complicated by being on the streets, that his surgery got postponed.
Months passed. The weather got colder. Joe stayed outside while his family and friends worried, unable to guard the guardian. By this point, the school asked Joe to leave after receiving complaints about the growing collection of scavenged goods he brought to the property. Joe moved across the street, sleeping outside the house of a woman who tried to help.
The night of February 13, 2020 was one of the season’s coldest. Joe slept outside, next to the neighbor’s house. The next morning, she brought him coffee and breakfast. She tried to wake him up, but he didn’t respond. He had died sometime during the early morning hours. It was Valentine’s Day.
Joe lived on a grassy area at the edge of the parking lot of the Creative Arts Center of Dallas. All the regulars at the community arts school knew the handsome, slender, gentle man in his 70s with the gray beard, who often could be found tinkering with the tools he scavenged or resting on a cushion on top of a concrete block. Joe would greet them with a big smile and raise two fingers in a peace sign. Students and teachers would bring him something to eat or drink and hang around to talk. Joe would ask about how their children or parents were doing.
Joe had been a fixture there for at least 15 years. Nobody knew exactly when he began living on the school’s grounds. At one time, he lived in one of the modest wood frame houses on the same street, Laughlin Drive. The neighborhood was his home, and he did not want to leave. Not even to stay with family members who ached to get him off the streets.
So, there he was, living outside in the rain, freezing winter, and suffocating Texas heat, one of at least 500,000 estimated homeless people across the United States, a disproportionate number of them Black men like Joe.
I met Joe on a near-freezing night when I went with a friend who took classes at the school to check on him. As we parked, we could see Joe sitting in the cold and the moonlight. He stood up, walked over and smiled. We shook hands, and he cupped his hands over mine.
“How are you?”
“I am blessed,” he said, pointing to the heavens. He said God was taking care of him.
My friend asked if he could call Joe’s family so he could have a warm place to stay. Joe declined, saying his phone was charged if he needed to call. Joe spent his small Social Security checks on his phone and storage units to house the treasures he found on his walks. Even when his family convinced him to visit, he didn’t stay long. He said he needed to go back to his “empire,” leaving his family heartbroken and baffled.
“We slowly began to accept and understand, he’s at peace with himself on Laughlin Drive, this is his happy place,” said his sister, Linda.
From behind the short chain-link metal fence that ran along the street, Joe was the school’s unofficial night watchman, shooing away potential vandals, thieves, and intruders.
“I never, ever felt threatened by Joe; I felt protected,” said Diana Pollak, the center’s executive director. “When my car was stolen from the parking lot one day, he helped identify the kids who had been hanging around the sculpture garden–it was them.”
Joe watched over the school, and the school watched over him. Students and teachers brought him sweet potatoes, clothes, shoes, blankets, and cake on his birthday. In turn, he gave tools to one instructor and taught her how to scavenge. He insisted on giving a neighbor a bottle of water from his cooler on a hot day. To many, Joe was more than a guardian; he was a guardian angel.
Joe also became a highly sought-after model for figure drawing and clay sculpture classes. He would show up in double-starched overalls or a suit, tie, and hat, which he
Joe was the second oldest of eight kids, a “young man with responsibility,” his family remembered, as he took care of his younger siblings while their mom worked nights after their parents separated. Joe shined shoes to help feed the family. Later, he moved to Los Angeles and worked in construction and as a commercial-licensed driver. He married, had a son, divorced, and ended up back in Dallas. He graduated from ATI Technical School in 1985 as a licensed certified mechanic, earning the honor of being a “perfect attendance” graduate.
Nobody knew why such a smart, kind, hardworking, successful man, who had a loving family, ended up living on the streets. Former President Ronald Reagan famously
On a cold, cloudy afternoon later that month, Joe’s family and friends from the art school gathered at a memorial service at a Dallas funeral home. Photos showed Joe, smiling, wearing pressed suits, with his mom, sisters, and brothers from happier times. Joe’s family members talked about their struggle to do the only thing we can do sometimes for the people we love: accept them without trying to change or “fix” them.
“We loved him where he was,” his sister, Cheryl, said. As his brothers, sisters, and friends took turns speaking, Joe was remembered as the devoted big brother and the kind friend.
“It is a blessing to have a brother with integrity and honesty like Joe,” his brother, Larry, said later. “Since the time I was a young boy to the day he passed, Joe never stopped being a steady rock in my life and the life of others. He was always there in difficult times and never let us forget we will get through this together.”
Pollak, the arts center’s executive director, spoke about how Joe “taught us all about creating a sense of home and community, but who had no home himself.
“To me, that was the irony of Joe,” Pollak said. Joe was remembered as a man who lived life on his own terms, for better or worse. “He’s still our guardian angel,” one of the teachers said at the memorial. “He’s definitely watching over us. I don’t think he’s ever going to leave.”
“WE SLOWLY BEGAN TO ACCEPT HE’S AT PEACE WITH HIMSELF ON LAUGHLIN DRIVE. THIS IS HIS HAPPY PLACE.”Award-winning journalist Kim Horner is the author of Probably Someday Cancer: Genetic Risk and Preventative Mastectomy published by UNT Press. A longer version of this essay won a Ten Spurs Award from the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in 2021 and will be published in this year’s Ten Spurs Journal. The Texas Observer is helping sponsor the Mayborn’s writing contests this year.
Todd Votteler mediates water disputes for a living. Amid pressures of drought, climate change, and development, he has ideas for how Texas can prevent a future of water wars.
INTERVIEW By DELGER ERDENESANAA
Cities and farmers in Central Texas used to pump groundwater from the Edwards Aquifer much more freely— draining local springs and rivers and depriving several endangered species of a habitat. In the 1990s, the Sierra Club sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on these creatures’ behalf.
As lawsuits dragged on, a drought arrived, and the court called on a young researcher named Todd Votteler to shepherd the aquifer through the crisis. He hastily slapped together a management plan, and somehow, the region pulled through. The litigation created the Edwards Aquifer Authority and spurred San Antonio—then entirely dependent on the aquifer—to diversify its water supply sources.
As climate change distorts the water cycle and Texas’ population and industry swell, this recent history is perhaps a preview of things to come, with implications well beyond our state. Notably, Texas is embroiled in a decadelong lawsuit against New Mexico over a lack of water flowing down the Rio Grande. The dispute has dragged on in Colorado as well and is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, although the states’ attorneys hope to reach a settlement this year.
Texas Observer: What are the biggest issues facing the state’s rivers today?
Todd Votteler: Oh, boy. One is the current drought. I’m sure you’re familiar with the situation on the Rio Grande.
The Rio Grande is influenced by snowpack. And snowpack has not been good in the southern Colorado region that makes up the headwaters. So you’ve got the drought, and you’ve got declining snowpack, which is related to climate change.
Then you have a dispute between Texas and New Mexico and Colorado before the U.S. Supreme Court over how we decide whether deliveries under the compact between those states are getting to Texas. You have the dispute internationally between the United States and Mexico over the Rio Grande, having to do with deliveries from Mexico to Texas. Mexico’s under a longterm drought, too.
When you look at other rivers, the big issues there—besides the drought—are the preservation of the aquatic environment through [river] flows and what is flowing into the bays and estuaries of Texas.
reservoirs are in pretty depleted condition. That raises a lot of issues going forward if this drought turns out to be another multi-year drought.
How does this year’s drought compare to what has happened historically?
There have been major multiyear droughts in Texas that exceed the drought in the 1950s, which we call the drought of record. Using tree ring chronologies in Texas, we reconstructed the drought cycle back to 1500. Long story short, we found droughts that were worse than the drought of record in Texas in previous centuries. That study was done prior to the drought of 2011, which ended in 2015 when we had the flood in Wimberley. That was the most recent multi-year drought that impacted the entire state.
Given climate change, even going back to the 1500s might not be that helpful in predicting what’s to come, right?
are skeptical about projections and models. What we are trying to tell them is, “Look, this is what the biological data recorded in these trees tell us.” That had a much greater rate of acceptance from all audiences. They were saying, “Okay, we see that. Boy, that’s awful.” What happens in the future, you can’t really know, can you? That’s one of the things which makes drought management so difficult. You never know when you are in the first day of the next drought.
If you were in charge, how would you make sure we have enough water?
We have a system in place, and completely replacing it would probably be more problematic than modifying it in some key areas. There’s a real need for a diversity of supplies. A lot of cities have a lot of surface water, but they don’t really have groundwater supplies, or they’ve not invested in water reuse.
changing the mix of crops in parts of the state that don’t get a whole lot of rain. You look at pecans, pistachios, almonds— those crops have got to have water every year. It’s not like a rice crop or a corn where you might be able to take a year off because the drought is so bad. There are some places in Texas where it might make more sense to have a different mix of crops.
But how is that transition going to happen? That can be more than someone who’s in farming can manage financially. So it makes sense for cities that could benefit to help in that transition, for cities to contract with farmers to say, “Listen, there’s not enough water to go around and we could really use your water during a dry year. And so we’ll pay you every year, a little money. And then that year where we really need you not to irrigate, we’ll pay you a lot more.”
Other things that I’m keeping my eyes on: In West Texas,
You’re right. It’s not helpful for that. What it’s helpful for is communicating drought risk to a wide audience. A lot of people
The majority of water used in the state of Texas is used for agriculture. There’s a real incentive for us to help farmers use less water so that the supplies they’re drawing from, particularly aquifers, are not depleted.
And then we use a lot of water for urban landscape irrigation, in July and August primarily, which is the most problematic time. So there’s a real need for us to figure out ways to use less water. That can mean landscaping with native plants, and it can mean removing turf or putting in varieties that use less water. A lot can be accomplished just by watering differently—fewer times, but you water more so the roots of grasses grow deeper
and they are better able to survive dry periods.
These are challenges that are not insurmountable, but there’s a lot of education that needs to go along with them. It requires people to do things differently.
and some farming communities have already dried out. Is having cities work together with farmers a way to preempt conflicts?
Right. There are ways for municipal and industrial interests to work with the agricultural community to free up some water and to do it in a way that preserves those communities.
Votteler is now a fellow at the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, editor of the Texas Water Journal, and president of a water conflict mediation firm. The Texas Observer asked him how Texas can sustain its rivers and water supplies into the future. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
As you mentioned, the majority of the state’s water use goes to agriculture. But there’s also a sense that our cities are growing; they need more and more water;
There is a possibility of
We have two well-structured water markets in Texas: one’s the groundwater market in the Edwards Aquifer Authority, and the other is the Rio Grande from Falcon (Reservoir) to the coast. Those programs work. Those farmers can dryland farm or do something else that year. But they’re being compensated—that’s the important thing. And the cities or industries relying on that water supply have another tool for meeting their needs. Both markets have been functioning for a number of years. They both resulted from situations where people got into a crisis over the management of those resources. It would be better if we could figure out ways to introduce some of those principles without getting into a crisis first.
No wild buffalo have roamed Big Bend country for decades, yet locals and tourists kept reporting encounters with a bison bull near the Chisos Basin in August. The bull, some say, is possibly an escapee from Bruce Ranch, a family-owned outfit with domestic herds near Marathon, the Big Bend Sentinel reported.
Can you get an A in Taylor Swift? In the fall 2022 semester, the University of Texas at Austin is offering a course on the megastar’s discography. With so many fine Texas musicians around, why does Swift, a native Pennsylvanian, merit academic attention? As English professor Elizabeth Scala told KXAN: “I want to take what Swift fans can already do at a sophisticated level, tease it out for them a bit with a different vocabulary, and then show them how, in fact, Swift draws on richer literary traditions in her songwriting.”
Texas Parks and Wildlife folk are raising the alarm about invasive creatures with enormous claws lurking in the pond near a Brownsville apartment complex. On the plus side, the supersized Australian redclaw crayfish look and taste like lobster. But they also reproduce at a frightening rate—enough to displace native species, as Click2Houston.com reported. As tempting as it might be to boil up and douse these critters in cajun seasoning, alert your friendly ranger instead!
Night sky-watchers reached for their cell phones on September 1 and recorded strange lights near a site called Cat Hollow. Round, bright lights appeared and disappeared and at one point seemed to fly in formation. “It was mesmerizing, honestly,” said Emily White, among those who sent images to Fox 7 Austin. A so-called “drone swarm” might be the best explanation: an organized group of dozens of people flying drones (likely illegally) late at night.
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State Senator Roland Gutierrez won’t let the governor forget about the schoolchildren gunned down in his district.
by MICHELLE PITCHERAs he watched a couple load ice chests into their car at a gas station, something didn’t sit right with Roland Gutierrez. The pair were likely on their way to the lake to enjoy the late May sunshine in San Antonio—a normal way to spend the day, he knew. But Gutierrez, the state senator for District 19, couldn’t help thinking how surreal it is that life continues after a tragedy. He was on his way to Uvalde just days after an 18-year-old had opened fire on a classroom at Robb Elementary School, killing 19 students and two teachers.
“I was thinking how sad it is that … we move on with our lives,” Gutierrez said when we met at his San Antonio law office in September. “It’s not an unnatural thing. I get it. When these things happen, we always say, ‘Oh, it’s just too bad. I feel so sorry for those people.’”
Gutierrez represents a massive district that stretches from his hometown of San Antonio west to Big Bend National Park, encompassing a broad swath of southwest Texas, including Uvalde. The Democrat is relatively new to the Texas Senate, taking office in January 2021. His campaign had promised certain priorities: to push for legalized marijuana, to bolster mental health resources for rural Texans, and to improve public schools. Although he hasn’t dropped these issues, nearly all of his public appearances since May have been about Uvalde.
The shooting “changed me for sure,” Gutierrez said. “I won’t be a singular-issue public servant, but it has become a very, very big issue in my life and in the lives of these new friends that I’ve made. … For these parents … there’s no issue out there that matters if you don’t have your kid.”
Gutierrez, a father of two girls aged 15 and 13, has emerged as one of the most vocal lawmakers in the
shooting’s aftermath. He called for accountability from the agencies that responded to the killings, appealed to Governor Greg Abbott to call a special session on gun laws, and sued the Texas Department of Public Safety and its powerful chief Steve McCraw to try and force the release of more records about the massacre. The state police agency’s response to the Uvalde shooting only deepened his concern. He’s been skeptical of DPS ever since the launch of the “bullshit propaganda machine for Greg Abbott” that is Operation Lone Star, the multibillion-dollar border security initiative in which state troopers play a starring role.
Gutierrez attended as many funerals for Uvalde schoolchildren as he could, determined to bear witness even as the world began to move on. “I did it because I felt for these people, and I felt like I needed to be there,” he said. “But I also felt like I needed to talk about it to my colleagues, so that they never allow this to happen in their own communities.”
Gutierrez has positioned himself as the anti-Abbott, pointedly criticizing the governor’s past responses—or lack thereof—to mass shootings, including those in El Paso and Santa Fe, which claimed the lives of 23 and 10 people, respectively. “You don’t just sweep into a community in a disaster like this and go pray with them one day and leave,” Gutierrez said. “That’s not what a leader does. It’s not what a governor should do.” He told the Texas Tribune that Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s failure to include him on the Senate Special Committee to Protect All Texans was a “slap in the face.” Patrick mostly appointed his conservative allies, and only a few members whose districts have been affected by gun violence.
Gutierrez’s political career in South Texas spans decades. He cut his teeth as a member of the San Antonio City Council from 2005 to 2008. Then he moved up the ladder to the Texas House of Representatives, where he served six terms before ascending to the Texas Senate.
District 19, anchored by San Antonio, has historically supported Democratic candidates. But that support faltered after former state Senator Carlos Uresti was sentenced to 12 years in prison for fraud and bribery. Gutierrez ran for the seat but lost in a three-way special election, ultimately won by Republican Pete Flores. Gutierrez tried again in 2020, this time narrowly ousting Flores.
Gutierrez may be a big-city Democrat, but that hasn’t stopped him from teaming up with conservative leaders in small-town Uvalde who share his outrage at state leaders’ response to the shooting. One of his main allies is Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, a boisterous right-winger, previously best known for his appearances on Fox News railing against Democrats’ border policies. The pair has jointly raised hell about delays in victim compensation and the stark lack of transparency from Abbott and Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee as investigations into the shooting got underway.
McLaughlin said that when Gutierrez first came to Uvalde, they got on the same page about shared support for stricter background checks for gun purchases and raising the age requirement for assault-style rifles from
18 to 21.
“We’ve got to be willing to negotiate,” McLaughlin said. “We both want the same thing: We want answers for these families. … It’s gonna take time, but we’re going to get it.”
Gutierrez is up for re-election in November. But he isn’t focusing his efforts on Republican challenger Robert Garza. The race is widely considered not competitive—the seat was made bluer in redistricting, and Garza’s campaign budget is relatively small. Instead, Gutierrez continues to speak out against high-level Republican leaders whom he calls his real political opposition. “For the last 20-plus years, Texas has really just been regressing as people spew hate, spew division … solely so they can stay in power. And they’ve convinced a bunch of rural Texans that they’re for them. And they don’t do one damn thing for rural Texas.”
If re-elected, Gutierrez said, he’ll go into the 2023 legislative session with a no-excuses plan: force the issue on gun reform. He plans to spearhead legislation on age increases for gun purchases, expanded background checks, and red flag laws. If that doesn’t work, he said he’ll force debate by offering gun control measures as amendments on all sorts of other priority legislation.
“If they don’t want to talk about guns, and they don’t want to talk about gun violence in this state, well, I’m going to be talking about it,” Gutierrez said. “We’ll have Uvalde families in there. … As far as I can see, those families aren’t going to stop, nor should they.”
This iconic civil rights leader’s death led to probes by the Texas attorney general, the FBI, and others. But all documents that might have proven he was murdered appear to have vanished.
By DAVID MARTIN DAVIES Photography by SHELBY TAUBER
Dorothy Redus Robinson didn’t believe in ghosts, but she always said she knew her husband was murdered because his ghost told her so.
In an interview recorded when she was 85, Robinson said she was sitting on the edge of her bed days after Frank J. Robinson’s funeral when she saw him again.
“It looked like he came to the hall and stood at the bedroom door, and he said, ‘Dear, it’s a lie,’ and I said, just as plain as I’m talking to you, ‘You don’t need to tell me, I know you didn’t kill yourself.’”
Dorothy said she was wide awake by the time the conversation ended.
“Then he just faded, just faded back,” Dorothy added. “He didn’t come forward. I didn’t see any movement of arms or legs.”
In life, Frank J. Robinson had always been one to come forward. He was a fearless civil rights leader and voting rights advocate who broke down barriers for Blacks in East Texas. From his home base in Palestine, Robinson, then in his 70s, was actively leading an effort called the East Texas Project in the 1970s.
In 1973, he filed Robinson v. Anderson County Commissioners Court in federal court and successfully harnessed the Voting Rights Act to end the gerrymandering of Black voters at the county level in East Texas, a practice used to dilute their power at the polls.
By 1976, he planned to expand on his legal victories and export his strategies of empowering Black voters to surrounding counties. He was planning further action to register and organize voters to help elect Black candidates, too.
Then, on October 14, 1976, 74-year-old Robinson was found dead in his garage. That morning, his body was discovered by a neighbor, John Cook, who came by to ask for some of the watermelons that Robinson was growing in a lush backyard garden.
Cook knocked on the front door and when no one answered, he went to the side door next to the garage. There, he spied a pair of legs laid out in a pool of blood on the garage floor.
He ran next door to Story Elementary School for help.
Palestine police were called and found Robinson stretched out on the concrete floor. The top of his head was blown off and there was a double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun lying across the body. (The records conflict on where it was found).
Palestine Police Chief Kenneth Berry immediately determined this was a homicide. “From the evidence gathered at the scene, an autopsy report, and the information taken from his widow, we have concluded it was not a suicide,” Berry told a reporter for the Palestine Herald Press
Dorothy was out of town the day her husband died. As president of the governor’s Advisory Council for TechnicalVocational Education, she had been in San Antonio and then in Minneapolis for conferences.
The last time she’d spoken with Frank was by telephone October 10, only three days before his death. “I called him Sunday afternoon after I got to Minneapolis and he said, ‘We’ve had a little cold snap and I can’t find my long underwear.’”
Dorothy told him where to find it. “But you won’t freeze to death till I get there,” she teased. She told him that her plane would arrive at 10 o’clock that Thursday. “And he repeated the time. And that was the last conversation we had. Probably the last thing I heard him say except ‘goodbye.’”
When her plane landed in Tyler, Dorothy knew something was wrong when she didn’t see Frank. “I could always see him standing out because the plane was so small,” she said.
“When I got out, my sister, her husband, and a friend and his daughter were standing there, and I said, ‘Where is Frank?’”
Dorothy’s sister threw her arms out but didn’t say anything. The friend’s daughter said, “dead.”
“Car wreck?” Dorothy asked.
“No, somebody killed him,” she said.
“Well, get my luggage,” Dorothy said. “I’m ready.”
By the time Dorothy got home, police had already cleaned up, removing almost all signs of the violent attack. Dorothy would later argue that in their rush they destroyed valuable evidence. But some gruesome artifacts of the horror weren’t so easy to wipe away: Some of her husband’s brain matter remained on the wall.
Police questioned Dorothy. They wanted to know “if I had any inkling that he had been threatened,” she said.
Frank often received anonymous, menacing phone calls but ignored them.
“He was just that dedicated to bringing change to East Texas,” Dorothy said. “So often he would say, ‘Change is always painful,’ and he’d say, ‘But what is a little bloodshed? Because it takes that to get change—my blood or yours or anybody’s. Blood changed a lot of things.’”
Berry had been Palestine’s police chief for a year when he began investigating Robinson’s death. He had previously worked as a lieutenant in the Waco Police Department, where he oversaw the vice unit. Berry would go on to serve as Palestine’s police chief for four years before becoming Palestine’s city manager. This was by far his most controversial and sensitive case.
Some of the people whom Frank had angered through his work were Berry’s bosses: members of the Palestine City Council. Robinson’s death happened only a week after he had won a legal fight to force that governing body to create single-member districts. The lines were redrawn in a way that enabled the city’s first two elected Black council members to take office.
News of Frank J. Robinson’s murder made it into newspapers across Texas and around the nation. The Call, an African American weekly newspaper in Kansas City, Missouri, carried the story with the headline “Civil Rights Leader in Texas Shot and Killed From Ambush.”
The Associated Press quoted Police Chief Berry: “We have no suspects. We do have leads we’re working on.” Berry made a plea to the public for any information.
A group of prominent Texas Black leaders immediately questioned whether Berry would be able to solve Robinson’s murder and called for assistance from outside law enforcement agencies. Those who called on the Texas Rangers and the FBI to probe the death included John Warfield, a University of Texas professor after whom the school’s Center for African and African American Studies was later named; and state Representative Paul Ragsdale, a Democrat from Dallas.
Warfield, a controversial scholar and civil rights activist, described Robinson’s death as a “Ku Klux Klan style of murder and terror.” He declared it to be part of “a conspiracy in this state to obstruct the political rights and political awakening of Black and brown people and the powerful potential constituency they represent.”
By “conspiracy,” Warfield said he meant the actions of state leaders, including Governor Dolph Briscoe, in opposing the Voting Rights Act.
Warfield thought Robinson had been targeted because “he was far too aggressive. I guess he wasn’t getting old enough fast enough for the people in that area.”
Ragsdale, a civil rights icon from Dallas and one of the first Black people elected to the Texas Legislature since Reconstruction, compared Robinson to Martin Luther King Jr. and said he believed that Robinson possibly was the victim of a political assassination. He told reporters that there was talk in Palestine that the slaying may have been carried out by a hired killer ordered to make the murder look like a suicide to avoid creating another martyr for the civil rights cause.
As word spread, condolences from across the nation and from the civil rights community were sent to Dorothy, including a telegram from Coretta Scott King, an advocate for Black equality and King’s widow.
Robinson’s death brought unwelcome attention to Palestine. “The out-of-town news media has done the city of Palestine a great injustice,” Chief Berry told a reporter
from UPI on October 26, 1976. “We have been depicted as being a hotbed of prejudice and oppression of minorities. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
But Dorothy Robinson, along with other Black members of the community, objected to the white police chief’s appraisal of Palestine as a racial utopia. In fact, Palestine was an unreconstructed community of the Old South that had in the past enforced Jim Crow and still openly suppressed Black voting rights, which was what Frank was fighting against when he died.
On October 27, the Palestine court received a letter written by Robert Harding, a prisoner at the Coffield Unit, which is also in Anderson County.
Harding stated that he knew who was responsible for Robinson’s murder. That same day, Texas Ranger Bob Prince went to the prison to question Harding. The prisoner said he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and was told by the imperial wizard that Robinson was an agitator and needed to be eliminated.
But Harding lacked personal knowledge about Robinson’s death and also had a history of making false claims. The Ku Klux Klan connection went uninvestigated.
At the time of his death, Frank Robinson was deep in the planning of a meeting of the East Texas Forum to be held the following month to discuss strategies to elect more Black candidates. He had already printed the tickets for the “Second Annual Leadership Convention.” Workshops and seminars on political organizing, voter registration, and running for office were planned for November 27 in Palestine.
It never happened because of Frank’s death.
Frank James Robinson was born in an area known as Mud Creek in the rural church community of Antioch in Smith County on June 5, 1902. He was the oldest of ten children. When Frank’s mother died in 1914, he had to quit his schooling in the seventh grade to work on the family farm.
That might have been the end of Frank’s education except for what happened on a day he was making a charcoal delivery in the city of Tyler. “And he said, he heard such joy and laughter up on the hill. And he wondered what everybody was so happy about. And he
asked the lady who was buying his coal what’s happening up there,” Dorothy later recounted.
His customer told him about Texas College, a historically Black college established in 1894, and Frank decided to enroll.
Initially, he was told they would accept him in their high school classes if he agreed to milk the school’s cows and work the garden. The administrator’s wife took a special interest in Frank and tutored him. When the administrator moved on to lead Prairie View Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M University), Frank took the examination for college freshmen, passed, and went with him.
It was at Prairie View that Frank fell in love. “We met in the summer of ’27. He was working washing dishes. I was waiting tables,” Dorothy said.
“Our first date was July the fourth. At the end of the school term in early August, he said, ‘I want you to be my wife.’ I was just 18. He was 25.” Their wedding took place in a small Ford coupe car under a tree on a dirt road outside the town of Hempstead.
“I told the preacher when he read our ceremony, ‘Don’t tell me to obey Frank, ’cause I may not obey and I’m not gonna sit up here and swear that I’m gonna do it.’ So he left it out,” Dorothy said.
Frank graduated from Prairie View in 1931 with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural science. He went to work in Palestine, the Anderson County seat, as the county agent serving Black farmers. Frank was given an office in the courthouse basement.
That’s where the Robinsons’ 46-year marriage and their many struggles and adventures began.
“I would have married him a thousand times,” Dorothy said.
The proper pronunciation of the East Texas city is Pal-asteen—not Pal-a-stine. Locals don’t like to be confused with the Israeli-occupied lands of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Today, Palestine has a population of nearly 19,000. At the time of Robinson’s death in the 1970s, it was about 15,000. Then as now, the population was at least 25 percent Black. But for most of Robinson’s life, Blacks had little or no representation in local politics.
In her memoir, The Bell Rings at Four: A Black Teacher’s Chronicle of Change, Dorothy recounts the racial discrimination she and Frank faced in their married life. In 1944, Frank and Dorothy were riding the Sunset Limited of the Southern Pacific Railroad back to Texas from California. During the long journey, they were denied access to the dining car because they were Black. They watched white prisoners of war, German Nazi soldiers, marched inside for hot meals.
As she ate her cold, dry sandwich, Dorothy wondered how her Black brothers, soldiers off fighting for freedom in World War II, would feel about such ongoing discrimination at home.
Anderson County was highly segregated, though Frank served as an important link between the Black and white communities. Among other roles, he served on a committee planning the county fair in an era when there was no bathroom designated for Black women at the fairgrounds. He asked about it, and the chairman said, “Let them go to the woods. That’s what they’re used to.”
In the downtown shopping district of Palestine, the only bathroom that Black citizens were allowed to use for decades was in the courthouse. “There definitely was segregation. And there were those who meant to keep it that way,” Dorothy said.
No Black person had ever been elected to political office in Palestine or Anderson County before Robinson sued the commissioners court. Because of Robinson’s victory, Reginald Browne Sr. won a seat in 1978. There has been Black representation on the Anderson County Commissioners Court ever since.
Blacks were also elected in Anderson County as justice of the peace and constable, and to Palestine’s city council only after the activism of Frank J. Robinson.
In 1976, Robinson’s most recent court victory against the city had altered the playing field for city council members, who had the power to hire or fire the police chief assigned to investigate his murder.
When Palestine police began their murder investigation on October 14, 1976, they found that the screen on the door that led to Frank’s workroom and connected to the garage had been recently cut, potential evidence of a break-in. But they found no other signs of robbery or violent disturbance in the Robinson home. The only thing out of place was Frank’s black-framed eyeglasses left neatly folded on top of a filing cabinet in his home office. Robinson normally wore those glasses.
The police fixated on the shotgun found beside Robinson’s body. The old, Stevens-built Ranger shotgun had a portion of the barrel sawed off but was still legal at 22 inches long.
Police settled on the theory that the gun belonged to Frank—ignoring evidence that it may not have been his gun at all and disregarding the theory that someone else could have killed Frank with his own gun.
Dorothy told police she had never seen that shotgun before. She knew Frank once owned a shotgun that had belonged to his father, but she assumed that dilapidated
shotgun was inoperable. Police said an unidentified friend examined a photograph of the shotgun and said he thought it might be the same gun that Frank had once shown him. Frank’s brother-in-law said it was not Frank’s.
Nevertheless, Palestine police officers decided it was Frank’s shotgun.
Thus they, and in turn the newspapers, now declared his death a suicide.
Dorothy argued vigorously from the beginning that Frank would never have killed himself and could not have done so with that gun. “I don’t think Frank’s arms were long enough to shoot himself with a shotgun,” she said. She spotted other flaws in police’s suicide theory.
On the morning of the shooting, at least seven boys had been outside Story Elementary School playing football on a field next to the Robinsons’ yard and told police they heard two to four shotgun blasts.
“Why four shots?
If you want to kill yourself, you don’t need but one—you’re not gonna miss,” Dorothy said. “It was definitely a cover-up deal.”
There were three spent shotgun shells in the garage and another along the fenceline at the back of the property near the schoolyard. The shotgun had been fired at a canvas mulch bag next to a tiller in the garage and also into the front-left fender of Dorothy Robinson’s car, a red 1976 Oldsmobile.
A Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab tested and confirmed that the shotgun shells were indeed fired from the shotgun found beside Frank’s body.
At the very least, the multiple shotgun blasts seemed strange and a possible sign of foul play—perhaps a struggle or a chase.
There was another oddity that perplexed some investigators: A mechanic had delivered Frank’s car and parked it in the driveway at the entrance to the double garage a few hours before his death. But police found it inside the garage. Curiously, its exterior was clean. Had it been in the garage at the time of the shooting, it would have been hit with the spray of blood and brain matter from the shotgun
blast, some believed.
Chief Berry, once so sure this was a homicide, now told reporters that it was normal for someone who was going to shoot themselves with a shotgun to fire it several times before turning the weapon on themselves to make sure the weapon was working.
Today, James Todd, a current justice of the peace in Anderson County, says that in his experience, a suicide with multiple gunshots preceding the fatal shot is not at all common.
There were other unusual elements of Robinson’s case.
There was no suicide note. Latent partial fingerprints were found on the shotgun, but investigators couldn’t match them—not even to Robinson. Officials said because of Robinson’s age, his fingertips didn’t produce enough oil to deposit fingerprints with defined ridges. And there was no gunpowder residue found on Robinson’s hands or clothing, which is peculiar seeing as police claimed he fired the old shotgun four times.
The weapon is identified in a Texas Rangers report as a break-action shotgun, in which the barrel is hinged and opens for the manual loading and unloading of shells. This means that after the first two shots, Robinson would have had to open the shotgun barrel, remove the spent shells, and insert fresh ammunition before firing again. Furthermore, because there were four shots fired and police found another unfired shell in the shotgun, it must have been reloaded at least twice.
One witness was 11 years old and playing with his schoolmates when he heard the shots. The Story Elementary School students were playing football in a field next to the Robinsons’ house. He remembers that at first it sounded like lumber being dropped but then he recognized it as a shotgun blast.
“A bunch of us had skipped lunch to go start playing football, and we saw a white van pull up. We all were kids of hunters. So I grew up hunting and we know the sound of gunshots and there were gunshots and then people ran out and we testified to that,” he said, 48 years later. He said he remembers the event as a murder.
The account of hearing four shots was told to investigators by seven different boys. Three of those boys told police they saw two white men at the Robinson house, and then saw the fleeing van. The elementary school was integrated; six of those boys were white and one, Carlos Aaron Sepulveda, was Hispanic. He was 12 years old at that time and still lives in Palestine.
“We just heard a gunshot go off and basically that’s it,” Sepulveda remembers today. He remembers only hearing one shot but in 1976 he told the investigating Texas Ranger he heard four shots. And he never saw any suspicious activity.
Sepulveda said the Robinson house was built on a little
hill that overlooked the makeshift football field and Story Elementary. (The school building was destroyed by a tornado in 1987.)
This gave the boys a clear view of the house and garage. And they knew who the Robinsons were because Dorothy was a school teacher who taught Sepulveda’s brother. The most detailed observation of the white van came from 11-year-old Michael Kevin Peterson, who told investigators it came out of the Robinson driveway “real fast.” It had a muffler that was smoking “real bad” and a radio antenna mounted on the front left.
In the years following, Dorothy would wonder about that mysterious van the boys saw. She would allege it was a lead that investigators never fully pursued.
Beyond the shaky physical evidence, more subtle clues point away from suicide.
For example: In Frank’s pocket was a blood-stained list of clothes he planned to buy for the coming winter. Dorothy considered that list so significant that she kept it for years.
“This is what I know, Frank James Robinson would never have killed himself. He was too busy and too involved in what he was doing,” Dorothy said.
The day that Frank’s life ended, he showed no signs of distress or despondency. First thing that morning, he walked to the post office and then to the East Texas National Bank. He spoke with Mary Kay Alexander, an 18-year-old bookkeeper, and asked her to mail him information about his checking account.
Alexander told police she remembered her exchange with Robinson and said he was soft-spoken and seemed neither jovial nor depressed.
Indeed, Frank Robinson had no reason to worry about money. He had worked as an extension agent and then an educator. He was also active in real estate development. His finances, later examined during the inquest, were sound. His house was paid for. He had several thousand dollars in the bank as well as other investments. Both he and his wife were drawing monthly pensions of $235 in addition to Social Security.
Nor did Frank Robinson have any known health problems that could have prompted him to kill himself, though he had suffered a stomach ulcer and been hospitalized for treatment weeks before his death. During his autopsy, no cancer or serious health conditions were uncovered.
Within weeks, the public furor surrounding Robinson’s death had become increasingly uncomfortable for the leaders of Palestine. Certainly, white politicians and city officeholders had a lot to gain from ruling it a suicide. Being labeled a hotbed of racial injustice was bad for business. Suicide would not only solve the problem of having to further investigate the murder of a slain civil rights leader, but it would also paint him with a stigma that might dull his voting rights accomplishments in the Black community.
But in October 1976, the elected Justice of the
Peace Floyd Hassell determined that the numerous inconsistencies and the conflicting evidence prevented a routine determination of cause of death. He called for a rare legal proceeding: a public inquest.
An inquest is similar to a trial in which evidence is presented to a judge, or as in Robinson’s case, a sixmember jury. The jury would decide if the evidence was sufficient to rule Robinson’s death a suicide, homicide, or inconclusive. In these cases, the jury is not held to the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but rather to the lesser “probable cause.”
On November 15, 1976, a month after Robinson was found dead, the inquest jury was sworn in. It included two Blacks, a fact seen as critical in creating the appearance of racial fairness in the controversial process.
A public inquest was so rare that no one knew how to conduct one, Alexander Nemer II recently said. Nemer was appointed to be the presiding judge of the inquest because he was an attorney and the justice of the peace wasn’t. Officials could have brought in a judge from a different county but, without explanation, didn’t. Nemer, who was the Anderson County attorney-elect at that time, called Texas Attorney General John Hill and asked him to send his smartest attorney for assistance.
Assistant Attorney General Anthony Sadberry, who was Black, was dispatched to Palestine.
Dr. Jack Pruitt, a pathologist from Lufkin, testified at the inquest that the gunshot wound that killed Robinson was “consistent” with other suicide victims he had examined. Pruitt said the angle of the shotgun blast that sheared off the top of Robinson’s head, plus other evidence, led him to believe it was a suicide.
The shotgun that killed Robinson had been pressed against his forehead above the bridge of the nose when it discharged pellets upward into the right side of the brain, Pruitt said.
But when pressed by Sadberry, Pruitt said it was “possible but not probable to me” that someone else could have shot Robinson.
“Somebody, unless this person was unconscious, would have to let this be done on purpose or think the person
[with the gun] was bluffing for this to happen,” Pruitt said. “The reflex would be to pull away.”
Pruitt said that because of the nature of the gunshot wound, it was impossible to say if Robinson had been struck unconscious before being fatally shot.
Another expert witness, Cecil Kuykendall, offered a different view of the gunshot blast. Kuykendall was a former employee of the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office and a former Palestine police officer. He told the court that the manner of death caused by the shotgun blast that blew off the top of Robinson’s head was duplicated in “very few” suicide cases he had seen. He said most suicides are performed with the gun barrel either under the chin or inside the mouth. Both methods “leave little room for doubt” as to their success.
Eleven-year-old Michael Kevin Peterson, who attended Story Elementary School the morning of the shooting, took the stand and told the jury that he heard the shots and then saw a white van in front of the Robinson home.
Civil rights attorney Dave Richards, who still lives in Austin, was there to represent the Robinson family in the inquest pro bono. He remembers the bravery it must have taken for the Peterson family to stand up in that charged atmosphere. “I was astonished that a white couple in Palestine would be willing to bring their son forward. And we put him on the stand,” he said. “But that testimony was not what they wanted to hear, so it was pretty much ignored,” Richards recalled years later.
Richards, who is former Governor Ann Richards’ ex-husband, had represented Frank J. Robinson two years earlier in his successful anti-gerrymandering case against Anderson County. Richards said the Robinson death inquest courtroom was “full of people” and at times had a circus-like atmosphere.
“The county put on what we thought was a bogus psychiatrist who testified that the pattern of Robinson’s behavior was very indicative of a suicide, based on nothing.”
Richards said the psychiatrist had never spoken to Robinson. But that didn’t prevent him from testifying that Robinson was in a mental state that would lead to suicide.
Richards vehemently disagreed: “It strikes me as awfully unlikely, from what I knew of Frank, that he would have committed suicide.” Richards remembers him as “quiet-spoken and thoroughly committed to the issue of civil rights for African Americans.”
The inquest lasted four days. There were 35 witnesses. It took the jury about an hour to issue their unanimous decision: Frank J. Robinson killed himself.
Judge Nemer polled the jury twice and they didn’t waver. After dismissing the jury, Nemer pleaded with the spectators and the community to accept the decision.
“To those who do not agree with the jury verdict, I can understand and sympathize with your feelings,” Nemer said.
Nemer, now 72, still insists that the jury got it right.
“There is no doubt in my mind,” he said.
Nemer says he was friends with “Mr. Frank,” as he called him, and if Robinson was murdered, he would have wanted that fact to be made public.
But then why did Frank Robinson commit suicide? Nemer has no answer. “Sometimes people just kill themselves,” he said.
Forensic science has come a long way since 1976. A fresh look at the Robinson autopsy, an inspection of the physical evidence, and an examination of the crime scene photographs today could reveal clues overlooked almost 50 years ago. Perhaps some long-lingering questions about Robinson’s death could be answered.
But the autopsy, crime photos, and evidence have all gone missing.
Nemer remembers that one photograph convinced him it was suicide. It showed Robinson’s body on the floor, blood everywhere, and a cat licking the inside of his skull.
“Once you see that, you never forget it,” Nemer said.
Requests to the Palestine Police Department, the Anderson County District Attorney’s Office, the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office, and the Anderson County District Clerk’s Office have failed to find any paperwork from the Frank J. Robinson death investigation or inquest. Records from 1976 are lost or no longer kept, was the agencies’ general response.
Only the DPS has been able to produce records of the Texas Rangers’ investigation. The reports are detailed but do not contain the autopsy report or the crime scene photos.
The outrage over Robinson’s death didn’t stop after the inquest. The nagging inconsistencies and unanswered questions were too incongruent to sweep away. In an attempt to help satisfy those who still insisted Robinson was politically assassinated, Texas Attorney General John Hill ordered the state’s premier forensic examiner, the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences at Dallas, to prepare a full report reviewing all the pertinent evidence.
In a letter dated January 18, 1977, Sadberry, the assistant attorney general, wrote to Dorothy Robinson with an update about the continuing investigation and the new forensic review by the independent pathologist. On October 28, 1977, the Houston Post reported that the Institute’s report was completed and had been submitted the previous June to the state attorney general’s office.
Charles Petty of the forensic institute said he was told by Hill’s office to keep the report quiet and that any
release to the public would come from the AG’s office. But it was never made public.
In 1982, Sadberry told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram the report had been inconclusive. It didn’t prove that it was a suicide and it didn’t prove that it was murder. Sadberry never forgot the Robinson case. He said from time to time he would page through the case transcript and wonder if the ruling of suicide was justified. “Frankly, I’m kind of uneasy about it. We just don’t know,” he said.
Sadberry died in 2008 after a distinguished law career and serving as the executive director of the Texas Lottery. He wasn’t alone in being haunted by Robinson’s death. Into the 1980s Anderson County Sheriff Roy Herrington kept the case open and said, “I haven’t dropped it.” John Hannah, then U.S. attorney in Tyler, reopened the case after being prodded by Dorothy Robinson. He spent two years reviewing the evidence and chasing down leads before concluding there wasn’t enough evidence to indicate that Robinson was murdered.
Today, multiple open records requests to the nowrenamed Dallas County Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences for a copy of the final Robinson report have resulted in claims the report never existed.
When pressed for details about how this report could be missing when other records from the 1970s are available, Dallas County’s response was: It appears this report was never ordered since there is no record of it in the “logbook.”
Normally, any out-of-county autopsy report would be returned to the justice of the peace in the county with jurisdiction. Though there is no statute of limitations on murder, nothing requires any Texas justice of the peace to retain death investigation records—and the current justice in Palestine does not have those records, either. Requests for the copies of the case and inquest records were submitted to the Texas Archive, which maintains the files from Attorney General Hill’s tenure. But so far, archivists have turned up no records. According to the archive’s staff, the attorney general’s office files from this era haven’t been digitally processed and they need case numbers to locate them.
Dorothy never gave up. She wrote letter after letter to the FBI, to U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen, to state leaders, and anyone else she thought could help reopen the case, reclassify Frank’s cause of death, and bring his killers to justice.
“It was February before I even got a death certificate. The death certificate got lost. The records got lost, something happened and something happened,” she said. “And then, when I did get the death certificate and I had to sign whatnot for it, that was when I really broke down because it said ‘death from a self-inflicted, massive, massive wound.’ And I knew Frank Robinson did not kill himself. I cried like a baby.”
By MICHELLE PITCHER
Photography by MARK FELIX
Prisoners walk through the yard at the John M. Wynne men’s prison unit in Huntsville.
n a lower level of the Wynne Unit, a state prison in Huntsville, about 20 men in white jumpsuits and matching white sneakers sit around the perimeter of a room. Their attention is focused on Paul Allen, who stands in front of them. He’s a familiar face in the unit of about 3,000 male prisoners: He’s been teaching there for years. Today, he’s leading the men through their capstone business course, for many the final step on the path to getting their associate of applied science degrees in business.
“We’ve got some geeks in here,” said Sherman Griffin with a laugh from his place in the back row. “And they’re smart. And it’s OK to be smart.” These men are learning entrepreneurship and creating their own business plans. One hopes to open a bar and grill, another a technology company.
Elkanah Hendrix, 40, sits in the front row. He has decades of martial arts training and wants to start his own virtual training school. “I have three children, and they won’t allow me to see this as incarceration,” Hendrix said. “They say, ‘Daddy, you’re away at college.’”
Many of them probably wouldn’t be in college if they hadn’t gone to prison. Only about 40 percent graduated from high school. The classes at the Wynne Unit—run by Lee College, a Baytownbased community college—are among the most diverse course offerings in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), ranging from accounting to horticulture to welding. But something else also sets these men apart: They can get federal money to pay for their education, an advantage long withheld from the vast majority of other incarcerated people.
For decades, nearly all prisoners have been excluded from applying for Pell Grants, one of the biggest sources of federal need-based funding for U.S. college students. This policy, which was the result of the tough-on-crime era of the late 20th century, decimated prison education programs nationwide.
Thanks to an order by the Biden White House, the funding will become available next July to people inside.
Nearly 70 institutions across the country, including the one in Huntsville, got an early infusion of funding from the program via the
Obama-era Second Chance Pell program. Today, seven colleges operate Second Chance Pell sites in Texas. Altogether, they serve 3,338 students, according to a count from the Vera Institute, which monitors the program.
“With Pell assistance, they’re able to continue their education and really begin to think about what type of life they want to have following their incarceration,” said Allen, the academic division chair of the Wynne Unit program.
Donna Zuniga, now associate vice president of the Lee College Huntsville Center, has worked with the college for 35 years. She saw the difference before and after nationwide Pell funding went away. In 1993, the year before Pell was ended for prisoners, 239 people in Texas earned their associate degrees and 41 earned bachelor’s while serving their sentences. By comparison, in 2015, only eight received their bachelor’s while incarcerated. By 2021, the number had ticked up to 17 but still remained a fraction of the graduation rate before the funding stream was cut off.
Zuniga has also seen other programs drop off, including the federal youthful offender grant, which helped cover tuition and fees for people in their teens and early 20s. At one point during her tenure, 78 percent of the college’s prison education budget had been stripped. But she’s always been determined to keep operating—she knows prison education programs have been proven to reduce recidivism and make individual units safer, among other benefits. Lee College has tracked the status of its students who were released in 2018: Their recidivism rate was 6 percent, compared with just over 20 percent for prisoners statewide.
She and her team have scrounged for grant money and convinced businesses to donate to the technical programs to offset tuition costs for students. TDCJ also received funding through the state Legislature for education programs, albeit far less than that body originally offered in the 1990s. “And then, of course, Second Chance Pell in 2015 was a game changer,” Zuniga said. She estimates that right now, at least 85 percent of Lee College’s incarcerated students—who number around 1,200 each semester—receive some amount of Pell funding.
universities currently run higher education programs in 33 Texas state prisons—the other 69 state lockups (including privatelyoperated units) have no programs at all. Half of the educational institutions also participated before Pell ended in 1994, according to data from TDCJ.
Some courses are restricted to inmates nearing the end of their sentences. Although courses can be limited to one per semester, many prisoners accumulate credit toward degrees and earn certificates in fields like construction, culinary arts, and automotive tech.
In Texas, men get far more educational opportunities in prison than women.
not just investing in our education; you’re investing in your own community.”
These units, some of which have benefited from Pell funding for more than five years now, provide a unique look into what the return of Pell might mean for people in prisons, especially in Texas, which has one of the nation’s highest incarceration rates.
In Texas, the restoration of Pell Grant funding systemwide next year will give the state prison system a unique opportunity to reduce the yawning chasm in educational opportunity between units.
Twelve community colleges and two
“When you give us education, and we come in here and we accomplish something, we’re learning,” said Robert Odom, another student in the business class. “We’re learning that we can go out into the world and we can become somebody. So you’re
Modern prison education programs began to take shape in the U.S. in the mid-20th century. At that time, participants could get funding for their education from a deep well of federal sources: the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Veterans Administration, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the GI Bill. Then, in 1972, when Pell Grants—originally called the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant Program— were created, incarcerated students could apply for funding based on income.
For the next two decades, Pell was the single biggest source of funding for higher education programs in prison. Where the money flowed, the opportunities followed. Then conservative commentators took up
Pell funding for prisoners as their cause du jour. Opponents claimed that prisoners were draining Pell coffers, leaving little for students on the outside. But this was a baseless argument: Incarcerated students made up less than 1 percent of the total Pell Grants awarded in 1993-94. Some even bizarrely claimed that providing this funding to prisoners would somehow incentivize crime, as if people would purposefully get themselves locked up in exchange for a “free” education. Restrictions began under President George H.W. Bush, who signed a law making people sentenced to death or to life without parole ineligible. State prison systems were also put under the microscope to make sure financial aid was being used only for educational purposes.
As political opposition to funding prison education grew within both parties, and the issue became part of the 1994 Violent
“WE’RE LEARNING THAT WE CAN GO OUT INTO THE WORLD, AND WE CAN BECOME SOMEBODY.”
Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that set the tone for years of harmful “tough-on-crime” rhetoric and legislation. The exclusion of prisoners from the Pell program had strong support in Texas, including from U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.
By the 1995-96 school year, prisoner enrollment in higher education programs was halved, according to the Journal of Student Financial Aid. With funding greatly reduced, many programs downsized or closed.
For more than two decades, many people served time in prison with no access to higher education. Even if they could afford classes on their own—either through family contributions or by tacking on costs to parole fees—the lack of federal funding had discouraged colleges and universities from offering courses. Onceflourishing programs dwindled, with offerings at fewer facilities.
In 2015, the Department of Education
was a silver lining: She had been assigned to the Mountain View Unit, a state prison in Gatesville then known for its robust college program.
“I wanted to take advantage of everything they offered. Heck, I would’ve learned to drive a forklift. Would I ever drive a forklift? Probably not. But if they were teaching it, I was going to learn it,” Garza said.
The classes were run by Central Texas College and Tarleton State. Each session had a huge turnout, and to Garza it felt like a true college campus. But over the years, course offerings dwindled. If her classes were held at another nearby facility, the women had to be bused—a process that included multiple rounds of strip searches and a ride in a hot, cramped van. Despite the obstacles, she earned her Braille certification from the Library of Congress and a bachelor’s degree from Tarleton State University.
Garza is now planning for her wedding in November—she met her fiance soon after being released. But she discovered the hard way that not all of the skills she learned in prison could be easily applied: She had to work at a steakhouse because the parole board wouldn’t accept her contract work as a Braille translator as a valid job. She had to have a pay stub every two weeks on top of her translating work.
to Mountain View at the end of the course, it looked like Toon had lost 15 pounds in just one month, Garza recalled. Toon had basically stopped eating while at the other unit—the walk to the chow hall in the dead heat was too much.
The heat is a factor for other friends still in prison, Toon said.
“Now, as I’m reading the list of programs to a friend that we have at the Hopper Unit, asking, ‘Have you heard of this? Are you interested in college?’
“She said, ‘Girl, right now, I am so hot, I can’t think. I am trying to survive. I don’t care about those programs. Not right now I don’t.’”
Toon added, “When you’re wanting people to participate in educational programs, higher education or otherwise, if the conditions are not conducive to learning, you’re not going to get that participation.”
Culture change can be slow, even with the impending reinstatement of Pell funding. According to the Vera Institute, 85 percent of students enrolled in Second Chance Pell funding programs are men.
Toon has spoken with women who are still incarcerated and asked if they know Pell is being reinstated. Many had never even heard of the funding opportunity.
under President Barack Obama launched its Second Chance Pell program. It opened the faucet to let the funding stream begin to flow—or rather, drip—once again to some incarcerated students.
Since then, these second-chance sites have become cities on the hill for those hoping to get a degree or certificate in prison in Texas.
But not everyone gets access.
Alexa Garza lives in Mesquite, a suburb of Dallas near where she was born and raised. Since her release, Garza has emerged as one of the most vocal Texas advocates for incarcerated women, whom she says are often a correctional afterthought. Nowhere is this more evident than in prison education programs.
Just a few days shy of her 20th birthday in 1999, Garza entered prison. She said she felt like her life was over, but there
One of Garza’s best friends in prison has remained by her side after release. Jennifer Toon was incarcerated as a teen and was able to pay for her classes with the nowdefunct youthful offenders grant.
Toon loved the early classes she took within TDCJ. She loved them so much she started crying in the dining room when she realized that grant funding would help her take more than one class per semester. But the gradual elimination of various funding streams eroded the educational offerings.
“College is very different and it was whittling down. Now it’s not this privilege that feels like the college campus. Now it’s a punishment,” Toon said.
Toon paid an unusually high price for her education. While incarcerated, she was transferred to a different unit for a month to take a class. But the unit she was transferred to lacked air conditioning, and the degree program she was pursuing was set to end, which meant the credit from her class was useless. By the time she returned
Back in Huntsville’s Wynne Unit, a group of male students meets for their truck driving course. It’s a massively popular class—the course often gets hundreds of applicants from units throughout the state vying for about 36 spots. When asked how many are paying for the class using Pell funds, which are need-based and don’t need to be repaid, more than half raise their hands.
Lee College has issued one of the highest numbers of Pell grants among the 67 initial second-chance sites around the U.S. The secret: Lee College counselors try to ensure every student who’s eligible gets enrolled in Pell. These counselors—Felix Buxkemper, Lance Byrd, and Tommy Crane—are semifamous figures around the halls of the Wynne Unit. Men they’ve helped shout greetings as they walk by.
Bruce Corbell and Melvin Coleman teach the truck driving course. The Wynne Unit is in a perfect position to host it since TDCJ’s freight transportation division is based in
Huntsville. Truck driving also tends to be friendlier than other trades to applicants with felony records. The class lasts for six months—five days a week, six hours a day. There are strict admission requirements: Students must have a clean disciplinary record for six months, a valid driver’s license, and no blemishes on their driving record. Corbell, whose massive cowboy hat and white mustache would make him seem right at home on any of Texas’ sprawling ranches, recently heard from a former student. Thomas Lawless used a Pell grant to take the course at Wynne in 2017 and was released in 2019. Now, with the help of his commercial driver’s license, he works for Goodwill Industries. He recently took over as instructor for the company’s own truck driving course. He traveled to Huntsville this year to speak to current students about his outside success.
“HECK, I WOULD HAVE LEARNED TO DRIVE A FORKLIFT....
IF THEY WERE TEACHING IT, I WAS GOING TO LEARN IT.”
Tim Jones, deputy director of volunteer services operations for TDCJ, said prison college and certification programs—like the truck driving course—emerge in one of two ways: Either the prison system approaches the college or vice versa. On the agency’s side, they’re looking for vocational and technical programs that will help people get jobs immediately after their release— and for success stories like Lawless’.
“We’re looking for something that will give them a job skill,” Jones said. “When they leave, they can go right into it.”
About five minutes from the prison, an unassuming row of businesses is home to the administrative offices of Lee College’s Huntsville operation. There, in an office with posters on the wall that commemorate the college’s more than 50 years in correctional education, a trio works to help current prisoners and formerly incarcerated people make the most of their education.
Brandon Warren, Tracy Williams, and Matt McGinnis make up the reentry services department. Warren and Williams were formerly incarcerated themselves, and both earned degrees and certifications while serving their sentences. McGinnis is a former parole officer. They connect people with job openings, host support groups, and offer a six-week reentry class. They’ve got a mentor network and weekly Zoom calls where people can pop in with questions about how to navigate the job market with a leg monitor, or where to get the best outfits for job interviews.
These services, often called wraparound services, are the holy grail. Very few prison college programs offer such a holistic approach. But advocates hope that will change in the new Pell era.
The new funding stream will not kick on overnight. Colleges looking to set up shop or expand in prisons must go through a lengthy approval process, proving the programs they’ll offer will actually benefit incarcerated people. The stipulation comes from a very real problem in prisons nationwide: Many people are barred from working in certain industries or are denied jobs after release because of their criminal records, even though courses for these fields were offered in prisons.
Maggie Luna, policy analyst and community outreach coordinator at the Texas Center for Justice Equity, got her construction certificate while incarcerated in Texas. (The nonprofit seeks to end mass incarceration and make communities safer.) “When I got out, I was so excited that I had this certificate, only to realize that there was absolutely nothing I could do with it,” she said. “It was just a piece of paper. Nobody would hire me.” She said one man laughed when she showed him her certificate, saying she could have just gotten it online with no effort.
“That is heartbreaking,” Luna said. “I thought that was going to be my ticket out. … Access to education not only helps give people a purpose while they’re in there; it gives them a light to look forward to. And if these are meaningful programs that you can actually use in the world, it reduces the
chances of recidivism.”
TDCJ will be able to enter into and terminate contracts with colleges with some amount of discretion, so ostensibly the prison system itself will be charged with determining whether colleges are serving students’ best interests. TDCJ officials will also have access to more robust tracking data than before, which will help determine how well the program is working—and where it needs a tune-up.
One area of particular interest to advocates is accessibility for all incarcerated students. Certain programs and classes are only offered in certain units, so women and prisoners with disabilities or medical conditions can get left out of the system altogether.
“The first step in making sure that Pell is reaching its full impact is understanding that the men already have a foundation, but that the women, their foundation crumbled
almost to dust,” Toon said. “They don’t have to reinvent the wheel over here with the men and Lee College and the other universities, but with the women, it’s like having a mansion over here and then you’ve got a dilapidated farmhouse. ... And these are two different structures to build.”
The federal government is in the process of working out the details of how these funds are distributed and overseen.
Meanwhile, both formerly incarcerated people like Toon and veteran educators are hoping the benefits will be plain to see.
Zuniga, who runs the prison programming for Lee College-Huntsville, said she thinks “it will be easy for us to make the case” that restoring Pell will make a difference in the lives of incarcerated people, their families, and their communities.
“Everyone should have the right to an education,” Zuniga said.
Top: Nicholas Taft listens during a business course. Bottom: Robert Odom shows his certificates of completion for Lee College courses.Aheavy monsoon season hit the Chihuahuan Desert in September. It flooded city streets in northern Mexico, overflowed some Mexican reservoirs and sent raging water down the Rio Grande through snaking canyons on the West Texas border, which months before had run totally dry for the first time on record.
In the Mexican state of Chihuahua, a massive area with a flourishing commercial nut export sector, residents rejoiced. Just a few weeks before they had drifted so near the brink of disaster that they had caught sight of the terrible hazards ahead.
In mid-August, Chihuahua’s largest reservoirs had dropped to critical levels after years of widespread drought. The largest city in northern Mexico, Monterrey, had been rationing water to its 5 million people all summer. Yet Mexico owed water to Texas. It was 20 months behind on a five-year payment schedule under a 1944 U.S.-Mexico treaty.
Along the Rio Grande, which forms the international border, residents of Texas cities were also confronting the prospect of severe shortfalls. This broad, regional crisis didn’t just result from a single summer’s searing heat and drought. The desperate predicament had been creeping for a century down long rivers and across vast deserts that connect the mountains of northern Mexico to the Rio Grande, South Texas, and the Gulf of Mexico.
When September’s monsoon arrived, it brought only temporary relief from a trend towards scarcity and conflict that spans two countries and affects millions of people.
Most of this vast region’s water problem comes down to the Rio Conchos, the largest single water source and, effectively, the headwaters of the Texas river. It flows—or lately, it doesn’t—from the Western Sierra Madre of Chihuahua into the Rio Grande between Ojinaga, Mexico, and Presidio, Texas.
These days a meek Conchos dribbles into the Rio Grande’s dry bed in a dusty, yellow grassland. Farmers around here grow mostly hay now.
Yet, this valley used to teem with muddy
wetlands, back when the two rivers that nursed it were so mighty that Spanish explorers in the 16th century dubbed this La Junta de los Rios—The Meeting of the Rivers. They found some 10,000 people in a dozen villages of two-story mud brick homes raising crops along a 50-mile stretch of fertile floodplain.
“This has been farming country for thousands of years,” said Enrique Madrid, an Indigenous historian with long gray hair and a mustache, thumbing through published English translations of Spanish explorations.
As he speaks, Madrid, the son of the town librarian, pulls books and binders from tall shelves and stacked boxes that fill the living room of the small home where he’s lived all his life in Redford, a town of 23. (It’s seen better days, he said.)
He flips to an illustration of when his ancestors tended fields along the rivers’ muddy banks but built their homes a safe distance away. Then he scans his shelf, picks out the Journal of Big Bend Studies, Volume 8, 1996, and finds his entry, “Native American and Mestizo Farming at La Junta de los Rios,” about how farmers here used the natural rhythm of epic floods to channel water through earthworks to their crops.
This place, like the rest of the Rio Grande, wasn’t part of the Republic of Texas that seceded from Mexico in 1836. Only in 1848, after the U.S. invaded Mexico, did it annex the river’s northern bank, along with all the southwestern territories, including the Rio Grande’s headwaters in Colorado and New Mexico.
After that, the days were numbered for traditional farming in La Junta de los Rios, and for the ancient floods that sustained it. Enterprising immigrants poured in. Railroads brought people and heavy machinery—not just here but upstream in New Mexico and down the Valley as well.
“The Anglos brought in pumps and motors,” Madrid said, chuckling in his worn-out armchair. “They think they can do better than all these poor people who’ve been here 20,000 years.”
Soon, hundreds of wood-fired pumps were drawing water onto new orchards and fields far upriver in New Mexico and Colorado. By 1916, a massive dam was built to catch Rocky Mountain snowmelt in New Mexico before it rushed into Texas.
Just like that, La Junta de los Rios was
gone, its northern arm severed, the floods that nursed its wetlands over. The old Rio Grande was broken into two—one river that flowed from the Rockies to El Paso and a second Rio Grande that flows from the Rio Conchos, through Texas to the Gulf.
For a century, the Conchos alone has watered this valley. Mechanical pumps enabled farming without floods. But little by little, the Conchos faltered. Mexicans built dams and planted orchards in Chihuahua, as well. This summer, the Conchos stopped running altogether, turning its path through the old Junta de los Rios into a muddy trench.
In Redford, a farmer and retired Customs and Border Protection worker named Esteban Mesa peered into the shallow water where his irrigation pump tapped the Rio Grande, 15 miles below the mouth of the Conchos. He had never seen it so low.
“The climate is changing,” Mesa said as temperatures exceeded 100 degrees during a late morning in May. “I feel the heat of the sun more.”
He recounted only two recent rains— three-quarters of an inch back in June 2021 and four-tenths of an inch that October.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said his wife, Josefina, who grew up here when agriculture thrived. “When there’s no water, what can you do?”
Madrid, the local historian who lives down the street, thinks he knows.
“All the cities on this river are going to fight for the water,” he said.
This dry spell spreads far beyond the old Junta de los Rios. Across a swath of North America, scientists have identified more than two decades of unusual dryness, as wilted cacti in the Chihuahuan Desert attest. About 150 miles downstream from the mouth of the Conchos, Guadalupe Davila, a 74-year-old retired backcountry firefighter, points out where his tiny village of Boquillas, Mexico, used to grow its food.
“All this used to be full of crops,” he said, standing atop a rock ledge and waving his hand over the sandy desert valley.
Crops grew thanks to rain that fell in the Sierra Madre then rushed past Boquillas on its way to the Rio Grande. A network of crumbling canals built by local families show how they formerly channeled pulses
A century of enterprise brought the Rio Grande to its brink. Now, authorities are “praying for a hurricane” as reservoirs dwindle and populations boom on both sides of the Mexico-Texas border.
Story and photography by DYLAN BADDOUR
that washed down the mountains into fields of corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, and chiles.
until it hits the dam that forms the Amistad Reservoir. Here, the free-flowing river ends for good. Afterward, its flows are man-made.
This dam, completed in 1969, spans six miles to catch river floodwaters and store them in its massive lake, from which millions drink.
That was almost 30 years ago. Today, no gardens remain. One man raises hay on what little water still arrives, Davila said, pointing to a distant greenish-tan patch in the sand. Most farmers gave up in the late 1990s. Too many dry years wrecked their labors and investments. Even though wet years have come, the rain isn’t reliable. Now, a truck comes to town once a week selling produce.
After Boquillas, the Rio Grande squiggles through about 220 miles of wild canyons and pristine, sparsely inhabited country
This “lake” is like a giant bank, holding the accounts of hundreds of downstream users—cities and irrigation districts in Texas and Mexico (where water is owned and managed by the federal government).
The banker—the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s Rio Grande watermaster—knows exactly how much each user has in its account. When a user wants to make a withdrawal, they ask the watermaster. When new water arrives, the watermaster divides it up, giving priority to municipal users and the state.
Only last summer, virtually no water was flowing. Amistad fell to 22 percent full while its downstream counterpart, Falcon Lake, hit 11 percent. Communities began asking the state to help extend pump intakes to reach the final dregs.
Yet from the gates of Amistad, water
still rushed forth, past a half-dozen cities of the Middle Rio Grande, which seemed reluctant to confront the mounting crisis.
“The bucket is almost empty,” said Martin Castro, watershed science director with the Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo. “We’re heading toward a point of no return.”
Laredo forms part of the largest metro area on the Rio Grande below the Conchos. Founded in 1755, it’s better known today as Los Dos Laredos since U.S. annexation turned the city’s river into an international divide. About 260,000 people live in Laredo, Texas, and another 425,000 in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.
Laredo leaders are aware of upcoming shortfalls. In 2021, the city’s 50-year water plan said its population would outgrow the water supply by 2040. Its top recommendation: Run a pipeline between 70 and 150 miles to an aquifer in another county and import tens of millions of gallons of water per day.
“The river, we cannot rely on it any
longer,” Castro said from the Rio Grande International Study Center, which is housed near the river.
Yet Laredo has no means of paying for an alternative water source. At a recent city council meeting, Mayor Pete Saenz said the city desperately hoped for federal funding from the recent infrastructure bill in order to make the pipeline happen.
“We need help. We cannot do it alone locally. It would throw us into a horrendous financial bind as a community for us to try to attempt to bring water,” Saenz told the council. “If somehow the state says no, we have no choice. We’d have to suspend basically everything that we have just to address that supplemental water.”
For many, this crisis seems invisible—as evidenced by the 10 million gallons of water Laredo residents spray on lawns every day. To the untrained eye, the robust river rushing each day under bridges between Los Dos Laredos seems like a strong water supply. But that’s only an illusion. This is not just water in a free-flowing river. It’s a commodity in a giant irrigation ditch, and every last drop is spoken for. That water leaves Amistad in meticulously measured releases, bound for specific downstream customers. As such, the river levels in Laredo may rise even during drought, as downstream farmers order more water to offset missing rain.
It’s bound for the thirstiest users in this entire system: the lush cropland and sprawling boomtowns of Texas’ Lower Rio Grande Valley.
About two hours’ drive south from Laredo, the highway dips from yellow grasslands into the vibrant green of irrigated fields and orchards. This broad, low floodplain extends some 70 miles until it meets the sea at Laguna Madre. Although it is known as the Valley, the Rio Grande Delta would be more accurate. Here, the river used to rise above the low hills that crest the Valley and spill floods from distant mountains into a shifting array of tentacles that spread towards the sea. Water almost always abounded.
Yet unlike the old Junta de los Rios, more than 600 miles upstream in the desert, the delta was never a historical hub for agriculture. Farming here dates only to the
20th century.
Before the time of the Spanish, native people kept their distance from the raging river, whose thrashing course often wiped out any village or farm within miles. Dry land one day could be marshland the next. The water’s invasions came in floods roaring down the river, and in hurricanes roaring up from the Gulf. Semi-nomadic groups made seasonal visits, but the climate was unwelcoming, said Francisco Guajardo, director of the Museum of South Texas History in Edinburg. “This place was not a desirable place to live.”
The Spanish founded ranches along the Rio Grande starting in the 1700s. Tejano cowboys grazed enormous herds of Iberian cattle here for more than a century before the U.S.-Mexico war brought this land under Texan control. After that, entrepreneurs saw the potential that pumps and motors could bring to this fertile floodplain with seemingly limitless water. When a Wisconsin-born farmer’s crop of Rio Grande sugar cane won first prize at the 1904 World’s Fair, the rush began.
Midwestern developers bought up massive tracts and imported pumps the
size of houses to spread water across one million acres of alluvial soil and grow premium tropical crops like citrus and sugarcane, plus all kinds of vegetables. Fast-growing cities followed: McAllen, Edinburg, Pharr, Harlingen, Weslaco—all founded after 1900.
All pumped freely from a rushing river. Today it’s a different story.
“We just don’t have the kind of water to be able to do a whole other century worth of agriculture,” Guajardo said. “Something has to give.”
Agriculture has been declining for decades, as U.S. distributors switched to cheaper producers in Mexico and Guatemala. It’s still a cultural pillar for the community and a $1.1 billion sector of the economy, but far smaller than the Valley’s consumer shopping sector.
Booms in manufacturing, border security, and subdivisions that attract sunseeking retirees have turned these former farming towns into a solid strip of suburban sprawl lining 60 miles of roaring highways.
Former farmer Rusty McDaniel guesses that during the 18 years he’s managed Hidalgo County Irrigation District 1 in Edinburg, he’s
“THE BUCKET
watched two-thirds of its acreage transform from farmland to suburban development. At 73 with bright white hair, he said he’s the average age for a farmer here. Most are retiring—cashing out on family land for big bucks from developers.
“Look at these homes. They’re all sold. This was just blank land,” said McDaniel, pointing out his office window at a brandnew subdivision. “The ag is going away.” With ag sales go water rights, signed over to city public utility departments. The region’s largest cities, McAllen and Brownsville, have doubled in population since the 1980s. The third largest, Edinburg, has quadrupled.
In McAllen, about 60 percent of municipal water use goes to water lawns, according to Jim Darling, a former McAllen mayor and head of the Region M Water Planning Group.
“I’d say the average citizen has no concept of where the water comes from,” he said.
Water planners, however, are keenly aware of the long drought on the Conchos and of the summer’s low reservoir levels, he said. They know shortages are coming and were
praying heavy rains would arrive in September 2022.
“We’re praying for a hurricane,” Darling said, then corrected himself, sensitive to the region’s traumatic hurricane history. “For a benevolent
tropical storm.”
Timely rains have always saved the day before. September is peak storm season and the region’s wettest month. But there are no guarantees, water planners and farmers know.
In July, in a green grove outside Edinburg, Jose Silva, a citrus farmer and growth care manager for the Edinburg Citrus Association, parked his pickup truck beside a small pump station and a one-acre pond. Another similar setup lies nearby, and a third can be seen in the distance.
Silva manages 1,500 acres like this for the ECA on behalf of investors, absentee owners, and a few local farmers. He checks the notes on his clipboard. This pump ran the day before for 9.7 hours and moved 536,000 gallons into the little reservoir, from which it dripped about 61 gallons at the roots of each tree in this 40-acre orchard.
“Those trees will just suck that water up pretty quick,” he said as he drove the rows and surveyed the sprinklers dribbling at each tree’s base.
This efficient drip irrigation method is used on about 20 percent of local citrus orchards, he said. The other 80 percent flood entire fields, using twice as much
water. Historically, the water savings of drip irrigation haven’t mattered much to farmers, who pay only $10 per acre-foot (about 326,000 gallons).
Even that’s changing for farmers like him, Silva said. In addition to the groves he manages, Silva raises his own 8.5-acre plot of oranges. His irrigation district, the Donna Irrigation District, is low on water and hasn’t been able to provide the irrigation he needs.
“It’s not a good feeling for me right now,” he said. “To be honest, we’ve never had to deal with this.”
The summer 2022 shortage forced him to buy excess water from neighboring districts for $30 an acre-foot, three times what he usually pays (though below the $1,000 his brother-in-law pays in California). He already suspected other districts would soon need water for themselves.
Last summer, seven of the region’s 32 irrigation districts implemented restrictions.
Cameron County Irrigation District No. 2 imposed restrictions in April 2021. Back then, the district announced that farmers
were only guaranteed a supply sufficient for one full crop on their acreage. In September, the district dropped the figure to one-quarter of a crop. In January, it fell to three-tenths.
Manager Sonia Lambert said the district has imposed restrictions on users twice before, in 1999 and in 2012. Each time, they lasted only weeks before big rains broke the drought.
“Never has it lasted this long,” Lambert said. “It’s a pretty scary situation, not knowing how long this is going to continue.”
Each district has its own threshold for restrictions. Cameron County No. 2 started early because it’s a big user. On the rural edge of the Rio Grande Valley, almost all of its farmers still flood fields, including sugar cane, one of the world’s thirstiest crops. It requires up to 1.6 million gallons per acre per year during dry times.
More populous urban districts had not been affected. The largest urban water supplier, Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2, was still sitting on a healthy reserve, said its manager, Sonny Hinojosa. His
district pumps water to cities like McAllen, Edinburg, Alamo, San Juan, and Pharr.
“Should nothing change, we’re a year away from restricting,” he said, crunching numbers on a white board at his office in San Benito.
Hinojosa, a veteran Valley water official with a crisp white button-down tucked into dark blue jeans, has been through this before, in 2002. During two consecutive five-year cycles, Mexico delivered less than half the water it owed Texas farmers under the 1944 treaty—the first two times it had ever come up short. Rio Grande reservoirs sank to record low levels.
“Mexico had the water, and they just chose to use it instead of delivering to the U.S.,” Hinojosa said. “By the time we realized what happened, it was too late.”
Valley irrigators were losing crops, so they asked the state government for help.
“Since there was no water to give us, instead they gave us money,” he said.
But the crisis ended suddenly with heavy flooding in November 2002; the next years brought ample rain. By 2005 the reservoirs
“IT’S A PRETTY SCARY SITUATION.”
were nearly full. Years of plenty ensued. Big storms in the Conchos basin sent water gushing down the Big Bend canyons and into Amistad, which spilled over its brim in 2008 and 2010.
Then the wet years ended; 2011 was one of record drought. But Amistad was full, so Valley farmers watered through the dry years undamaged. By 2013, the reservoir had plummeted to 30 percent, before rain in 2014 put it back over 50 percent.
Mexico fell behind on its water payments again. In 2015 it ended a fiveyear cycle 250,000 acre-feet in debt. By the next cycle’s end in 2020, Mexico was behind again. Even though its own reservoirs were low, the country faced pressure from the Trump administration to pay up.
In Chihuahua state, Mexican authorities opened the dam gates at La Boquilla, the largest reservoir in the Conchos basin, sending its waters into the Rio Grande.
Local communities protested the release of their water to pay off Texas. Two days after the gates were opened, a mob of
farmers armed with clubs forced their way into the dam facility and shut off the valve. Clashes with the Mexican national guard left two people dead.
So Mexico hastily devised a legal trick to pay off its debt, signing over rights to water already stored in the Falcon Reservoir. After that, it released no more water from La Boquilla as the reservoir dropped to 21 percent and Mexico fell farther behind than ever before on its debt.
“Mexico has overdeveloped their water supply,” Hinojosa said. “They’re farming desert land. They increased their acreage with water that should have gone to the U.S. And it was U.S. companies doing it.”
“It’s gonna get real interesting,” he said, leaning back into his leather chair.
Mexico has until 2025—the end of this cycle—until it becomes officially delinquent on water payments. Even then, the 1944 treaty allows for one delinquent cycle—“in the event of extraordinary drought or serious accident”—to be paid up in the next. So Mexico has until 2030 until it would officially violate the treaty.
“Every time that Mexico falls behind in complying with the treaty, there is no question that Texas agricultural interests in the Rio Grande Valley are the ones that bear the most significant impacts,” said Carlos Rubinstein, former head of the Texas Water Development Board.
If Mexico violates the treaty, he said, “it’s up to the U.S. State Department to ensure it is honored.”
That could be done, Rubinstein said, by withholding water from the Colorado River that the U.S. owes Mexico. But no one knows what will happen if Mexico’s debt comes due on water it simply doesn’t have.
In the Sierra Madres of Mexico’s north, the river basins that feed the Rio Grande ran bone dry last summer after six consecutive years of low rainfall.
“Many of the rivers that used to be permanent, now they don’t exist,” said Oscar Leal, water program coordinator at Pronatura Noreste, an environmental nonprofit based in Monterrey, Mexico. With 5.3 million people, Monterrey is Mexico’s third-largest metro area, and one of its richest. Like the Texas Valley cities, its population has doubled since the 1980s. There, authorities have been rationing water since June. Most households get water for just a few hours each morning and others not at all.
Through Monterrey runs the (mostly) dry bed of the Rio Santa Catarina, which later hits the Rio San Juan, which joins the Rio Grande downstream from both binational reservoirs, Amistad and Falcon, so its waters don’t contribute to the reservoirs that sustain South Texas cities
and farmers, leaving it outside the U.S.Mexico standoff.
It’s the Rio Conchos, more than any other, that South Texas depends on. That river flows out of the vast state of Chihuahua, which boasts its own booming population and thriving $3 billion agricultural sector, largely watered by the Rio Conchos system. Its eponymous capital city has one million people. It, too, has doubled its population since the late 1980s.
Pecan groves have become a major industry in Chihuahua, and today it is the world’s second-leading exporter of nuts, after the U.S. It is also Mexico’s top producer of apples. One study found that the depth of irrigation wells for apple orchards in Chihuahua grew from an average of about 200 feet in 1980 to almost 1,600 feet in 2010 as aquifers’ levels receded.
It isn’t the first time that farming has boomed in these dry, fertile valleys, according to Marusia Renteria at the Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua. The story of the last time around raises a grim specter for what the future may hold.
Seven centuries ago, the Paquimé civilization flourished in Chihuahua. Major works of water infrastructure enabled 3,000 people to farm with a great network of fields, canals, cisterns, reservoirs, and drains, capturing and storing water when it rushed down surrounding mountains. They built multi-story stone cities and impressive public works.
Then the mountain rains faltered. The Paquimé’s decline, Renteria said, lines up with a goliath dry spell from about 1350 to 1450. It was part of an era of drying thought to have brought several civilizations of the American Southwest to their demise.
Scientists call it a “mega-drought”— although some wet years come, too many dry ones make intensive farming impossible.
By the time the Spanish arrived in Chihuahua, the Paquimé’s cropland had disappeared back into the desert. Their canals were abandoned, their cities crumbled, and their civilization dispersed into wandering bands.
Today the farms and canals are back. This
time 3.7 million people live in the state of Chihuahua. As years of recurring drought persist across this wide region and beyond, Chihuahuenses can’t help but wonder if this is the drought that will force Mexico, a few years down the line, to choose between its own needs and its water debt to Texas.
Historically, mega-droughts were interspersed with strong monsoons too, Renteria said. She hopes the temporary relief of the September 2022 rains will not distract from the need to confront longterm troubles.
“We are legally obligated, between countries, to comply with the treaty,” Renteria said. “It’s risky to say it, but these are two countries we are talking about. There are grave consequences that this could bring.”
Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of “Drifting Toward Disaster”, a Texas Observer series about life-changing challenges facing Texans and their rivers.
“THERE ARE GRAVE CONSEQUENCES THIS COULD BRING.”
In 2021, Jesse Freidin began traveling across the country to photograph transgender youth for a photo project called “Are You OK?” He’s been to more than half the states in the country, meeting with dozens of trans kids.
In August, Freidin made his second visit to Texas. In the intervening year, legal and policy-based attacks on LGBTQ+ people in the United States have reached feverish heights. Governor Greg Abbott even launched child abuse investigations into parents who seek gender-affirming healthcare for their kids. Though nonprofits like Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union have responded with multiple lawsuits against the policy, which has been partially blocked in court, it still left many families fearing for their safety. Kai Shappley, a trans girl known for her outspoken activism, fled the state with her family a month before Friedin planned to photograph her.
“I want to tell those stories before they disappear, before these families leave the country or state, before these families have to go underground,” Freidin said.
Despite this growing moral panic around young trans lives, a few brave kids still feel safe enough to defiantly present their faces to the world.
“The ones who are so at risk but still want to speak out, still want to be in the fight and be public, they’re doing their own kind of activism,” Freidin said.
As a trans man, Freidin feels he can relate to the issue on a deeper level than the mainstream media; “I was so tired of seeing the same image of a trans kid we see in journalism all the time, which is typically by themselves looking sad, playing with toys on the floor.”
Before he takes any photos, Freidin leads his subjects in a breathing exercise designed to help “come into ourselves and hold space for each other.”
Each portrait follows a similar formula: the young trans person in focus, seated and looking right at the camera. Behind them stand family members, photographed below their shoulders so that their faces are unseen, but exuding support with a touch.
“I want to make a portrait that’s solely about strength and power and joy and, you know, the authenticity and self-knowledge of these kids—because they know who they are,” Freidin said.
The photos, a selection from Freidin’s 2022 trip to Texas, are accompanied by quotes from the interviews he conducted with each trans kid and their family.
A new Netflix series filmed in Houston provides laughter and insights into the immigrant experience.
By Nguyên Lê
One thing about Mo, a limited series that debuted on Netflix last month, is that it’s fast. Think diction-of-“Mattress Mack” fast. Fast in doling out gags that at minimum will redden your face and dramatic beats that address the tragicomic reality of people who call the United States their second home.
Minutes into the pilot, the lead character, Mo, a semi-autobiographical role played by Houston comedian Mohammed Amer, is placed on a riches-to-rags journey where he goes from a senior staffer at a cellular shop to a jobless Palestinian immigrant. Having no work permit is the reason cited. But what can he do when the only way to get it is to have his asylum case heard, though it’s been stalled in immigration courts for 22 years? Both heartaches and laughs ensue.
Meanwhile, for me, a realization strikes: I know this story. So many in Texas have lived or are living in this uncertain state of undetermined status. I, too, have known
what job insecurity looks like. At one time, a now-defunct media station on Houston’s Bellaire Boulevard considered me essential for pitching and hosting a show—one about movies. But then I had to leave because of my short-term work papers. Since no one else could pick up the slack, the show was ultimately written off. It remains stunning to think all it took to upend my life was three letters. For me it was issues with OPT (the Optional Practical Training program, open to students before or after graduation); for Mo it was ICE (the threat of a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
Yet, as bitter as Mo’s departure from his main hustle is, there is a hilarious parting line he delivers to his boss (played by Bassem Youssef) that sprinkles in some sweetness: “How will you run this place? It’s my place—I mean, it’s your place, but I run it.”
I reckon this is the magic of Mo. It offers flashes of hilarity, but it is more than comedy. It also highlights a very particular
limbo of immigrants that I find other scripted series rarely address so directly. It doesn’t take long for the show to have me feeling that the somewhat fictional Mo and I are offshoots of the same tree.
In attempting to explain the deep connection I felt, I initially thought the answer was the setting: Houston. In lieu of, say, Los Angeles’ weather and New York’s art scene, Houston has an ability to make starkly different pieces and peoples seem cohesive—at times almost interchangeable. But it turns out our bond goes beyond geography and into identity, from where I am to who I am. Like Mo, I’m just one of many navigating life in the U.S. without the ability to truly check off the “all American” box.
Of Mo’s three listed focuses—“two cultures, three languages, and a ton of bullshit”—the last initially seems most apparent. Creators Ramy Youssef (of Hulu’s Ramy fame) and Amer mine many funny scenarios for Mo, who aside from being an
asylum-seeker is also a trunk merchant, a lean addict, and a son (his mom, Yusra, is played by Farah Bsieso). Yet those pivots are also how the show builds its sturdiest link to the “not quite American” reality that Mo and I and many other Texans share. It sure is refreshing to see filmic art that speaks this truth.
Another familiar moment for me is in episode four, titled “Moola,” where Mo finds out that his girlfriend Maria (played by Teresa Ruiz) is being snubbed by her (thankfully short-lived) business partners, her of-Indian-descent friend Shila (played by Kausar Mohammed) and Shila’s affluent white husband Glen (played by Grant Redmond). During the couple’s house party, Shila is seen tasking Maria with chores like a master to a maid.
This sequence, though filled with overthe-top amusement, prompts me to reflect on times I felt I had to roll along with demeaning demands to reach certain goals or risk being seen as the troublesome minority. Believe me, I wanted to let that particular newspaper editor know that I found his remarks at my English being “obviously of second-language level”
myself from such comparative resentment should I learn of a fellow Vietnamese who had better success in love or at work. Over a celebratory dinner or drinks, I would be the one with the dour attitude, much like Mo who can’t stop doubting Hameed’s marriage (“love as real as her hair”) even when everyone else has gone all in.
Fortunately, Mo comes to see that in the end, Hameed’s union is both the fulfilling of an objective—gaining legality—and the result of bona fide chemistry.
But, let’s say your reason to tune in is to tune out reality, Mo will still welcome you with pure entertainment. Note, however, that you will always feel balanced after a gag, fully earthbound after giggling all the way to cloud nine. Or vice versa. Even when packed into one fast-paced exchange, the laughs don’t lose their flavor. Check out this one in the pilot when Mo reacts to a supermarket employee (played by Lori Z. Cordova) asking him to sample chocolate hummus:
offensive. But it was either go along and finish the internship, or perhaps see it cut off halfway and then—surprise—“fall out of status.” For immigrants in the United States, visa conditions—often referred to as “status”—are the reason they can stay.
To rescue Maria from the Shila-Glen danger, Mo exits the ornate house party scene after dropping a funny truth bomb on Shila: “You haven’t been Indian since 2009.” How I wish I could have channeled Mo’s truth-telling nature, or that there had been a figure of his kind, to relieve me from the Vietnamese equivalents of Shila— people so clouded by their proximity to privilege, access, or power that they made the air nearly unbreathable.
Certain moments in episode six (“Holy Matrimony”), where Mo and his childhood friend Nick (played by Tobe Nwigwe) prepare Hameed (played by Moayad Alnefaie) for his wedding to a blonde, are also sobering.
Albeit unpleasant, I find jealousy is commonplace among immigrants, and the areas it can invade include looks, health, wealth, property, family, and legal status. I was once—or still am—trying to deprogram
Mo: “You know what you just did? You just insulted my grandmother. Yeah. ‘F*** your lineage, to hell with your culture.’”
Supermarket Employee: “Lo siento, I did not know hummus was Mexican.”
Mo: “It’s not Mexican! It’s Palestinian.”
Then, less than a minute later, there’s a shootout. This is America. And as Mo, who was grazed by a bullet, is about to be transported to the hospital, he shouts: “I’m refusing medical attention! I’m uninsured. I’m not paying $5000 for an ambulance ride.”
Have I told you that immigrant life in the U.S. is, generally, a tragicomedy waiting to be told?
Granted, Mo is mainly a fictitious creation, but he and his journey demonstrate with great flair and plenty of fun how to face matters when many in immigrant communities—especially my own—would prefer to instead apply the “stay down, stay quiet, stay fine” adage. As such, thank you, Mo, for letting me know myself better and be a bit braver as I continue life in my “home away from home.”
Love you much, my parallel brother.
By GAYLE REAVES
Ana Chandler points south to a dip in the Davis Mountains. Often, when she and her husband are sky-watching, “Omega Centauri appears in that notch,” she said.
Omega Centauri is a globular star cluster—millions of stars so crammed together that their light merges. It’s just one of a skyful of reasons the Chandlers moved from Central Texas to this spot between Fort Davis and the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory.
Six or eight nights a month, weather permitting, the Chandlers open the roll-off roof of their observatory and focus 25- and 30-inch reflecting telescopes on whatever
objects are on their current list. They are visual astronomers, Jim Chandler explained. They actually look through eyepieces rather than attaching cameras and other equipment to capture images and data. “There’s just something about billion-year-old photons directly hitting your retina,” he said.
The Chandlers are part of a group of amateur astronomers in Limpia Crossing, a development of about 110 houses spread over several hillsides, that is the nearest residential neighborhood to McDonald Observatory. Jim Chandler said only about 50 homes are occupied
beings. Some were McDonald Observatory employees, retirees, or volunteers. Many took pride in being the closest neighbors of the world-class observatory and in helping keep conditions right for its work.
“They get it,” said Stephen Hummel, coordinator of McDonald’s Dark Skies Initiative, aimed at convincing governments, businesses, and residents in surrounding counties to limit light pollution by reducing and shielding exterior lighting.
At one time, as many as 20 Limpia Crossing residents were astronomers, though locals say their numbers have decreased in recent years. The Texas Star Party, one of the largest annual gatherings of amateur astronomers in North America, happens practically next door.
“When you drive by, you can see domes throughout the neighborhood,” said Katie Kizziar, assistant director for education and outreach at McDonald. “It’s a place where people retired and moved out there and built their own [observatory] domes. We benefit from that—we get them to volunteer to run telescopes at our star parties.”
“There are a crew of people in Limpia Crossing who bought their houses so they could look at the night sky,” said Steve Odewahn, a resident astronomer at McDonald. “Various residents over the years have contributed to scientific knowledge through their observations.”
crosses and what look like minarets. The McDonald domes are visible in the distance.
Recently, Gilchrist showed off his own Stonecrest Observatory, explaining the mechanics of the dome, 12-inch reflecting telescope, and photographic equipment.
“I take images that can be used to make pretty pictures, but they can also be used in research,” he said. “I will come out and spend a good part of the night taking images. The next day, I get the data and process it.”
A few years ago, he spent several hours on the 107-inch telescope at McDonald, tracking Comet Neowise, acting as a remote observing assistant for prominent research astronomers in Austin. Then, about 18 months ago, he became interested in variable stars, so-called because their brightness changes over time. The result was an article he co-authored in a recent issue of the peerreviewed Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers.
At the Chandlers’ house, Ana’s special interest is something called super-thins— galaxies seen edge-on that lack the typical bulge in the center. A super-thin “is just a streak in the sky,” she said. Over the years, she researched them and developed a list of them to look for. “I thought, let’s see how many can I see in my lifetime? Several hundred by now.”
for the Conservancy’s Texas chapter, said the development of Limpia Crossing “certainly was a justification” for the efforts to protect the Davis Mountains. Right now, ownership of big land parcels in and around the preserve is stable, he said. But if that changes, there is still land without easements that could be sold and subdivided. If that seemed imminent, he said, the conservancy would go to work on it.
In April, the entire Big Bend region plus an adjacent area in Mexico was formally designated as the Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve, the largest such reserve in the world. McDonald Observatory and the Davis Mountains Preserve make up the core of the reserve, with the strongest protections against light pollution. Hummel said all counties and cities within the reserve have outdoor lighting ordinances and all parks and public lands have lighting management plans. McDonald provides technical guidance and in some cases donates light fixtures.
by full-time residents.
When the development started to take shape in the 1980s, professional astronomers worried about what it would do to their dark skies. For the most part, the observatory is surrounded by ranchland and the Davis Mountains State Park. Limpia Crossing had a minimum lot size of 5 acres, but its lights still could dim the future for serious astronomy.
What the observatory leaders soon realized was that in Limpia Crossing they had natural allies: people who’d chosen this part of West Texas for its dark skies, quiet, and relative absence of fellow human
Limpia Crossing resident Jimi Lowrey has a 48-inch scope, one of the largest amateur telescopes in the world. About a dozen years ago, on a particularly clear night, he spotted a possible planetary nebula—that is, a star in its death throes that is surrounded by a glowing ring of gases that it is throwing off. Astronomers at McDonald and elsewhere helped verify the newly documented sky object.
Another local, astral photographer Allen Gilchrist, does work that is “extremely useful and immediately relevant,” Odewahn said. Gilchrist, a retired oilfield services researcher from Houston, moved to Limpia Crossing and built his observatory in 2011. The path to his house follows rutted gravel roads across hills and through a lowwater creek crossing. Homes of all sizes and various architectural styles dot the slopes, along with several horse pastures and one walled compound complete with lots of
“You look for 20 and see a few of them,” her husband said. “It depends on the darkness of the sky, the quality of the dark.”
The quality of the dark around McDonald Observatory has been preserved and even enhanced in recent years by two large-scale nonprofit efforts.
In the 1990s, the Nature Conservancy began putting together the Davis Mountains Preserve to protect this “sky island”—a ring of mountains with higher, cooler elevations that sustain different flora and fauna than the surrounding Chihuahuan desert. Working with ranchers and other landowners, the Conservancy bought more than 33,000 acres and protected almost three times that much land with conservation easements and other arrangements. Their work has helped area ranchers fend off development pressures, protected habitats for many rare species of plants and animals, and helped keep skies dark for the astronomers.
Jeff Francell, director of land protection
Hummel said oil and gas operations in the Permian Basin are the largest source of light pollution affecting McDonald currently. But several companies “have worked with us to reduce light pollution by adopting better lighting practices,” he said. Thanks in part to those changes, he said, “light pollution as seen from the observatory has fallen by approximately 20 percent over the past two years.”
At McDonald’s visitor center, gift shop employees Angie Otoupal and Carol Crook were excited to get in new supplies of Astronaut ice cream, a popular freezedried treat. They weren’t as excited to talk about Limpia Crossing, where they both live.
“Some [residents] are just here a few months a year,” Crook said. “Some are more or less hermits. They want to get away and concentrate on their focus, whether it’s geology or astronomy or making quilts.”
Nor is it always an easy place to live. Residents dig their own wells. Gravel roads can be slippery. “We’re used to power outages, not having the internet, no cell coverage. You have to go to the mailboxes”—up on the highway—“to get bars,” she said.
But, Otoupal acknowledged, “I do love to go out and look at the stars” and enjoy the quiet. “It’s why I’m here.”
Big-city traffic and a resolution on New Year’s Eve of 2020 led Pflugerville resident Kelsey Black to become a bookseller.
An avid reader, she disliked the hour round trip required to get from her suburb of 65,000 to downtown Austin to browse a bookstore. “OK,” she told herself, “I think it’s just going to be easier for me to … start my own bookstore.”
Turned out, it wasn’t easy at all, “but it’s OK because I have now found my calling,” Black said. The Book Burrow began as a pop-up and online business and finally, on August 6, opened as a brick-and-mortar store. She said the 200-square-foot space has become a haven for those who don’t feel like they fit in elsewhere, drawn by the store’s motto: “Embrace your weird.”
For her, the phrase means cultivating love for whatever makes you unique: “Embrace your gender identity; embrace your sexual identity; embrace your racial background; embrace your spiritual path.”
Apparently, she is good at creating a welcoming atmosphere. Multiple strangers came out to her the day the Burrow opened its doors. “We have a story for everybody in our little bookstore,” she said.
New independent bookstores in Texas are blossoming as in the rest of the country, and many of the more established ones are “hanging in there” by writing and rewriting their own stories. A passion for books and people and a willingness to embrace change
seem to be among the key requirements. Many managers talk about retooling their businesses to survive the COVID-19 pandemic. Some stores had to rethink who their customer base was and find new allies. And it looks like book-banning efforts in this state aren’t all that bad for the indie bookstore business.
“It definitely seems like bookstore openings are on the uprise again. I just heard [of] about four more,” said Kristine Hall, publisher of Lone Star Literary Life, which covers independent bookstores in Texas. When she went to a regional conference in April, she said, “Booksellers there said they are stepping up their sidelines, which account for a lot of their revenue.” Overall, the industry is just always “on and off, on and off,” she said. “And there’s always the Amazon anti-Christ.”
In many cases, surviving and thriving has meant developing a second line of business, becoming a “bookstore and”—a bookstore and a coffeeshop. A bookstore and a gift shop. Or art gallery. Or wine seller. North of Abilene, in the small town of Stamford, the Noteworthy bookstore and gift shop actually helps support the local newspaper whose offices it shares. In Fort Worth, Leaves Book and Tea Shop probably sells as much Earl Grey as it does books, but its stated mission is one shared by just about every indie bookstore: to “create a community gathering place where you can
pause from the hectic pace of daily life.”
Julia Green, manager of Front Street Books in Alpine, said that according to the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association, registrations of new members are up. “We’re gaining more than we’re losing,” she said.
Front Street, in one incarnation or another, has been around since about 1996; Green has worked there for most of that time. On a recent, crisp morning, the bookstore was busy. People came in the front door or from the back, where the bookstore connects to Cedar Coffee Supply.
“We get a ton of business, people wandering back and forth” between coffeeshop and bookstore, Green said.
The store offers sections on Texas-Mexico border issues, women’s issues, LGBTQ+ authors and topics, and other interests. The shelves of traditional mysteries and romances are near the back of the store.
“Our goal is to be a welcoming space regardless of your politics,” she said. People should be able to “find a home here, find a book here, regardless of what you believe or what we believe. … That is something true to indies. It’s kind of our whole point.”
Green said the store has never gotten complaints or threats because someone didn’t like the books they offer. But then, she said, she has heard of no attempts to ban books in Alpine schools or libraries, as has happened in many allegedly more
cosmopolitan areas.
By contrast, Black said someone once complained to the Pflugerville mayor that the Burrow was “promoting Satanic ideology” at a farmer’s market event because of a book whose cover showed a part-woman, part-scorpion hybrid, “and that we can’t have that in a Christian nation.” The mayor called the farmer’s market manager, who looked at her table, and then, Black said, had a laugh with her over it.
In some markets, Hall said, book-banning attempts have actually helped independent bookstores by “giving them a campaign to throw themselves behind.” In that context, she said, “bookstores are safe places.”
In San Antonio, the Nowhere Bookshop, founded by author Jenny Lawson, reacted to a local school district’s book-banning attempt by offering to donate up to 250 copies of the book in question—the awardwinning Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre by Carole Boston Weatherford— to local educators.
Manager Elizabeth Jordan said more than 120 educators have signed up thus far for the free copies and that people have expressed interest in donating to the effort. “We … hope we have created an environment that makes Nowhere feel like a safe space for historically marginalized communities,” she said. The store opened to curbside business in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. The physical store, which offers a coffee, wine, and beer bar, opened in July of this year.
Dallas seems a thriving locale for indies.
Deep Vellum Bookstore (in Deep Ellum, of course) and the publishing house of the same name call themselves “the heart and soul of the literary community in Dallas,” a boast backed up by the bookstore’s calendar, filled with information on readings, author interviews, and exhibits. Interabang Books, in North Dallas, has survived a tornado and flooding as well as the pandemic and is now at a point where it’s doing “extremely well,” according to the store’s business manager. On the west side of town, the Bishop Arts District now boasts four or five indie bookstores, including the tiny Poets Bookshop.
Poets is owned by the same trio who owns Cigar Arts next door, which has been around for about a decade. When the neighboring space became vacant in 2017, co-owner Marco Cavazos said, they opened up a hat shop “because we thought hats would be a cool fit for the neighborhood.” Their mistake, he said, was that “we weren’t passionate about hats.” So they turned to books, which all three were passionate about. The cigar shop and bookshop are mostly separate, business-wise, Cavazos said, rather than either one depending on the other.
Cavazos, who writes both poetry and fiction, originally envisioned the shop as a collaborative poetry studio where people would come to write—on manual typewriters, no less—read, and create art. Adding a book component “just made
sense,” he said, even more so because the pandemic quickly put a stop to shared workspaces. So the bookstore continued, with books getting delivered to local customers. “The biggest reason we got through 2020 was the neighborhood wanting to support its bookstores,” he said.
A few blocks away, The Wild Detectives bookstore has been a wild success for years because it’s also a bar and an event venue. On a Sunday afternoon, the backyard of the little repurposed house was full of chess players, readers, students studying, and a family birthday party. A few kids ran around, and someone tended to a cocker spaniel in a baby carriage. Inside at the bar, an artist was sipping a drink and sketching, and customers were lined up to order drinks and food and pay for books. The space at the front of the room, often set up for poetry and prose readings, was reconfigured for the daytime crowds.
In North Dallas, business manager Brian Weiskopf said Interabang is “doing extremely well. It’s nice to have writers back on the road. … We have a vibrant
signed first-edition club. And we’ve also rolled out a child subscription program” for their youngest readers. People love the convenience of Amazon, “but they also love the feel of a real book,” he said. “They like our expertise … that personal touch.”
What’s in the future? “I’ve heard that many people would love to have this kind of bookstore on their side of town,” he said. “We’d love to expand our footprint. But we can’t do it right now.”
Other store owners say they are maintaining rather than looking to expand. BookWoman, Austin’s original feminist bookstore, is at that stage, according to owner Susan Post. On the other hand, that’s what they’ve been doing since 1975, sustained by the locals’ love for its eclectic selection and its storied history. The business began as part of the great feminist bookstore movement, which saw hundreds of similar shops pop up around the country and internationally in the 1970s and ’80s. Post said fewer than a half-dozen stores from that time remain.
There was a moment early in the pandemic when the store flourished, she said, as disrupted supply chains sent people looking for new, local sources for what they needed. The store’s small footprint and minimal staff meant BookWoman was able to stay open with curbside pickup when other bookstores were forced to close.
She recalled a day when the counter was piled high with orders ready to be mailed. “We must have shipped like 30 boxes of books,” she recalled. “And it went on like that for a year.”
The rush is over now, however. “Now that’s really fallen off because people are socializing, going to movies, going on vacation,” Post said.
Still, the store cultivated new, loyal customers during that time and diversified into new income streams, from t-shirts to a non-Amazon-owned company that lets customers order audio books alongside the traditional kind. BookWoman, like many stores, has also partnered with bookshop. org, an online bookseller that shares 30 percent of sales with brick-and-mortar stores. The site generates a small income for her store, Post said, “but we make more if they order directly through our website.”
In Fort Worth, The Dock Bookshop is also “maintaining,” said Donna Craddock, who
owns the roomy eastside store with her sister Donya. As one of the largest African American-owned full-service bookstores in the state, The Dock does on a larger scale what many smaller stores, like Book Burrow, also do: try to offer something for everyone while also providing in-depth material for underserved groups. They also have a large section of children’s books. Since the store opened in 2008, Donna said, they’ve watched some young customers grow up. “We do have some bookstore babies,” she said.
When the pandemic started, Donya Craddock said, The Dock had already embraced a variety of platforms to bring customers in, including podcasts like the Dock Power Hour. Still, she said, “a lot of people weren’t working, and books were not in the hierarchy of need.”
The Dock was close to shutting its doors when a national tragedy changed things. On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a movement that the Craddock sisters call “a great awakening” rolled into The Dock.
“People were willing to break down walls and try to learn about other groups. People were grappling with this thing called
racism,” Donna said. And to learn, they came to The Dock.
“This section here,” she said, pointing to shelves of books on race relations, “we didn’t have this section”—that is, not nearly as many books on that topic. “It just blew up on us. … It was awesome.”
Included in that wave were a lot of European Americans. They’d had some of those customers before, Donna said, but many more started showing up. “It helped save the bookstore.” That wave eventually subsided, but some new customers stuck around. Even with that, though, business still isn’t back to pre-COVID levels.
As it always has been, involvement with the community is a key to their survival, both women said. The Dock hosts community meetings, family book nights, spoken-word events, and author events. This year the store was a founding sponsor of the Trinity River Book Festival, in which more than 30 authors participated. “It was very well received and we will definitely be doing it again next year,” Donya said.
Across town, Leaves Book and Tea has also stabilized since the pandemic, owner Tina Howard said. “I believe as our society feels fractured in many ways, bookstores are still held as a place of ideas and
Here lean against me while I lean against the window trying to steady the world. Something jittery as the day begins, a hesitation, a catch in its step, its uncertain breath.
My friend the librarian always told me that the world was more than anyone deserved, more trouble and more beauty. She said she never understood why she felt responsible for it, as if she needed to give it a good spin every morning to keep it going, to stop that wobble that she felt.
And then what, I asked her. “Just hold on,” she said, “hold on with everything I have.”
Telling me that was like handing it to me. As when she handed me a book she thought I might like, or one she thought I ought to read.
perspectives,” she said.
The last two years brought plenty of change to BookPeople. Austin’s largest indie bookstore closed for the first few months of the pandemic, and CEO Charley Rejsek said that only now, in the closing months of 2022, does she feel that she can begin thinking seriously about the future again.
Since 2020, she said, BookPeople has redesigned its website, signed its first union contract, and renewed its community partnerships. This summer, BookPeople partnered with Austin Public Library to present Banned Camp, a series of summer events for all ages focusing on banned books. Rejsek said it was a huge success, and they’re looking for other ways to support libraries and educators in the future.
“These challenges are just getting stronger. And we are definitely here to stay, to keep selling the books,” she said. “We recognize the books that are being challenged are the books that we uplift and highlight and recommend to our customers on a daily basis.”
John Dillman, owner of Kaboom Books in Houston’s Woodland Heights neighborhood, said it helps to think of the book trade like farming, where the weather can never be predicted. Used books—his section of the indie bookstore scene—are particularly unpredictable, he said. In two years out 10, “something hits you in the right ear that you never saw coming.”
Dillman’s been a bookseller for 45 years, starting in New Orleans and driven to Houston by Hurricane Katrina. His Houston store was hit hard when the pandemic forced him to close to in-person traffic. He’s just hoping that inflation and rising rents don’t hurt him or his competitors. “Houston’s a great city and it deserves more bookstores,” he said.
At BookPeople, Rejsek was getting excited about the Texas Book Festival (“the best weekend of the year”) and the coming holiday season. She wanted to remind people “that where you spend your money is where you put your values.
“We’re still asking our community to … shop with us if they want to see us here,” Rejsek said. Supply chain issues, inflation, and other threats have not gone away. “We’re asking people to shop early and shop local this season and to resist Amazon.”
authorof a book of poems, Cracks in the Earth, published in 2018 by Cat Shadow Press.
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