All the Scary Houses - September/October 2023

ALL THE SCARY HOUSES

Neighborhoods fight the giant companies pushing the shortterm rental tidal wave.

By EVA RUTH MORAVEC

QUEENS DEFIANT

LGBTQ+ performers are battling Texas’ “drag ban.”

By KIT O’CONNELL

THE LAST TEXAN TO DIE

IN AFGHANISTAN

A Marine’s story reveals how the military targets Latinos.

By REYNALDO LEAÑOS JR.

TOPPLING STATUES

Getting rid of Confederate monuments won’t erase racism.

By GABRIEL ARANA

By NEELANJANA BANERJEE

Short-Term

RUTH MORAVEC

INVESTIGATING TEXAS SINCE 1954

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2023

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 Josephine Lee (McHam Fellow), Michelle Pitcher

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Tyler Lewis

GUEST POETRY EDITOR Logen Cure

POETRY EDITOR EMERITUS Naomi Shihab Nye

STAFF CARTOONIST Ben Sargent

COPY EDITOR Adam Muro

FACT CHECKER Chris Collins

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Neelanjana Banjeree, David Brockman, Reynaldo Leaños Jr., & Eva Ruth Moravec

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Peter Charlap & Drue Wagner

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Kaylee Greenlee Beal, Cindy Elizabeth, Christopher Lee, Shelby Tauber, & Joseph Rushmore

BUSINESS MANAGER Nikki Kobiljak

TEXAS DEMOCRACY FOUNDATION BOARD

Lize Burr (president), Peter Ravella (treasurer), Terri Burke, Carlton Carl, Mark Horvit, Kathleen McElroy, & Skye Perryman

EDITORS EMERETI: Jake Bernstein, Nate Blakeslee, Lou Dubose, Dave Mann, Bob Moser, Kaye Northcott, Karen Olsson, Geoff Rips, Andrea Valdez, & Forrest Wilder

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Michael Agresta, Asher Elbein, Alex Hannaford, Christopher Hooks, Steven G. Kellman, Robert Leleux, James McWilliams, Bill Minutaglio, Rachel Pearson, Robyn Ross, Brad Tyer, & Daniel Blue Tyx

FOUNDING EDITOR Ronnie Dugger

OUR MISSION

We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of humankind as the foundation of democracy. We will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dear Observer Community,

Short-term rentals—for which companies like Airbnb serve as brokers—are sucking up housing inventory across Texas, driving up prices for renters and home buyers alike. For longterm residents whose neighborhoods have been taken over by tourists, there’s also the noise, trash, and parade of strangers who lack community roots.

Our cover story by Contributor Eva Ruth Moravec examines the toll on neighborhoods and how residents and cities have fought back. But any modest progress local governments have made in regulating the industry may soon fall victim to Republicans’ quest to wrest control away from cities with the recently passed “Death Star” bill.

In a collaboration with Latino USA, Contributor Reynaldo Leaños Jr. looks at the military’s efforts to recruit Latinos, which oversell the benefits and understate the risks, as enlistments dwindle. Contributor Neelanjana Banerjee tells the story of how an approaching execution changed an Indian-American family and a killer.

In our culture pages, Digital Editor Kit O’Connell explores Austin’s thriving scene as a new law limiting drag performances comes into effect. With Halloween around the corner, Michelle Pitcher ghost-hunts at an Austin office building where Confederate women and children still haunt the halls. And Senior Writer and Editor Lise Olsen previews Attorney General Ken Paxton’s upcoming impeachment trial.

Since bidding farewell to beloved Texas Observer Poetry Editor Naomi Shihab Nye, we have invited other Texas poets to help with our selection for each issue. Thanks to Guest Poetry Editor Logen Cure, who curates Inner Moonlight, a monthly reading series and podcast for The Wild Detectives venue in Dallas. Her debut poetry collection Welcome to Midland was shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Awards.

GABRIEL ARANA Editor-in-Chief

Gabriel Arana

CAN TEXAS SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE KEN PAXTON?

The upcoming impeachment is guaranteed to provide a jaw-dropping spectacle of how Lone Star State politicians grapple with corruption.

by LISE OLSEN

The forthcoming impeachment trial of Attorney General Ken Paxton is guaranteed to provide a colorful show and a lesson on how Texans occasionally confront the corrupt through a highly anachronistic political tool. Many Americans may only recall the impeachments of U.S. Presidents Donald Trump or Bill Clinton—fraught theatrical affairs in which the House voted to impeach and a politically divided Senate then failed to convict.

But such political trials are centuries-old, having been imported by the Founding Fathers from England, where an impeachment conviction could lead to beheading for egregious rogues. Under today’s U.S. and Texas constitutions, the most dire result is simply an embarrassing spectacle and possible removal from office. No one dies or goes to jail.

Although it still seems unlikely that

Paxton, the ultimate survivor, will lose his job for good, the rules made by the Republican-dominated Texas Senate are surprisingly by-the-book—and some of the state’s top attorneys are assisting the prosecution.

As Alexander Hamilton, the same dude who centuries later inspired the hit musical, once wrote: The subjects of impeachment are “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

In other words: Impeachment was created to protect society from elected scoundrels.

Paxton, a former state representative and senator, stood accused of violating various laws and abusing his power well

before his first term as attorney general began in 2015. It took eight years for the House of Representatives to decide Texans needed protection from him.

In some ways, Paxton’s articles of impeachment resemble the charges in his pending state criminal case for stock fraud (a matter stalled in criminal courts) and in the allegations made in a civil lawsuit filed by ex-senior employees in the AG’s office (which is stalled in civil court after state lawmakers declined to foot the bill for a settlement).

But impeachment is entirely separate and is nothing like a criminal or civil trial. The impeachment trial, scheduled to begin in September in the Texas Senate, will be purely political by design.

The impeachment trial judge will be Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, an ultraconservative ex-radio talk show host who lacks legal training. And the trial rules are

The impeachment is the latest drama for Texas state government. (Shutterstock)

being written by the senators themselves.

Today’s Texans are relying partly on records from Texas’ last truly high-profile impeachment: that of Governor James “Pa” Ferguson, impeached for embezzlement in 1917. Ferguson, a colorful character, also stood accused of profiting by mixing personal and political business. (He’s also remembered for having propelled his wife “Ma” Ferguson into the governorship after the Senate removed him and barred him from running again.)

Ferguson appealed his impeachment to the courts, which upheld the Texas Senate’s decision and underscored its authority. Essentially, the Senate “becomes a court and continues as such regardless of legislative sessions.”

In some ways, the Texas Constitution is stronger than the feds’. An impeachment vote here results in immediate suspension from office, so Paxton was ousted in May after house members voted 121-23 to approve 20 different impeachment articles.

But Texas senators serve both as rule-makers and as jurors in Paxton’s case. They must decide whether he’s guilty of any of the allegations and, if so, whether his exile from office should be permanent. If the Senate does vote to convict, they could also ban Paxton from holding other Texas public offices—though such a decision might favor the political fortunes of Paxton’s wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, as they did for Ma Ferguson, who became Texas’ first female governor.

For Paxton, who served in the Legislature’s upper chamber until 2015, a trial by the Texas Senate means a trial by his former colleagues and his wife’s

current ones.

In typical civil or criminal court cases, prospective jurors can be struck from any panel for conflicts of interest—but not in the Paxton impeachment. Paxton’s wife has been excluded from voting. But senators have not barred state Senator Donna Campbell, who once employed a woman who’s been identified as Paxton’s mistress and who was supposedly given another job as a favor to Paxton by his developer friend, Nate Paul. Nor have they barred state Senator Bryan Hughes, an ally, former roommate, and ex-tenant of Paxton’s.

In order to win a conviction, the lawyers who will be presenting the case for impeachment, including Houston celebrity criminal defense attorneys Rusty Hardin and Dick DeGuerin, will have to convince twice as many people as in a standard courtroom’s 12-member jury.

Hardin, a former state prosecutor, is famous for successfully defending celebrity clients like Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens, once accused in a high-profile report of using performance-enhancing drugs. DeGuerin, among other things, is renowned (in cynical legal circles at least) for having convinced a Galveston jury to acquit millionaire Robert Durst after Durst killed and cut up his neighbor.

These two, working together for the first time, must convince two-thirds of the majority-Republican senate.

This will be only the third impeachment in Texas history. At the federal level, there have been only 21 impeachments, mostly of federal judges. Curiously, both Hardin

and DeGuerin were peripherally involved in the impeachment of Samuel B. Kent, once the lone U.S. district judge in Galveston. Kent enjoys particular infamy as the first and only federal judge to be impeached for sex crimes on June 9, 2009.

Like Paxton, Kent stood accused of a pattern of abuse of power that had endured for years. Like Paxton, Kent—who called himself “King Kent”—had been accused of retaliating against employees. The allegations that eventually brought down Kent were that he sexually assaulted female staff members, then lied to investigators.

In that matter, DeGuerin and Hardin stood on opposite sides: DeGuerin was the judge’s criminal defense attorney and Hardin represented Cathy McBroom, the whistleblower who accused the judge of sexually assaulting her. By the time Kent was impeached by the U.S. House, he’d already been criminally convicted of perjury and imprisoned. Only after being impeached did he resign, avoiding a U.S. Senate trial.

In contrast, Paxton has successfully stonewalled his state criminal charges, avoided federal prosecution, and steadfastly denied wrongdoing. Indeed, he has profited by using allegations against him as an opportunity to stockpile campaign cash.

Like Pa Ferguson before him, Paxton will stand and fight.

And there’s another curious link in Paxton’s case to the disgraced “King Kent.” One attorney Paxton chose as his ally in his upcoming impeachment trial is Anthony Buzbee, a powerful Houston trial attorney, who got his start as Kent’s former law clerk.

LOON STAR STATE

BEN SARGENT’S

DARK HISTORY

Once we take down Confederate statues, Texans must still grapple with monsters in the past.

By GABRIEL ARANA

My great-grandfather, José-María Arana, was a racist.

After the United States barred Chinese men from immigrating under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, tens of thousands sought a new life in Mexico, where they faced no warmer a welcome as they established themselves. A former schoolteacher and businessman, José-María led a vicious campaign against the Chinese in the Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja California in the early 1900s.

Seeking “all legal means to eliminate the Asian merchant,” whose growing prosperity he viewed as a threat to the working class and Mexican national identity, José-María formed a junta of local businessmen in 1912 to address what he called “the tremendous calamity of the Chinese jaundice.” He launched a newspaper, Pro-Patria, whose masthead boldly proclaimed, “Mexico for the Mexicans and China for the Chinese.” Featuring racist jokes and caricatures, the broadsheet portrayed Chinese immigrants as carriers of disease and a threat to Mexican women.

“We cannot live together because there exists an absolute incompatibility in race, social customs, and economy,” José-María wrote in its pages.

My great-grandfather carried his message throughout Northern Mexico, making speeches in working-class towns like Cananea—whose poor copper miners he thought ripe for radicalization—and urging city and state leaders to restrict

the types of businesses that Chinese immigrants could run, relegate them to ghettos, and expel them de manera definitiva [in a definitive way].

I’ve thought increasingly about my great-grandfather and his ignoble legacy as I’ve settled into life in Texas, where the Confederate cause is memorialized on statues, flags, and street signs. Growing up on the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona—where José-María’s widow, my great-grandmother, settled after his death in 1921—I knew little about my family tree’s racist roots. Like a lot of gay kids who come from a small town, I left to find people like me in bigger cities and only much later started to contemplate my origins.

A few months after moving here in the summer of 2022, I visited the Capitol grounds with my in-laws from London. The Texas State Capitol is an imposing Renaissance revival structure made of pink granite with a dome that, Texans remind you, is taller than the U.S. Capitol. But what impressed us all the most on that first visit was the enormous Confederate Soldiers Monument on the right as one walks up to the entrance from 11th Street.

A bronze statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis stands atop one of five pillars. The other four support figures representing the branches of the Confederate military. The inscription on the pedestal below commemorates the 437,000 soldiers who

“died for states [sic] rights guaranteed under the Constitution” and asserts that “the People of the South, animated by the spirit of 1776, to preserve their rights, withdrew from the federal compact.”

“It’s Texas,” I said preemptively, feeling defensive and embarrassed at the same time as my in-laws looked on in horror. It’s the same way I feel when an outsider mentions the state’s abortion ban or attacks on LGBTQ+ people.

The Confederate Soldiers Monument is one of 12 memorials on the grounds that perpetuate the “lost cause”—the historical myth that the Confederate cause was heroic and not about slavery.

It is a lie easily debunked by looking at Texas’ Ordinance of Succession, which laid out the state’s own reasoning for withdrawing from the union. The document declares that Blacks were “rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race” and that “the servitude of the African race … is mutually beneficial to both bond and free” as well as ordained by God. Even the monument’s Confederate death count, scholars have pointed out, is inflated.

The endurance of the Confederate cult here does not, of course, reflect the prejudices of most Texans, which is what makes these symbols so corrosive to a shared sense of state identity. An implicit endorsement of white supremacy, they most directly exclude Black Texans, whose struggle for freedom offers a far more

edifying narrative to rally around—one that embodies our national values and unity rather than doubling down on a lost war. But they set up an identity conflict for anyone of good conscience who wants to claim Texas as their own: Every assertion of Texas identity must come with a “but.”

Reminders of the Confederacy abound here in Austin, considered the state’s bluest city: In the Texas State Cemetery, civil rights hero and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and former Governor Ann Richards lie yards away from Albert Sidney Johnston, a slave owner and Confederate general whose Gothic tomb looks out on the Confederate Fields on the cemetery’s southeast side, where 2,200 Confederate veterans are interred, each plot marked by a white cross.

Some of my Southern friends have said that when you grow up in the South, the paraphernalia is so commonplace, it can blur into the background. But if you’re new to it, it’s striking to see the resentments of the 1800s enshrined in what are supposed to be shared expressions of our civic ideals.

It was perhaps easier to dismiss them before the Obama and Trump presidencies brought the Nazis and white, Christian nationalists out of the woodwork, when it was at least a bit more plausible to reassure oneself that “America is getting better.” It’s become harder to think of racism as a healing wound on the body politic when white nationalists demonstrate openly in public and Republicans in the Legislature try to ensure K-12 students only get taught a sanitized fairy tale about Texas history.

“Most Texans do not support erasing our history … out of political correctness,” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick wrote in an August 2022 letter to Senate Democrats who had urged the Legislature to remove Confederate monuments on the Capitol grounds.

The irony is that whitewashing Texas history is the very purpose of Confederate propaganda—and the impetus behind state Republicans’ attacks on education. Last year, Governor Greg Abbott signed a law that limits how K-12 teachers can talk about racism and slavery; it bans educators from discussing the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which reframes the nation’s founding as inextricably linked to

the arrival of slaves on American shores in 1619.

Since the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and the George Floyd protests in 2020, some Texans have begun to change their minds about memorializing the Confederacy. While a bare majority once opposed their removal, now 52 percent say they should be taken out of public view or relocated to museums where they can teach us about the past rather than help keep its prejudices alive.

Amid our national reckoning about race, reminders of the Confederacy have started

nine monuments, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

My great-grandfather has no monuments dedicated to him, nor do I think he deserves any. What he represents is too corrosive to memorialize.

I don’t have trouble condemning JoséMaría as racist and acknowledging the harm he caused the Chinese community in Northern Mexico. I have come to take a qualified pride in my Mexican heritage, but to the extent it is synonymous with the racism José-María espoused, I must condemn it. Being members of a pluralistic society requires us to put our civic ideals, like the belief in human equality, above allegiance to our ancestry.

I never heard about José-María as a kid. My grandparents died when I was young, and my father never spoke of him. One Christmas when I was home, I happened upon a collection of my grandfather’s writing about our family history. His father, he wrote, had been mayor of Magdalena, Sonora, and his papers were preserved in a collection at the University of Arizona.

I looked up the collection online, which featured speeches, newspaper clippings, and correspondence, including hate mail from Chinese Sonorans. A quick trip to Google Scholar filled in his biography.

to come down in Texas. In 2017, the Texas State Preservation Board voted to remove the Children of the Confederacy plaque, which proclaimed that “the War Between the States was not a rebellion, nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery,” from the Capitol. The University of Texas at Austin relocated four Confederate statues on its campus in 2015 and 2017. But this only scratches the surface: Statewide, only 34 of 240 Confederate symbols have been removed, including

José-María was indeed elected mayor of Magdalena in 1919 after running twice, his first campaign derailed by a stint in prison for inciting violence against Chinese immigrants. As mayor, he was only able to pass laws taxing Chinese businesses, but his advocacy helped inspire the Sonoran legislature to relegate Chinese immigrants to ghettos and expel them in 1919—a move later overruled by the federal government. He died in 1921, supposedly from being poisoned, after which his widow moved to Arizona with my grandfather, where the family was reduced to poverty.

Though I think it is good to have learned about the monster in my bloodline, I’m glad that ultimately, his name will only exist only for those who want to discover it. That’s where I think my great-grandfather’s shameful legacy belongs—in the historical record, the subject of debate and reflection about the mistakes of our ancestors, as a warning of what happens when one is too proud of one’s identity.

IT’S BECOME HARDER TO THINK OF RACISM AS A HEALING WOUND ON THE BODY POLITIC WHEN WHITE NATIONALISTS DEMONSTRATE OPENLY IN THE STREETS.

THE PEOPLE’S DOCTOR

Physician and Author Ricardo Nuila thinks public hospitals could help save patients trapped in our troubled medical system.

INTERVIEW BY LISE OLSEN

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

You became a doctor partly through your roots: Your father is an OB-GYN and your grandfather is a physician in El Salvador. Why are you drawn to tell patients’ stories?

I just knew that these stories had not been told before. And also, just gut feelings. Being on the wards with patients and being like—whoa!—I can’t believe this person’s going through this. Their odyssey sticks with you. And there came a realization: Well, if I’m shocked, everybody will be shocked by this. … I just want to artistically render the stories of patients going through what they do and what their medical odysseys say about life or about the world. This book certainly did not start off as a treatise on healthcare!

Your book recounts gripping tales of five patients who face life-and-death struggles without insurance: Roxana, a former Saks salesperson who has limbs

that are literally rotting off, but she can’t afford treatment; Stephen, a conservative former restaurant manager saddled with massive cancer-related bills; Ebonie, who nearly dies in childbirth after moving to Texas from California; Christian, a young man who can’t find anyone to diagnose mysterious debilitating health problems; and finally Geronimo, a man who loses coverage because he worked. Why did you choose them?

Roxana—she and I connected immediately. She was from El Salvador and given the drama she had to go through, she was forced to demonstrate her specialness. She was very resilient and inspiring. She remained graceful despite those dead limbs.

Stephen’s story I could write from talking with him, though he looks at life in one way and I have different views. This book is not meant to preach to the choir—I don’t want to write only for liberals. It’s literally written to exist in the middle

to see how we can take steps forward in healthcare. He was trying to do everything self-pay. Christian’s story came about because of all these twists and turns in his journey.

Ebonie was more obvious— we know that maternal death is a huge problem. … Her story was about what somebody who’s at high risk has to deal with in Texas.

Geronimo got his Medicaid taken away from him because of a few bucks. It ranked my injustice bone. He was my own age and that was another, “If I’m shocked by this, I need to write something about it!”

You write of Jan de Hartog, who prompted Harris County voters to fund a better public healthcare system by writing a book-length exposé called The Hospital in 1963 that “alerted the city to the deplorable state of its safety-net hospital.” Your book argues that today, Ben Taub, a huge public hospital and major trauma center, saves many more patients’ lives than its

pricey Texas Medical Center competitors. Why?

There was a dirty secret going around. It was just that everybody who staffs Ben Taub is a Baylor College of Medicine doctor. … And it’s crazy, but we feel that the care is better here at Ben Taub than at the nice, fancy hospitals. And to me that was an interesting intellectual pursuit: Why is it that we think this public hospital is better than private hospitals? And why is it that me and my colleagues only want to work here, and why do we love it?

Yet you describe Texas as

“quite possibly the most restrictive healthcare environment for the poor in the country” and as a place where maternal healthcare remains dismal—and has gotten worse since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Are you worried doctors will flee?

There’s so much pressure on the medical personnel who are very caring and who are tasked to care for women in precarious situations. The pressures have been ramped up because one way to make sure women’s health was guaranteed has just been taken away. It does weigh

on me as an internal medicine doctor, especially thinking about my OB-GYN colleagues.

You called COVID-19 “an invader” that made things immeasurably worse. Even after the pandemic waned, waves of new patients still arrived at Ben Taub after losing jobs and insurance, right?

It’s an enormous challenge because COVID has really made the labor markets very volatile, and since, in America, we peg health insurance to that, [and insurance] is gone. That means we are extremely busy as the safety net hospital. And then inflation has also made it so that the cost of healthcare grew so much that people can’t afford it.

No spoilers here by sharing how your patients’ sagas turn out. But you reveal some of your own struggles after a revered mentor of yours committed suicide during the pandemic.

It was a very difficult situation. … He was my closest friend in the hospital and he was my boss and mentor. We could all see ourselves growing into him because he had this idealism [mixed] with pragmatism. He was a doctor who wanted to care for people, but he also had been an administrator. He wasn’t a zealot. He was there to do medicine for people who needed it.

It was so sudden—and it was at a time when there was this existential dread. I think a lot of us wondered if that could become us.

I think suicide is so complex, but I felt that what he was seeing on a daily basis was what I was seeing. … It’s also just an

unmasking of just how vulnerable the profession could be.

You strongly criticize private insurers and nonprofit hospitals that overcharge and perform unnecessary tests or get lots of tax breaks but do comparatively little for the poor—like the one that claims in ads to erase cancer. Although you don’t name these hospitals, they’re recognizable. Have you gotten pushback?

In an event at the Baker Institute, someone got up and said, “You talk about all the private hospitals—what about the insurance companies?” I wondered if he had read the book, because I go off on the insurance companies, too. We found out later he was an administrator at a private hospital. But I have not gotten huge pushback, and that’s been kind of interesting. The wave could be coming.

I’m scared there’s not more pushback. It might just mean that people are entrenched and this isn’t going to change. … There are such clear incentives and there’s so much money behind these institutions, that it’s hard to fathom that the lobbyists will go away or anything like that.

We need to look back to the 1960s in Houston, when the people voted for public support of a hospital that became a successful public healthcare system.

We should combat the stranglehold of “Medicine, Inc.,” as I call it. We need a public healthcare system that competes with it.

The “shocking” predicaments of patients ensnared in the healthcare system inspired Ricardo Nuila to write The People’s Hospital.

(Courtesy Jonas Mohr)

STRANGEST STATE

SANGER

Weather has been really weird with heat waves, hail, Saharan dust, and Canadian smoke swirling everywhere. Suddenly, the National Weather Service predicted hail as big as DVDs would hit Texas. And voilà: In Sanger, chunks of ice as large as 6 inches in diameter fell from the sky. One Texas TV station received photos from viewers who collected ice balls bigger than golf balls, tennis balls, and even that summer treat: a ripe tomato.

RICHMOND

It looked like yet another attack on Texas public education when a 5-foot-long alligator wandered to the sidewalk of a Richmond elementary school. School leaders responded rapidly to this threat. “The rumors are true. We had to turn away a visitor from registration this morning,” one posted on social media. A local game warden responded, jumped on the beast’s back, and hauled it away.

FORT WORTH

Texans head for spring-fed rivers or hide out in air-conditioned homes and cooling centers during heat waves. But what do animals do? At the Fort Worth Zoo, tigers, lions, and primates play with huge ice cubes, and elephants and gorillas cavort in sprinklers. “Just like humans,” a Zoo spokesperson told the Guardian, “we’ve all kind of adjusted.”

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BETWEEN TWO DEATHS: HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

A MURDER AND AN EXECUTION DATE CHANGED THOSE ON BOTH SIDES OF THE BARS.

By NEELANJANA BANERJEE

Hasmukh Patel built a life around his store and was killed there in 2004.

Photography by CHRISTOPHER LEE

t was a busy day for Mitesh Patel and his wife Shweta in May 2018. Both 36, they were working from their home office in the Alamo Heights suburb of San Antonio while their two sons were at school and daycare. Shweta, a financial manager for a major medical group, was on a call. Mitesh, who managed assisted living facilities, was going over administrative reports.

Then Mitesh opened the email he’d been waiting 14 years for, from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ): An execution date had been set for Christopher Young, the man who killed Mitesh’s father. Hasmukh “Hash” Patel was fatally shot in 2004 at the family’s convenience store in Southeast San Antonio.

That email “felt like a sense of closure, a sense of relief for my family,” Mitesh said.

He read over the attachments to the email and told Shweta what he had said many times: He planned to attend the execution. Then he walked down the hall to tell his mother, who had lived with them since 2007.

Shweta remembers standing up to stretch at that moment. She was seven months pregnant with their third child, and it had become increasingly difficult to sit for a full day of work. It struck her that her due date was around the same time that Young was to be executed. She thought again of the message that had been hand-delivered by two men a few weeks earlier, from Young himself to Mitesh and his family. She wondered if it could possibly change her husband’s mind.

The execution date was two months away.

The facts about Texas’ death penalty are well-documented and, in many parts of the world, infamous. The state has executed 577 people since 1976. What is less well known is that, once appeals have been exhausted and an execution date is set, the inmate’s lawyer can petition for clemency—a longshot attempt to reduce a defendant’s sentence, usually to life without parole. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles votes on the petition, then sends its recommendation to the governor. Few requests are granted.

A motley crew of people decided to try to stop Christopher Young’s execution. This is the story of that case—of a murder, a death penalty, and how the progress

toward execution changed both the killer and the family of the man he killed.

Hasmukh Patel arrived in the United States in 1976, sponsored by his sister’s husband in Pennsylvania under a preference system for immigrants with needed skills and family ties in the United States. Raised in a family of farmers in Gujarat, India, he went to college, earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering and, in the 1970s, began fielding job offers from various countries.

His family arranged for him to marry the sister of his brother’s wife in 1975. Mina was seven years younger, a slight, smiling woman with glasses. They had a year together before he left for the United States, a time Mina remembers with pleasure: Hasmukh taking her to movies, ordering delivered meals instead of requiring his young wife to cook. Before he left, their first child, a daughter, was born. “I enjoyed that time in my life,” Mina said with a sigh.

In the United States, Hasmukh started working right away rather than continuing his education so he could send money home. His wife and daughter needed support, and his family had paid for a new water well that came in dry. He got a job flipping burgers at a Roy Rogers fast-food outlet for $2 an hour. His willingness to do whatever it took to support his family is something they remember.

Mina joined him in Pennsylvania a few months later, leaving their daughter with relatives temporarily. She, too, went to work right away, first in a sewing factory and later at other blue-collar jobs. For her, America was about working hard but also about being by her husband’s side. In 1981, a college friend invited Hasmukh to move to Houston for a job designing fire protection systems. Their daughter Rinal came to the United States that year, and Mitesh was born in 1982.

Hasmukh spent eight years in fire protection but never really found his niche. So, as other Gujarati Americans have done, he founded a small business. In 1988, he moved the family to San Antonio, where friends helped him lease a shuttered gas station in the southeast part of town.

Mitesh, then 6, remembers the

move— the borrowed cargo van, the eerie red glow over the empty gas station’s exit sign. With the help of family and friends, Hasmukh built a successful convenience store and dry-cleaning business there.

That store was young Mitesh’s universe. For 16 years, his parents were its main employees. If he or his sister were sick, his parents made them a bed under the front counter. The family moved into a twobedroom apartment nearby, and both sets of grandparents joined them there from India shortly after.

“We lived with eight people in that apartment for years” before moving to a nearby home, Mitesh recalled. They had one car, a 1970 Buick Skylark that his father bought for $500. But Mitesh said that, as a kid, he never felt any sense of financial struggle, even when his father went through a series of layoffs before buying the store. Hasmukh never shared such worries with his family.

Mina would get the kids to school and then report to the store, working until it was time to pick them up. She learned to run the cash register and improved her English by talking with customers. For the first several years, the Patels were the area’s only Indian-American family, and they and their store were well known. Today, Texas has the second-largest IndianAmerican population of any U.S. state.

In Houston, Hasmukh and Mina had helped build a Swaminarayan Hindu temple, and they did the same thing in San Antonio. When the temple moved to an old church building, Hasmukh worked on the plumbing or in the garden— whatever was needed.

In the meantime, the neighborhood around the store was slowly changing, and so the store changed as well, selling more rolling papers than packs of cigarettes. There were some robberies, mostly kids trying to steal beer.

Mitesh began to resent his father’s 14-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week work schedule and that so many of his own weekends were spent running store-related errands. When Mitesh intentionally failed three classes in high school, Hasmukh opened up to him about his own struggles, encouraging him to create something of his own. Eventually, he inspired Mitesh to become the businessman he is today. “I felt

like he transitioned from being my dad to really becoming my best friend,” Mitesh said.

Hash, as his customers called him, was known for his generosity. If a customer came up short, Hash would often front them the money. Among the customers who benefited from Hash’s help were Christopher Young and his girlfriend. Mina advanced money to Young’s girlfriend for diapers for the couple’s baby. However, one day Hash and Young’s girlfriend got into an argument.

The next day was Sunday, November 21, 2004. Mina, on her way to the temple, detoured to bring chai to her husband. She remembers that he looked like a light was shining on him. “I could see his brightness,” she said. He had followed her to the car when a regular customer came by for a lottery ticket. “Today, my wife is first, then you,” he joked with the customer.

After Mina left, Young arrived, driving a stolen car. He had been drinking heavily the night before, and his girlfriend told him Hasmukh had disrespected her.

At the store, Young was angry and aggressive. When Hasmukh reached for the

alarm button under the counter to call 911, Young shot him twice, killing him. Young left and was arrested later that day.

Mina heard the news, returned to the store, and fainted. Mitesh was living in Houston with his sister. They got to San Antonio as fast as they could.

Hundreds of people came to the funeral: Indian-American community members, dozens of customers. It was overwhelming for Mitesh; the Hindu rituals of touching the body before it was cremated drove home that his father was really gone. Mitesh couldn’t speak. He let his sister do the talking that day.

When Young killed Hasmukh Patel in a drunken haze, he arguably prolonged his own life. At 21, he was a self-professed “knucklehead” who’d grown up in poverty. A mental health evaluation diagnosed him with PTSD from major childhood trauma.

His mother had two children— Christopher was her second—before she

was 18. She broke up with Christopher’s father, Willard Young, then moved the kids to Wisconsin, married again and divorced, and moved back to Texas after breaking up with yet another boyfriend. It was later discovered that one of her former partners had raped Christopher’s sister and another had abused Christopher. Being back in San Antonio meant Christopher got to spend time with his father—but not for long. In 1991, Willard Young was shot and killed, allegedly in a drug deal connected to his gang affiliation. Christopher was 8.

After that, Christopher “really lost his way,” said his aunt, Valerie Harris, Willard’s sister. He found a new father figure in an uncle who was also in a gang, so Christopher joined one too, associated with the Bloods. Soon after, according to Christopher, his uncle was sentenced to 50 years for the murder of a rival gang member.

In a 2014 psychological evaluation, Christopher spoke of growing up around the Bloods. “I remember seeing my uncle … the day after he was shot,” he told the evaluator. “He showed me the gunshot wound. … I have seen people get stomped out and have seen people get their ass beat.” He later attended a school dominated by the rival gang, the Crips. “I would have fights with Crips every day,” he said.

Not surprisingly, Christopher lost interest in school, though he was extremely bright. In middle school, he began to have run-ins with authorities, often due to fights with his mother. His aunt said he attempted suicide several times, feeling like he’d lost the only person who really loved him—his father.

According to documents put together for his clemency plea, by the time Young stopped attending school regularly, around the ninth grade, he had been a drugdealing gang member for several years. When he was arrested for Hasmukh Patel’s murder, he was also charged with car theft (which he later admitted to) and sexual assault (which he denied). In his trial, prosecutors presented evidence about both the car theft and, in the punishment phase, about the assault charge.

On Texas’s Allen B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston, death row inmates live in single-person, 60-square-foot cells and are not allowed to

For Mina Patel, their early years in the United States were about working hard and being with her husband Hasmukh.

work. They receive one hour of solo recreation per day. At least eight death row inmates have committed suicide in the past 20 years. Christopher would spend a dozen years in one of these cells.

His aunt believes Young’s transformation began on death row. Harris hadn’t seen him in years, but she wrote and began to visit him in Polunsky.

“When I first saw him, he was so angry,” Harris said. He learned from the other inmates how to protest when they were treated inhumanely. When inmates refused to move, a “force team” of guards came in to physically move them. Because force team actions had to be documented on video, inmates used the recordings as a tool to voice their grievances.

Another Polunsky inmate, Ronald Prible, writing in support of Young’s bid for clemency, recalled an incident when guards were punishing the person in the adjacent cell by denying food. In protest, Young “jacked his bean slot,” jamming the horizontal slot through which food trays are delivered. The force team was called, and Young was disciplined. The incident stuck with Prible because Young, who was Black, had been advocating for a white man.

“Most people here wouldn’t stick their necks out for anyone, especially someone of another race,” wrote Prible, whose death sentence was overturned in 2020 because of allegations of prosecutorial misconduct by a white prosecutor.

Harris said Young repeatedly looked out for fellow inmates. When he learned one of his neighbors was planning to kill himself, he stayed up all night and talked him out of it. He began to read incessantly, wrote, painted, and connected with fellow inmates and his family—especially his daughter Chrishelle, who was only 2 years old when he was sent to prison. Through his aunt, he began to connect with troubled young people outside prison.

When youths she knew were struggling with disciplinary or mental health issues, Harris started bringing them to Young. He would share his story but also encouraged them to find creative outlets. Those discussions sparked something in him.

“It was like he found a purpose,” Harris said.

Texas Innocence Project founder and attorney David Dow, with the help of another

lawyer, students, and volunteers, handles the appeals of some Texas death row inmates and took on Young’s case in 2013. Dow said he found Young to be an exceptional person, “easily a guy who would’ve been a friend of mine if he hadn’t been on death row.”

New York artist Peter Charlap had never thought much about prisons until he heard an NPR interview with Dow about his death row work. Wanting to help, he contacted Dow, who put him in touch with Young. Charlap began visiting the prison to paint portraits of the incarcerated.

When he first met Young, Charlap asked what he dreamt about in prison. Young’s answer was to ask whether the artist had read Carl Jung. “And I realized, I’m talking to a highly intellectual person,” Charlap said. “Very well read. Very charismatic.” His portrait shows Young behind a chessboard.

Charlap was fascinated with how the men played chess in their separate cells, calling out moves to one another. He said Young could play four games at once.

In 2016, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Laurence Thrush and other writers were working on a pitch for a series based on Dow’s work, and Dow put him in touch with Young. They began corresponding, and while the TV show was never made, Thrush’s friendship with Young grew. They began collaborating on a documentary film. When Thrush met British actor and producer Chike Okonkwo (Being Mary Jane, La Brea), who had moved to Los Angeles and was increasingly interested in the criminal justice system, he introduced him to Young as well. Okonkwo found Young to be “kind and smart, artistic,” he said in an interview, and they, too, became friends.

Harris said the collaboration with

“I was a typical Texan who was waiting for him to get executed.”

Mitesh Patel, center; his mother Mina at left; and wife Shweta, right, all eventually supported Young’s petition for clemency. They are shown with Mitesh and Sweta’s children.

Thrush built a fire under Young to bring about serious change. Thrush and Okonkwo, like Harris and Young, felt that the documentary could help troubled young men on the outside and also tell a story of the prison system from the inside.

Then the news came that Young’s execution date had been set.

When an inmate has exhausted all appeals, he is, in the lingo of Innocence Project workers, “on the brink” of having an execution date set. An inmate with an execution date is called a “crisis case.”

“We keep track of all of the cases that are on the brink, and we identify issues that we will raise if it becomes a crisis case,” Dow explained.

Dow’s team began to work on a

clemency petition for Young to the Texas Board of Paroles and Pardons, whose five members make recommendations to the governor. They consider the defendant’s crime, the defendant’s behavior while incarcerated, and the wishes of the victim or victim’s family.

Getting someone off death row doesn’t happen often—in 30 years, Dow has gotten 14 clients’ sentences changed from death to prison time and gotten four out of prison entirely. Even when he can’t do that, he said, “We still manage to keep our clients alive for months and sometimes years, sometimes many years longer than if we weren’t representing them. … It’s time that they get to spend [communicating and visiting] with their friends and their family and their loved ones.”

Dow had recently won relief for another client. Thomas Whitaker, a white man,

had hired a hitman to kill his family for insurance purposes. His mother and brother were killed. His father survived the shooting and advocated for his son’s clemency. The Pardons and Paroles Board voted unanimously for clemency, and Governor Greg Abbott commuted Whitaker’s sentence to life in prison without parole.

Thrush and Okonkwo thought Young might have a good chance for clemency because his crime, unlike Whitaker’s, was not premeditated, and Young had transformed his life while on death row. They decided to ask Mitesh Patel for help.

Mitesh Patel was 22 when his father died, and he shouldered much of the murder’s fallout. He inadvertently saw the security video of Young shooting Hasmukh. Mitesh identified his father’s body and testified at trial

to spare his mother and older sister Rinal the trauma of doing so. Over the next 14 years, whenever a major life event came along—marriage, becoming a father himself, business successes and failures—he drove to that store and sat in the parking lot, where he felt closest to his father.

He had kept tabs on Young’s case. “I was a typical Texan who was waiting for him to get executed,” he said with characteristic candor. “I really felt like the state was wasting all this time and money. This guy killed my dad with a 30-cent bullet. For years, I was like, ‘I will gladly provide the state with a 30-cent bullet and we can take care of this much, much faster.’”

Shweta and Mitesh had met in graduate school a few months before Hasmukh Patel was murdered, and she’d always felt the loss of not knowing this man who was so

important to her husband. But Mitesh’s idea of attending the execution to achieve closure had never sat right with her. She feared it wouldn’t give him the relief he sought.

As the execution date approached, Okonkwo had begun to worry about the clemency team’s plan to show up unannounced at the Patels’ house. He talked to Rebecca Weiker, a transformative justice expert who told him that at all costs he should avoid retraumatizing Mitesh. Okonkwo and the others decided to leave a letter saying they had a message from Young.

The actor and Thrush drove to the Patels’ house, got out, and put the letter in the mailbox. But as they headed back to the car, Shweta came out to speak to them. Mitesh was out of town, but she wanted to know who they were. Okonkwo noticed

that she was pregnant.

“As soon as we told her who we were, and that we had the message, she started talking to us excitedly, saying that maybe this would help Mitesh,” he remembered. Shweta went inside and called Mitesh right away. He was furious that she would speak to and be manipulated by these strangers.

A few weeks later, Thrush and Okonkwo came back, asking if they could show Mitesh a video message from Young. This time, Mitesh agreed, they met for breakfast, and Mitesh watched the video. In it, Young says that killing Hash Patel was the biggest regret of his life, that he wanted Mitesh and his family to know how sorry he was. Mitesh recoiled at hearing his father’s name coming from Young’s mouth. He didn’t trust the video or these men.

Thrush tried to tell Mitesh what he knew of Young’s background, the hardship he had gone through as a child, and how much it would hurt his 14-year-old daughter Chrishelle to lose her father.

“I was like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’” Mitesh said. “They were presenting stuff to me about how Chris is this great artist, eloquent, how they visit him often and it just pissed me off—here are two people from Hollywood … and Chris is their pet project, and they are shitting on me and my family and what Chris did to my family with this ‘Oh, poor Chris’ take.”

When he saw the meeting derailing, Okonkwo changed direction. “I told him that there is real evidence that watching an execution can retraumatize people who [have lost] someone to murder,” Okonkwo said. “I told him that I was honestly worried about him.”

Mitesh remembers his reply. “I was like, ‘Worried about me? You don’t know me, man. Worry about your own damn self.’”

Dejected, Thrush and Okonkwo headed back to Los Angeles. Okonkwo, though, couldn’t stop thinking about Mitesh. Over the next few weeks, he emailed, texted, and called. Eventually, Mitesh started picking up the phone when Okonkwo called.

“He’s so damn persistent,” Mitesh recalled, laughing. “And he always came at me with such sympathy.”

Mitesh has just fed his father a piece of cake at his 50th birthday celebration

On one call, Okonkwo told Mitesh about how Young, in visits with his daughter, always said he was in prison solely because of his own actions and that she should “stay away from people like me and find good people to surround you.”

After the call, Mitesh found himself staring into his computer screen. It was late. Shweta was already in bed; the pregnancy had been hard, and the fact that her due date and Young’s execution date were so close had started to bother him, too.

“I was like, ‘Holy shit, I’m a dad, and here is another guy who is a father, and he is trying to impart something positive to his daughter, and if the state takes him away, that fatherhood stops,’” Mitesh said, thinking of how much he missed talking to his own father. “I finally thought, if there is a chance for me to stop it, then I could help his daughter Chrishelle not go through what I went through.”

Mitesh went to the bedroom and woke Shweta to tell her. The next morning, he told his mother, who also agreed. Mitesh called Okonkwo back and said he wanted to help with the clemency attempt. Okonkwo connected him with Dow, who was surprised by the development. It wasn’t often that he saw this in Texas.

The execution was only three weeks away.

Over the next few weeks, with Okonkwo’s help, Mitesh attended rallies and spoke to local and national reporters. Thrush edited some of his footage into a video to accompany Dow’s legal brief. In addition to Young’s family members, it included testimony from 12 other Polunsky inmates attesting to the positive force he had become on death row.

Mitesh called TDCJ’s Victim Services Division to request a meeting with Young but was told that was impossible. Mitesh could write a letter, they said, and they would bring back Young’s recorded answers.

“It started to bother me, like, why can’t I go and talk to him?” Mitesh said. Both Victim Services representatives and the prosecutor who had tried the case contacted Mitesh to ask if he really wanted to do this. They warned him that Dow was known for theatrics, and they didn’t want Mitesh and his family to be manipulated.

“I really didn’t know who to trust at that point,” Mitesh said. It was “like everyone had their own agenda.”

Dow arranged for Mitesh to meet with the parole board in Austin. “They wanted to know why I was doing this and who had put me up to it,” Mitesh said. When Mitesh told them what he knew about Young’s early life, they told him about the man’s rap sheet and infractions from his early years in Polunsky. Mitesh left feeling as though he was doing something wrong.

A few days later, on Sunday, July 8, Shweta was feeling off and told Mitesh that she was going to take a nap. He got worried. Shweta said everything was fine, but he took her to the hospital anyway. Mitesh was right to worry: The baby was in the breech position and his heart rate was erratic. Shweta was rushed into surgery

for an emergency cesarean section. They named the baby boy Rushabh Hasmukh Patel, after Mitesh’s father.

Shweta and the baby were still in the hospital when Okonkwo arrived to say he’d arranged for Mitesh to do an interview on Good Morning America. National pressure on Abbott might make a difference, but the interview was the next day. In New York City.

“I remember Chike asking me if it was OK if [he took] Mitesh, and I was like, no question—you have to go,” Shweta said. She had her parents and Mitesh’s sister to help.

When they arrived at the TV studio in New York, however, a producer said the story had been bumped for one involving former President Donald Trump and a Scottish golf resort. Shortly after, they got the news from Dow that the pardons and paroles board had voted unanimously to

“Christopher Anthony Young” 24” x 20” oil on panel (Copyright 2014 Peter Charlap)

move forward with Young’s execution. The bid for clemency was over.

Okonkwo couldn’t believe that he had dragged Mitesh away from his newborn son for nothing.

But Dow had another idea. He and his team sued, claiming that the Texas Board of Paroles and Pardons’ action was racist, citing the evidence that they had voted in favor of Whitaker’s clemency, but ruled the other way when it came to an IndianAmerican victim and family and a black defendant. Dow pointed out other cases in which survivors of a victim opposed the execution of the perpetrator. In all the cases where the parties were people of color, he said, clemency was unanimously denied. However, in the case of Whitaker, a white man, it was unanimously granted.

The judge who heard the suit seemed bothered by those facts, Dow said.

According to the Texas Tribune, U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison expressed frustration that he felt required to reject the appeal because Dow’s team had so little chance of proving racial discrimination.

Mitesh was on his way home from the airport when his cellphone rang. Someone from U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee’s office was asking if he’d still like to meet Christopher Young in person. Mitesh said he would.

Later, Mitesh got an angry call from the head of Victim Services.

“He said, ‘I don’t know who you know, but I am on vacation out here on my ranch, and I got a call that I need to arrange a visit for you in Huntsville tomorrow, so you need to be there at 9 a.m. sharp,’” Mitesh recalled.

The next morning, Mitesh drove three and a half hours to the Walls Unit in Huntsville, where Texas executions are carried out. When he arrived, the parking lot was empty—the prison had been put on lockdown. A Victim Services staffer accompanied Mitesh to the meeting.

On the phone in a visitation room, separated from Mitesh only by a glass wall, Young apologized, saying that he should have never gone into the store that day and that Mitesh’s father should be alive. Mitesh asked questions about Young’s time in prison and about his daughter. Young

told him how he’d tried to reach young people from inside prison.

“Then I apologized to him,” Mitesh said, “I told him that I was sorry I didn’t come around earlier, that if we had more time, maybe I could have done more to make sure he got his sentence commuted.”

Mitesh told him that he would be there as a witness the next day, not for closure or vengeance, but so Young did not have to die alone—and that he knew that’s what his father would have wanted.

Young held his hand up to the 3-inchthick glass and motioned for Mitesh to do the same—their two hands similar in color and size. “You don’t have to do that. It was enough for you to have to watch your father die on that security video,” he told Mitesh, “I don’t want anyone to have to see that. I need to do it alone.”

Young took all his friends and family off the execution-day list, but he made his Aunt Valerie his spiritual advisor so she could be with him on July 17, in the hours before his execution. He was excited to tell her about his meeting with Mitesh. He called his family, who had all gathered in one place to say goodbye, which was joyful and painful.

“Then we got into an argument,” Harris recalled. She told him she would be there at the execution. He got mad and began to cry.

“It was the first time I had ever seen him cry,” Harris said, her voice breaking, so she backed down and agreed to stay away from the execution room. “He said, ‘But I’m not done yet.’”

Young told her he might fight the injection to protest the system one last time. But Harris said she understood now that she had been praying the wrong way in those last few days. Instead of praying for clemency, she should have been praying for peace.

“I said, ‘Baby, you don’t have to ever go back into that prison today. You gonna be free.’ … I said, ‘I’m not telling you not to fight, but fight with your words, think about the children. Show them the way with your words.’ I said, ‘Unless a seed is planted in the ground and dies, it bears no fruit. Be the seed.’ And he told me to go back to death row and tell his brothers to take the torch he had lit and run with it,

and we prayed together, and I told him to go and take his rest.”

As she left to go to the chapel, she heard him laughing with the guards. Who does that, she thought. What kind of man can laugh with the guards that are going to kill him?

The Patel family had gathered in San Antonio. The two boys, Rishaan, 4, and Roshan, 2, played while the adults passed the new baby around. Before 6 p.m., Mina went to her altar.

Then the family fell silent as the TV news reported Young’s final words: “I want to make sure the Patel family knows I love them like they love me,” he had said. “Make sure the kids in the world know I’m being executed, and those kids I’ve been mentoring, keep this fight going.”

For days afterward, Harris couldn’t get out of bed or eat. But she made the trip to Polunsky a few days later. She visited all of her nephew’s closest friends and told them about his final day, sat with them as they cried and mourned, and made plans to continue his outreach work.

Thrush and Okonkwo were banned from visiting Polunsky because they’d used footage from the documentary to advocate for Young.

A year and a half after Young died, the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the country and shut down normal life, making it hard to visit Polunsky. But Harris kept up her work. Today, the Christopher Young Foundation: Love, Forgiveness, and Second Chances has its 501(c)(3) classification as a formal nonprofit organization.

Work continues on the documentary. Thrush said Young’s story will be there for future generations to learn from. Mitesh and Okonkwo remain close. They text each other often and talk about how they can make a change together somehow.

“People get it wrong,” Mitesh said. “I never forgave Chris for killing my dad, but I thought there was value to his life and that he was trying to do something good for his daughter, for other kids.” He wants to share his story in the hope that others will help him “make a change in this world as a way to honor my father and the values he instilled in me.”

Neelanjana Banerjee is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles.

Mitesh Patel, shown in the store where his father was killed, said he didn’t forgive the killer, “but I thought there was value to his life.”

SHORT-TERM HOUSING , LONG-TERM MESS

GIANT RENTAL PLATFORMS ARE CREATING DRAMA IN THE STREETS—AND PUTTING MONEY IN THE COFFERS OF TEXAS CITIES.

By EVA RUTH MORAVEC

Photography by SHELBY TAUBER

In this Plano neighborhood, when a party at a short-term rental turned violent, a bullet went through a neighbor’s window.

Gunfire jolted Zoey Sanchez awake that night in February, not something she heard often in her usually tranquil neighborhood in Plano, north of Dallas. Then she heard screeching tires. After a few minutes, Sanchez peeked out a window to see police officers detaining a young woman.

Sanchez eventually went back to sleep. Then it was sunrise, and her husband was jostling her awake. You need to get up, he said. There’s drama. She grabbed a bathrobe and walked out of the front door—and into chaos.

Outside, news crews and upset neighbors had descended on remnants of an active crime scene. And everyone seemed to be looking at her house—specifically, at a window in her young daughter’s playroom. She learned that a party at the shortterm rental house across the street had turned into a gunfight, and one bullet had ricocheted around her daughter Luna’s playroom, crossing the nook where Luna likes to read. Thankfully, Luna had been asleep in her bedroom, tucked away from windows facing the street.

The two-story brick rental house had become a frequent source of trouble for the neighborhood Sanchez loved. An outsider had bought it, sunk a lot of money into it, tried to sell it, and then turned it into a bed-and-breakfast. For months, loud tenants and their guests had disrupted the street. Neighbors had seen partygoers peeing in the yard, hanging out of windows, and screaming. Their cars filled the block. To neighbors, police had seemed unable, and the owner unwilling, to address the stream of complaints. Now the partying had escalated to violence that could easily have killed Sanchez’s daughter.

Shootings, with horrific consequences, have become almost commonplace at Texas schools, houses of worship, restaurants, shopping malls, and concerts. This time, Sanchez feared she’d have to explain to Luna that she might not even be safe from gunfire in her own home.

“As a mom, you don’t care about yourself. But your biggest thing is, you want to have your kids safe,” said Sanchez, an occupational therapist. “So when your house is not safe anymore, you’re like, ‘Well, that sucks. I failed.’”

When Sanchez began researching the

situation, she found that the problems at B&Bs in other neighborhoods were equally serious. The previous fall, police busted a sex trafficking ring operating a brothel out of a short-term rental three miles away. In nearby Wylie, a woman allegedly used an Airbnb in fall 2021 for sex trafficking her 8-year-old daughter. In northwest Dallas, according to news reports, an Airbnb unit owner fired his management company after neighbors complained about visitors and armed security guards.

What had once been a way for visitors to find charming, off-the-beaten-path lodgings—and a way for local property owners to make extra money with little neighborhood disruption—has become a global business dominated by corporate investors that in many places threaten the safety and character of residential neighborhoods. How short-term rentals (or STRs) fit into the local landscape varies, but it’s becoming universally accepted

that, left uncontrolled, their impact can be immense. In some places, they are making rental housing so lucrative as tourist lodging that it is becoming unavailable and unaffordable to local workers, students, and other residents. Selling for higher prices, they drive up property values and neighborhood tax bills and replace families with a steady stream of strangers—whom locals see as producing more crime and less accountability than traditional renters.

Neighborhoods tend to be—or used to be—a strong force in Texas politics. Often, angry neighbors’ comments have been loud enough to kill off affordable housing or commercial developments. But short-term rental companies with highly paid lobbyists, worldwide reach, the offer of hotel-tax millions to local and state governments, and the support of local B&B owners and operators, are a formidable force. Cities around Texas and the world, from San Juan to Taipei to Barcelona, are scrambling to

Zoey Sanchez and her daughter, Luna, sit in the playroom of their home in Plano, which was struck by a stray bullet fired from a party at a nearby Airbnb in February.

address resulting problems.

Some neighborhoods in Fredericksburg appear deserted during the week because so much housing is aimed at weekend guests—while the popular tourist town has a labor shortage because of the lack of affordable housing. In Galveston, shortterm rentals are worsening the lack of housing for working-class and middle-class residents. In Arlington and Fort Worth, residents fought for regulatory measures, with threats of lawsuits always in the air. In Dallas, it took four years for a strong neighborhoods coalition to win city council approval of an ordinance banning such rentals from single-family residential areas.

“We stand together, although there were more of us earlier today, and we represent about 500,000 other homeowners, and there are renters too, who unfathomably find ourselves as the underdog in this fight,” said Olive Talley, one of the leaders of the fight against short-term rentals in Dallas, a few hours before the city council passed the ordinance.

In the meantime, B&B corporations have crafted deals to pay hotel taxes on behalf of rental property owners to the state and some cities. For individual owners, those deals help shield them from state scrutiny over how much they should be paying in taxes and being identified as short-term rentals for tax and zoning purposes. At the same time, they provide the kind of income to states that engenders a lot of goodwill. Since May 2017, Airbnb, one of the largest companies, has paid Texas more than $229 million, and HomeAway has paid more than $57 million, according to the state comptroller’s office.

Bills to prevent cities from regulating short-term rentals have been filed—and thus far defeated—in the Texas Legislature repeatedly since 2017 and likely will be filed again.

For now, city councils continue to struggle to pass rules that can pass muster in expensive court challenges, where by a slight margin, rental property owners are ahead. The result has been a patchwork of partially enforced regulations, dwindling housing stock, and, in some cities, the continuing degradation of neighborhoods.

In 1995, a retired teacher started a website to rent out his Colorado ski resort condo. Five

years later, Vacation Rental By Owner, or VRBO, was advertising properties in all 50 U.S. states and 28 countries. Then, in 2005, venture capitalists in Austin started a company called HomeAway with six employees who quickly bought up similar companies. Within two years, HomeAway raised $160 million and bought VRBO. The combined company, called VRBO, operated more than 130,000 properties in almost 100 countries. It had no real competition until a new San Francisco-based website called Airbed and Breakfast officially launched at South By Southwest in Austin in 2008. Built with less than $20,000, the website helped hundreds of people find accommodations in places where hotels were already sold out—in Denver, for instance, for the Democratic

National Convention.

Bed-and-breakfasts were already popular in Fredericksburg by the 1990s. They were mostly the kinds of places where hosts fixed breakfast for visitors, and owners often lived onsite. A few reservation services popped up to help manage bookings at hundreds of such lodgings.

That picture changed by the new millennium, with VRBO going strong and Airbnb newly launched. Homeowners like Austin’s Sharon Walker were getting involved. She and her husband were in trouble on the mortgage on their dream home downtown. They had to sell it or figure something out.

“We’d heard about this company, HomeAway. I contacted all of the five listings that were there at the time for Austin, and one woman took the time to talk to me,” Walker said. “She said it was successful.”

Walker and her husband moved across the street and put their house up for shortterm rental on HomeAway. In 2010, Walker rented her house for $500 a night, almost every weekend, and watched through the kitchen window as visitors checked in across the street. She learned to avoid problems by asking potential guests about the nature of their trips and groups. At first, she thought of it as “not a business” because it was “still the residential use of a home.”

The next year, prior to SXSW, Walker heard from desperate Google and Apple executives who’d found local hotels sold out. Walker emailed 30 friends to see if they’d host people in their homes and got 15 yeses. She coordinated the guests’ stays as a festival rental manager. The next year, she rented out 150 houses for SXSW. By 2012, Walker’s management gig had become a business.

While the lodgings offered by Walker and other “hosts” on HomeAway and Airbnb were becoming popular, they were also attracting the attention of cities. In 2011, the Austin City Council, alerted to the tax income potential of short-term rentals, approved a study. They found that, while some operators had been paying hotel occupancy taxes—money traditionally used to promote tourism—only 80 of 200 originally identified short-term rentals were paying it. And then an audit found that the number of units was closer to 1,500.

Kathie Tovo, then a council member

“AS A MOM, YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT YOURSELF. BUT YOUR BIGGEST THING IS, YOU WANT TO HAVE YOUR KIDS SAFE.”

and a strong opponent of short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods, said that opposition to a proposed ordinance usually comes from owners who have only one or two rental properties. But as the city accumulated information, she told the Texas Observer, “More often it looked like … people were making their living this way—you know, they were acquiring four or five properties.”

The following year, Austin passed the first ordinance in Texas regulating shortterm rentals, requiring them to register, pass inspection, and pay hotel taxes and other fees. But—as is usually true with most issues regarding that industry—it wasn’t that simple. Entering new territory, city leaders amended the ordinance, redefined allowable rentals, and got sued. By 2017, Austin’s ordinance allowed the city to deny licenses to new short-term rentals in residential zones if they are not owneroccupied properties. Properties already being used as short-term rentals, even if not owner-occupied, were grandfathered in.

Tovo said the council was concerned

about the availability of affordable housing and the effects of short-term rentals on school enrollment. It was easy to see why short-term rentals would reduce the housing available on longer-term leases, she said. “You’re gonna make more money as a short-term rental.”

Walker’s short-term rental business helped her and her husband keep their dream home, and she felt that she had served a real need for lodging in Austin. Working only with owner-occupied properties, which might only be rented out a few times a year, “doesn’t work for us” as a sustainable business, she said. She still manages about 30 non-owner-occupied rentals in Central Texas. She thinks opponents are blaming short-term rentals for too many problems and using fear of crime as a weapon.

Short-term rentals seem here to stay. They fill a need. Many of the owners pay taxes and are responsible hosts. But problems linger. Industry representatives like to focus on how much money their business brings in, how ordinances hamper property rights,

and blame “party houses” and crime on a few bad actors while touting improved safety and accountability processes like background checks. But it doesn’t take many bullets through a little girl’s playroom window, or busts of drug operations and prostitution rings, for residents to see what might happen in any neighborhood if shortterm rentals go unregulated.

In 2013, Jeryl Hoover was in his second term as mayor of Fredericksburg (he’s now in his third) when residents approached him with the idea of changing the town’s bed-and-breakfast ordinance to allow them in single-family residential neighborhoods. He agreed.

“I bear this scar,” Hoover said. Residents were having a tough time getting (or paying for) mortgages. “So we thought, well, maybe more people could buy an R1 [single-family] house if part of their mortgage affordability plan was to operate a B&B, either in their home or in an accessory building out in the backyard.”

From that came what Hoover calls a “tsunami of growth,” but it wasn’t the kind that helped most residents. Now, local workers can’t find homes to rent long-term. Nor can they afford to buy homes—but wealthy investors, often from out of town, can. For eight years, no new hotels were built, while the numbers of short-term rental units skyrocketed. In 2020, taxes paid to the city by STR operators surpassed tax income from traditional hotels and motels. More than 1,900 short-term units now comprise nearly 25 percent of the town’s housing inventory.

“The problem we have here is as our visitor numbers continue to increase, we don’t have enough support structure,” said Tim Lehmberg, executive director of the Gillespie County Economic Development Commission. “We have a severe labor challenge here that’s driven by a number of things, but primarily [by] such an extraordinarily high cost of real estate.”

The city hasn’t ignored the problem: Regulations have been put in place and amended. Now, short-term rentals must get permits and pass inspection. Certain types of new STRs are limited in singlefamily zoned areas. In June, Hoover and the council were revisiting the rules again

A circle of cracked glass marks one of the places where the bullet shot through the Sanchez’ window in February and ricocheted.

to help locals get back into single-family homes and to protect neighborhoods— though that effort may be too late. Finally, at least 800 new hotel rooms are on the five-year horizon.

While many want the council to control the short-term tidal wave, those benefiting from the industry like things just the way they are. According to Airbnb, its hosts in Gillespie County made $40 million in 2021.

Matt Durrette, owner of a Fredericksburgbased short-term rental management company, wrote to city officials about proposed changes, noting that tourism is the largest employer in town. “Innovative solutions” to long-term housing would be better than “stripping away people’s rights” and … [blaming] STRs,” he wrote.

Outside of the United States, the story is often the same: Short-term rentals are blamed for housing shortages in places like Amsterdam, which has strict limits on vacation rentals; Barcelona, which banned short-term private room rentals in 2021; and the entire country of Portugal, which is no longer issuing new licenses for shortterm rentals.

The short-term rental industry denies that its growth is part of such problems. A 2019 national study paid for by VRBO (now Vrbo) concluded that other factors, like rising household income, were to blame.

Other studies produced different results. A year after the VRBO study, a community activist who created a data project called Inside Airbnb collaborated on a study with a left-wing group in the European Parliament and concluded, “With case studies on Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Prague, Vienna, New York and San Francisco, the report reveals how Airbnb has driven up rents, caused damage to urban communities, and wrecked affordable social housing programmes.”

Problems with vacation rentals don’t happen only in tourist towns. Take Plano, for example. Now home to about 300,000 people, parts of the city were still farmland in the 1980s, when Ross Perot bought 2,700 acres and moved EDS, his multinational information technology company, to town. Various corporate headquarters followed.

In spring 2019, Plano became the first

Texas city to sign a hotel-tax collection agreement with Airbnb. Officials touted the new revenue stream. Last year, Airbnb and Vrbo together paid Plano nearly $600,000 in hotel taxes.

But by November 2019, it was impossible to live in Plano and not know that STRs posed problems. Late one night, teenagers crashed a party at an Airbnb, got kicked out, and retaliated by allegedly shooting into the home. Marquel Ellis Jr., 16, an Allen High School sophomore and football standout, was killed.

“It was literally rented as a party house,” said Plano City Council member Shelby Williams. “East Plano is not a vacation destination.”

It is, however, an affluent city with plenty of large homes, many with pools— the perfect locations for family reunions, bachelor trips—and parties. After Ellis was killed, residents showed up again and again at city hall to describe what it was like to live next to such houses.

“Honestly, it had not come across my radar before,” Williams said. “After that, it

Some attendees of a Dallas City Council session in June wore “Homes Not Hotels” shirts and stickers, showing their support for restricting short-term rental properties.

registered in a big way. At the time and now … I feel a responsibility.”

Things were quiet for a while—the pandemic pushed other items off the nightly news. Then came the brothel bust, then the shooting across from Zoey Sanchez’s house. Residents and council members were reenergized. Williams said he heard from the Texas Neighborhood Coalition’s local chapter at almost every council meeting for months. “We had a core group of eight to 10 people, and every week, we’d go to city council and talk about it,” chapter leader Bill France said.

The Plano City Council in fall 2022 asked staff to work on a short-term rental registration program and commissioned a survey. Nearly three-fourths of respondents said they would be moderately or very uncomfortable living on the same block as an STR. More than a third of those with personal experience with the rentals reported safety or noise concerns. In May, the council voted to ban all new STRs for one year so the city could study their implications and appointed a citizen task

force to examine the issue.

The brothel bust and the shootings personalized the crime problem for Plano citizens. Industry supporters question the accuracy of studies showing that violent crime rates rise because of short-term rentals, but statistics pale beside residents’ outrage over specific incidents.

The industry says the instances are statistically rare—plus, Airbnb banned parties in 2020. But activists have built a national database to show that shootings, at least, aren’t all that rare.

Cities have plenty of incentive to work out compromises with the bed-andbreakfast industry. In Austin alone, Airbnb officials estimated that a tax collection agreement between Airbnb and the city would produce $15 million to $20 million annually in hotel tax income. Airbnb has tax-collection agreements in 15 other countries and territories and in nearly every U.S. state. In Texas, the company has agreements with the state, about a dozen cities, and a few counties.

The agreements mean that, rather than hotel occupancy taxes being paid by the individuals who rent their properties on Airbnb or Vrbo, the companies pay on behalf of all their bookings in the area. Typically, the amounts paid under the “voluntary collection agreements” are much larger than what had been coming in from individual property owners.

But, as the hotel industry and the Economic Policy Institute have pointed out, the agreements conceal specifics on how many and where vacation rentals are actually operating. Typically, cities can audit information the companies provide, but not information from individual property owners. Such agreements have drawn a caution from the National League of Cities, which says some officials worry that the agreements allow the companies to pay less than they owe and make auditing impossible, as was the case in New Orleans in 2021.

The agreements stipulate that the companies will pay the taxing jurisdiction’s hotel occupancy tax rate—in Plano’s case, 7 percent—on “taxable booking transactions.” The companies self-report the taxable amount and pay the taxes

they presume they owe, just as with retail sales taxes. Expedia did not respond to multiple requests for comment about its agreements. According to Airbnb, they are “happy to work with cities” that want more detailed information.

Instead, municipalities pay thousands of dollars for software to comb through the short-term rental platforms and find properties that operate illegally—without a permit or in a zone where they are outlawed.

Overall, the platforms are enormous. Airbnb’s initial public offering was the biggest in the country in 2020. Aside from a slight dip in 2020, the company’s taxable receipts in Texas have skyrocketed, going from $143.8 million in 2017 to over $1 billion in 2022. HomeAway’s taxable receipts rose from $100 million in 2019 to just under $300 million in 2022.

The timing of those agreements has coincided with the Texas Legislature’s attempts to protect companies from local regulation. The tax collection agreements were made possible by a 2015 law. In 2017, the state entered into its agreement with Airbnb to collect its share of hotel taxes directly from the platform. Simultaneously, lawmakers drafted their first effort at preemption—a bill that would have kept municipalities from banning short-term rentals.

Tourism is big business in Arlington, home to the Texas Rangers, the Dallas Cowboys, the original Six Flags Over Texas amusement park, and a growing entertainment district. Billions of dollars have been invested, and millions of tourists—and their dollars—arrive annually. David Schwarte, a former corporate lawyer for American Airlines and a tech company, lives not far from the giant AT&T Stadium where the Cowboys play. One day his neighbor told him that a property owner had just “opened up the short-term rental from Hades” nearby. In fact, he said, five of about 80 area homes were being rented short-term, often to people throwing parties. Kids were learning dirty words from loud partygoers. “It was a total mess,” Schwarte said.

He and others in the neighborhood formed an alliance and started to research. They studied other cities’ dealings with STRs and spoke often at city council meetings, detailing what it was like to live

next to a so-called party house. For more than two years, the council studied the issue before adopting restrictions.

In April 2019, Arlington passed an ordinance to create an STR zone, extending about a mile beyond the borders of the entertainment district. Short-term rentals are allowed inside the zone and in areas zoned for mixed uses, but they’re forbidden in single-family residential neighborhoods. Another ordinance was passed to regulate the operation of such rentals.

Five STR owners sued, saying the ordinances violated their rights. The courts upheld the ordinances. Arlington had shown that short-term rentals could disrupt residential neighborhoods, so restricting them was legal, the appellate court said, and the city had also worked to reach a consensus in the community. The “Arlington model” was born, but what made it successful was the fact that the city’s development code had never allowed residential property to be used for rentals shorter than 30 days. As in other cities, the ordinances didn’t solve all the problems: Officials estimate that hundreds of units are operating without licenses.

Just west of Arlington, Fort Worth passed its ordinance regulating short-term rentals in February. Like Arlington, the larger city had never allowed short-stay rentals in its rules for residential districts. After the ordinance passed, some rental operators registered with the city and paid the required fees while others closed. But the elephant in the room is the 600 or so rental units that have been picked up by the city’s software as apparently operating in illegal zones. For now, said Shannon Elder, the city’s assistant director of code enforcement, she and her staff are focusing on properties that have generated complaints.

Fort Worth neighborhood groups, meanwhile, were keeping a close eye on what was happening in the Legislature. And down the road in Dallas, where a long fight was coming to a head, activists were watching what happened in Fort Worth.

In June, just weeks before a council vote on the proposed ordinance, a long, noisy

In Dallas, the fight over short-term rentals in neighborhoods took four years of sometimes bitter debate—and the city is still likely to get sued.

party at an STR in a quiet neighborhood ended in gunfire, terrifying residents. As has been the case in other areas, the incident inspired a new set of neighbors to post “HOMES NOT HOTELS” signs in their yards and show up at city hall in t-shirts with matching slogans. This time, photographer Sonya Herbert was among them, roused to action by the raucous party two doors down from her home. She’d brought along a video she took showing teenagers partying in the street and, eventually, the gunfire.

“You can’t see [in that video] the fear and confusion my two daughters experienced and are still experiencing, having been woken up by machine gun fire less than 40 steps from their home. How would all of you feel if this were happening in front of your home?” Herbert told council members.

Lisa Sievers, an STR owner active in the Dallas Short Term Rental Alliance, said the anecdotal stories about crime are misleading since they could take place anywhere. “We’ve had people shoot into people’s houses on my street, and we have

a park across the way where drug deals go on all the time,” Sievers told the Observer. For documentary filmmaker Olive Talley, the fight came to her street in Lakewood, in East Dallas, via a house listed as “Your Own Private Dallas Oasis” on STR platforms due to its three-story cabana overlooking the backyard swimming pool. There were also parking issues, but the noise really got to her.

“Just imagine people rolling roll-aboard suitcases up and down the sidewalk at all hours of the day and night … people partying outside,” she said. “I have video of one group, and they’re throwing balls off the cabana at each other down below, and each one [gets] a cheer. This goes on until 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. … You know, we often wonder if any of the owners of STRs would enjoy having an STR like this … right next door to them. I would venture to say most of them would say ‘no.’”

She discovered the Texas Neighborhood Coalition, which helped her find allies and learn about court cases and similar

fights around the country. In May 2021, about a hundred people signed up to speak publicly on the issue at a city council meeting. That meeting “helped a few of us get in touch with each other. Oh my gosh, this is happening in South Dallas. This is happening in Oak Cliff. Oh my gosh, this is happening in District 3 and District 4,” Talley said.

As their group grew, the city held meeting after meeting with task forces, committees, and the full council as they batted around potential definitions and regulations. Finally, in June, the council was set to vote on an ordinance that would ban new STRs from single-family neighborhoods and establish new registration requirements. Once more, neighborhood advocates donned white “HOMES NOT HOTELS” t-shirts and waited their turn at the microphone. Both sides had shown up in force. Talley was one of the first of about 60 to speak.

“You can vote to protect homes and neighborhoods, or you can vote to destroy

Sonya Herbert shows the Dallas City Council a video she took of a party at a short-term rental property in her neighborhood.

neighborhoods as we know them and worsen your housing crisis,” she said. She motioned to the crowd of supporters behind her to rise.

Council member Adam Bazaldua warned that an outright ban could make the city vulnerable to litigation and put a target on Dallas’ back in the next legislative session. “We need to give the residents as much relief as we can while still protecting the city’s best interest,” he said.

As the night wore on, it was clear that neighborhood advocates had the votes they needed. The ordinance was adopted. The city’s goal is that, beginning in December, short-term rentals will be banned from single-family neighborhoods and limited in multifamily residential zones.

Sievers said she is waiting to see what happens before making changes to her operations. “It was disappointing that the city council elected to put thousands of entrepreneurs out of business, that they elected to put millions of enforcement dollars on the backs of the taxpayers of the city,” Sievers said. “This is going to end up in a big fat lawsuit.”

Sievers is probably right about the lawsuit. Court fights over short-term rental ordinances continue to shape the debate. One was filed just a day after Dallas’ ordinance passed—but it was over the Fort Worth ordinance.

Graigory Fancher is representing the 113 Fort Worth property-owner plaintiffs. “We’re saying that it’s not constitutional to take away that property right from homeowners,” he said. If his clients win, “it’s going to be the roadmap to overturn all of the other ordinances in all of the other municipalities.” City officials, in a statement, said their approach “balances the preservation of neighborhoods and support of tourism” and that they would vigorously defend the ordinance.

In Austin, just down the street from city hall, the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), representing a group of homeowners, challenged that city’s shortterm rental ordinance on constitutional grounds. Attorney General Ken Paxton joined in, penning a 102-page brief. A state appeals court sided with TPPF in the case of homeowners who were already renting out

their property before the ordinance passed. So STRs in operation before the Austin ordinance changed, even though they were not owner-occupied and were in residential zones, would be grandfathered in. But, according to the city, the court decision “does not require the city to issue new licenses” for non-owner-occupied homes.

TPPF Executive Director Rob Henneke disagrees. “Cities are ignoring adverse legal outcomes,” he said.

In August, a federal judge dealt another blow to Austin’s ordinance, overturning it, at least for now. It’s unclear how Austin will respond. Meanwhile, the pro-business Legislature and its members continue attempts to stop cities from banning shortterm rentals.

State Representative Gary Gates, a Republican from Richmond, sponsored the latest preemption bill and will likely carry it again in 2025. He said publicly that he was interested because, as a triathlete with 13 children, he often relied on shortterm rentals when the family traveled for his races.

When asked by the Observer who brought him the preemption bill, Gates said, “The industry kind of brought it to me—the short-term rental, the Airbnb industry.” Now, he has “developed a passion for this legislation,” he said. “I bought into that mantra of ‘local control’ until you start becoming the victims of overregulation.”

Short-term rental ordinances potentially could be affected by the state’s so-called Death Star bill, which went into effect September 1. It wipes out local control of many areas of law, but its wording is so vague and its enforcement mechanisms so uncertain that no one knows what the on-the-ground results will be. The bill’s authors have said it will not affect cities’ zoning powers or short-term rentals.

For people like Sonya Herbert in Dallas, more local action is necessary.

“If our communities can’t be safe just so investors from outside of Dallas can make a buck, that doesn’t make any sense,” Herbert said. “They should be protecting us, not the interest of the investors.”

Eva Ruth Moravec is an independent journalist and podcast producer covering criminal justice and other Texas topics.

Plenty of people signed up to speak to the Dallas City Council in June about problems with shortterm rentals.

THE LAST TEXAN KILLED IN AFGHANISTAN

What Lance Corporal David Lee Espinoza’s death can tell us about Latinos in the military

By REYNALDO LEAÑOS JR.

In collaboration with Latino USA

Photography by CHRISTOPHER LEE

The house on Sabana Lane in Laredo is a repository of memories. Military posters, American flags, crosses, and photographs hang on the wall, each of them a piece of David Lee Espinoza’s story that ended in Afghanistan.

“This was his cross he was wearing when he passed, and I wear it,” said his mother, Elizabeth Holguin, grabbing the necklace in her hands. “I always feel like he’s around me.”

Espinoza, a lance corporal in the U.S. Marines, died in the waning days of the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan when suicide bombers blew themselves up near the Kabul airport on August 26, 2021. Twelve other service members, about half of them Latino, and more than 150 Afghans perished in the attack.

Born just months before the war began, Espinoza was one of the last to die when America’s longest war came to an end. He was 20.

Espinoza is one of an estimated 7,000 American service members who lost their lives in the post-9/11 wars that include Afghanistan and Iraq, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project. Another 30,000 of these service members and veterans later died by suicide.

For decades, the U.S. military has targeted communities of color for recruitment. Latinos, according to the U.S. Department of Defense, make up about 18 percent of the active duty force. The numbers are even higher in the Marine Corps, in which Hispanics make up 24 percent of active duty members. Latinos are already the largest demographic group in Texas, and by 2050, they’re expected to be the largest in the United States. A 2022 report from the Department of Defense showed Latinos were the fastest-growing segment of the military.

“Our nation’s ability to fill ranks in the future will depend on our ability to successfully recruit Latinos,” Louis Caldera, then secretary of the army, told the Los Angeles Times in 1999.

Irene Garza is a historian of U.S. militarism and Latinidad and an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, Transnationalism and Migration at Yale University. She said recruiters began aggressively marketing and targeting people, including Latinos, for enlistment after the draft ended in 1973 under President Richard M. Nixon, marking the switch to an all-volunteer force.

“The U.S. war in Vietnam demonstrated to military personnel the demographic diversity of the Latinx population,” she said. “Latinos constituted a previously ignored, historically marginalized community.”

The military markets aggressively to Latinos with Spanish-language ads and hefty recruitment efforts in high schools with large Latino populations, using monetary incentives and opportunities for continuing education to entice Latinos to serve. For immigrants, the military can offer a path to citizenship, but even for those who are born here, military service offers a way to

establish one’s bona fides as an American.

“It is through laboring in the uniform that you prove your citizenship,” Garza said.

Espinoza’s life and death tell a larger story about why some Latinos decide to join the U.S. Armed Forces, the strategies and incentives the military uses to recruit them, and how families and communities remember those who sacrifice their lives.

In late May, the hallways of Lyndon B. Johnson High School in Laredo were filled with students carrying backpacks. They walked past the library with gold lettering overhead that reads, “Lance Corporal David Lee Espinoza Memorial Library,” renamed in 2022 in his honor. A recruitment poster to the side with a photo of a man in uniform reads, “Take one. It’s the last thing you’ll be given in the Marine Corps.” Underneath, a pouch meant to hold pamphlets sits empty.

Michael Carrillo has been teaching at LBJ for about 20 years. The high school is about 99 percent Hispanic, and about 90 percent of the students are poor. He said high school is when a lot of kids are figuring out what they want to do as they enter adulthood, and he often hears students talk about joining the armed forces.

Carrillo tells students interested in a military career about the school’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) program.

“If I ever hear a student telling me that they may be interested in the military, I would highly encourage them to join the JROTC,” Carrillo said. “It teaches the kids discipline … it’s a very structured environment.”

JROTC, an elective class funded in part by the military, is offered in many public high schools across the country. In these classes, students wear military uniforms, do physical training, and learn about leadership and civics. JROTC programs don’t technically recruit students but, coupled with military recruiters visiting campuses, often act as a funnel for students deciding to join the armed forces.

Last year, a New York Times investigation found thousands of students of color and from low-income areas were being pushed into JROTC programs. Some schools even made the program mandatory.

In recent years, as the military has faced enlistment shortfalls—this year, the Army, Navy, and Air Force are expected to miss their goals by thousands— recruiters have drawn in immigrants with a fast track to citizenship.

In 2023, the Air Force announced that 14 trainees were the first to complete basic military training and become U.S. citizens as part of a new program that streamlines the naturalization process. It’s part of a collaboration with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that grants trainees citizenship before they graduate. Last year, the Army reestablished a program

(Above left) L. Cpl. Espinoza’s glasses, recovered with his body, are displayed at his family home. (Above right) Elizabeth Holguin wears her son’s dog tags to keep his memory alive. (Below) Students at Lyndon B. Johnson High School await the arrival of Espinoza’s casket on the day of his funeral.

that would allow legal permanent residents to apply for accelerated naturalization as part of basic training.

Each year, thousands of service members and their families become naturalized U.S. citizens, according to a website run by the Department of Defense.

The military also offers economic benefits that might appeal to students at places like Laredo’s LBJ High School.

Even high-achieving students with higher education ambitions in some communities simply can’t afford college, so they turn to the military, which advertises that it can help pay up to full college tuition for public and in-state schools and provide money for housing and books. They also advertise that if college isn’t in a student’s future, they can also help pay for trade schools, technical schools, and certification programs.

“They want to be able to provide for their families,” Carrillo said. “There’s a lot of need in our area, and a lot of them take on very mature roles at such a young age where they’re taking care of all of their younger brothers and sisters. It gives them that opportunity where they see that college can be paid for.”

In addition to the military helping pay for higher education, last year the Army also increased bonuses it pays to future soldiers who ship to basic training within 45 days of signing a four-year contract.

It’s these types of incentives that critics like David Morales have said are misleading. They oversell the benefits of military service while minimizing the drawbacks and risks.

Morales grew up in San Diego—a city with a naval base where recruiters and military propaganda are commonplace. As a student, he didn’t question the militarism he saw around him, but later it inspired him to get involved with Project YANO, an organization that was founded in 1984 to provide young people with an alternative point of view about military enlistment.

“Recruiters prey on young people who maybe come from the background that I did and who have limited opportunities, and [recruiters] take advantage of their economic situation and promise them huge signing bonuses or say things like, ‘We’re going to help you or your parents become citizens quicker,’” he said.

Morales said he was outraged to discover that military recruitment, including JROTC programs, was most common in schools with a large population of poor students.

“In other schools that were in more affluent areas … they didn’t have any military recruiters or military courses like the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps,” Morales said.

Almost 15 years later, Morales and Project YANO continue their work and get invited by teachers to schools and college fairs to give presentations. Morales said he and his organization also discuss how intentional the military is in its recruitment efforts.

“The military knows what they’re doing when they ... release ads of Latino-looking people wearing super tidy uniforms and when they send Latino recruiters to

the same communities that they came from and in tidy uniforms and nice cars,” he said.

The YANO speakers also address the prevalence of discrimination, harassment, and sexism in the military— something that Ana Yeli Ruiz, a former Marine and member of Project YANO, said she experienced.

“It’s pretty common to be verbally or sexually harassed, kind of like it was almost the norm,” said Ruiz, who has shared her story with students and on YouTube.

Ruiz said it happened within the first year of her arrival in San Diego for her duty station.

“They pretty much told me that it was my fault and kind of just gaslit me,” she said. “That culture of toxic sexual culture and harassment was just normalized and nobody batted an eye.”

Department of Defense data showed a 13 percent increase in sexual assaults in the military from fiscal year 2020 to 2021.

“I guess I really bought into the camaraderie and the [idea that] being family and being a brother and sisterhood, that we would have each other’s backs,” Ruiz added.

Morales said Project YANO helps people find other ways to pay for college and assists them in finding jobs outside of the military. They’re trying to show students they have more options than they think.

“It is hard to tell someone who seemingly has no other option, who’s in a very difficult financial situation, ‘Hey, don’t do this,’ and that’s why we don’t tell people what to do,” he said. “We think it’s important for people to make their own informed decision, but we believe that they should know what they’re getting themselves into.”

Morales believes the military is now aggressively trying to recruit more people into its ranks because of its low recruitment numbers.

“A year ago, the Army dropped its high school graduation requirement, and that was outrageous,” he said. “That was a desperate move by the military to fill its recruitment quotas.”

Shortly after, the Army reversed its policy.

Last year, 19 Republican lawmakers sent President Joe Biden a letter condemning the administration’s proposal to eliminate some student loan debt because it would take away an incentive for young people to join the military.

“By forgiving such a wide swath of loans for borrowers, you are removing any leverage the Department of Defense maintained as one of the fastest and easiest ways to pay for higher education,” the letter said. “We recognize the loan forgiveness programs have issues of their own, but this remains a top recruiting incentive.”

“It’s completely predatory to target students who are in debt and to go risk their lives to help pay back some of this debt,” Morales said.

Jessica Lavariega Monforti is the coauthor of Proving Patriotismo: Latino Military Recruitment, Service, and Belonging in the US.

She found that, as Morales had noticed, JROTC programs tend to be concentrated in economically poorer areas like the Rio Grande Valley in what some call the “poverty draft.”

“If you think about the Rio Grande Valley as a metropolitan statistical area, it is one of the poorest metropolitan areas in the United States,” she said. “What we saw was that recruitment was strongest in the schools that had higher rates of poverty.”

She said her research also challenges the prevailing narrative about whom the military is trying to recruit. “The story that we have been told is that the military is the last option for people who didn’t have other opportunities,” Lavariega Monforti said. “[But] the recruiters aren’t going after at-risk students; they are going after students who are seen as role models, who are doing well in school, who do have other options.”

Lavariega Monforti explained that military service offers Latinos—many of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants—a sense of civic identity and belonging.

“All of a sudden, you have a recruiter who said, ‘Come represent the United States; come be a part of our community; come be a part of this effort to protect … our families and communities abroad,” she said. “That is

(Above left) Football players at LBJ High School stand for a moment of silence to honor David Lee Espinoza. (Above right) a young boy peeks under the flags along the funeral route. (Bottom left) Angel Sanchez, who was in boot camp with Espinoza, made his friend a bracelet with his last name misspelled—an inside joke between the two.

hugely appealing to young people who have felt pushed away and alienated.”

Lavariega Monforti points out that the military uses a lot of Spanish-language ads like the “Yo Soy El Army” campaign that ran from 2001 to 2005.

David Espinoza, like so many others, grew up around all of these influences. At LBJ High School, he decided at one point that college wasn’t for him, so a military career was an option. But his parents said that the driving force for him to join the Marines came from a sense of duty to serve his country.

Espinoza graduated in 2019 and went to California for 13 weeks of basic training. Recruits undergo things like physical and combat conditioning and martial arts training.

Things were going well until Espinoza hurt himself on a long hike, after which he was transported to a special unit for recruits in need of medical attention. That’s where he met Angel Sanchez, who had tested positive for tuberculosis.

Sanchez remembered Espinoza being a jokester. They teased each other about being in the medical unit. “Every

day I’d be like, ‘Shut up, Espinoza, that’s why your ankle doesn’t work,’ and he’d go, ‘Shut up, Sanchez, that’s why your lungs don’t work,’” Sanchez recalled. “I never heard him talk bad about anybody, and he was never sad.”

Both Espinoza and Sanchez healed, and after boot camp graduation, they went their separate ways.

Before Afghanistan, the military sent Espinoza to Jordan. His mom remembers Espinoza saying things were slow.

“When he called me, he just said, ‘Mom, I’m bored here. It’s very calm. I need some action,” Holguin recalled. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about? I was like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, don’t say that.’”

Espinoza made another call home on August 13, 2021. His parents were sitting on rocking chairs in their backyard when they heard Espinoza say he was going to Afghanistan.

“I told him, ‘Okay, you know it’s only a few days because this is almost over,’” recalled Victor Dominguez, his father. “On the inside, it was killing me.”

There was a lot of news coverage about what was happening in Afghanistan then. Videos showed people hopping onto the wings of airplanes trying to escape. The situation was escalating.

Laredo residents gather on Memorial Day to honor Espinoza and other veterans.

Holguin couldn’t keep herself from crying, her husband, Dominguez recalled.

“She was crying because she knew where he was going,” he said. “I just kept talking to him the whole time, just trying to be positive with him.”

A few days later, Espinoza arrived in Afghanistan. Holguin said she was able to talk to Espinoza a few times while he was there. She remembers their last call.

“When I heard him, I kind of think he knew because of the way he was talking to me,” she said. “He was saying, ‘If anything, you know, I love you … it’s going to be okay.’”

Two days later, on August 26, 2021, news broke about an explosion in Afghanistan. Dominguez rushed to turn on the television. Holguin was on a break at work when she came across a post on Facebook detailing what was happening and hurried home. Dominguez stayed up until 1 a.m. waiting for more news. Holguin went to bed but couldn’t sleep.

At 2 a.m., the phone rang. Officers were already outside their home.

“I knew right away, it was him,” Holguin said through tears. The next morning, she posted on Facebook that Espinoza had been killed.

Espinoza’s funeral procession took his body through town, including a stop at his high school.

“Every street we went through, you know, just seeing how much respect he got for what he went through, what happened to him,” Dominguez said. “I don’t think there are words to describe it.”

In addition to having the school library at LBJ named in his honor, officials in Laredo dedicated a street to him. A local, veteran-owned business displays a mural of him in his uniform. Every Memorial Day, local veterans and families celebrate Espinoza.

Holguin and Dominguez want to keep their son’s story alive. One way they’re trying to do so is by pushing for changes to how money from the GI Bill is used.

The GI Bill was originally set up in the 1940s to help returning veterans reintegrate into society. It provided help with things like a mortgage, job training, or money to go to school. At the time, the majority of the help went to White veterans.

Currently, if a service member dies in action, some benefits go to their spouse or child, but Espinoza had neither. His parents would like to see funds for education go to his siblings.

“Why not give his brothers the opportunity?” Holguin said.

David’s parents plan to continue to speak out and help keep their son’s legacy alive.

Reynaldo Leaños Jr. is a producer at Latino USA and is based in New York City.

Holguin and Dominguez pause at their son’s gravesite on Memorial Day.

FOR FIREFIGHTERS, A LONG AND VERY HOT SUMMER.

In Maverick County, losing a grant meant stretching crews to cover extra shifts and lots of territory.

In a summer of record-high temperatures, things just kept getting hotter for Maverick County and its firefighters.

Maverick County, on the Texas-Mexico border west of San Antonio, has a population about the same as San Marcos spread over an area about the size of Rhode Island. The Eagle Pass Fire Department is the only professional fire company and emergency medical service provider in the county.

For several months, with the help of a state grant initially intended for equipment purchases but partially redirected to overtime, the department was able to keep 21 to 24 firefighter EMTs on duty per shift. With the grant ending in August, however, those numbers were due to fall to 15 to 17— to cover three stations and operate three fire trucks and five ambulances.

The National Fire Protection Association recommends four firefighters per fire truck, and ambulances need at a minimum one driver and one medic. About 85 percent of the 10,000 or so calls the department responds to each year are for medical care.

With the reduced staffing, “it was hectic because there were multiple calls and you’re getting slammed on the EMS side,” Fire Department Captain Manuel Roman told the Texas Observer. “You always ran the risk that if a fire broke out you wouldn’t have enough personnel to respond.”

The Eagle Pass city budget includes money to hire six additional firefighters in the fall, but they won’t be fully certified in both firefighting and emergency medical services for a year.

Assistant Fire Chief Rodolfo Cardona said he’s confident that a new state grant will help fill the personnel gap. He said he’s been told the new grant will likely come through Operation Lone Star, Governor Greg Abbott’s controversial border security initiative.

“Oh man, when that grant ends, and if it’s not renewed, I think we’ll feel even more of a strain,” firefighter EMT William Dorsey said in August. “Not only are we running our typical number of calls tending to the city, [but] we have the additional calls from [the Texas Department of Public Safety] and Border Patrol.”

Photos and text by KAYLEE GREENLEE BEAL

In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Firefighter EMT Rodrigo Pineda listens as a patient tells him about her medical history.

From left to right, firefighter EMTs Rudy Castillon, Alfonso GarciaZuaZua, and Israel Sanchez walk through the apparatus bay.

From left to right, firefighter EMTs Harish Garcia, Jose Garza, Luis Huerta, and Pedro Olivares transport a disoriented woman to the hospital.

Firefighter EMT Harrish Garcia performs chest compressions on a girl who drowned while crossing the Rio Grande. She was declared dead at the hospital.

Garcia, left, and trainee Marco Lopez wait for team members to return to the ambulance bay.

Jose Escamilla looks out the window of an ambulance on its way to the hospital with a patient. One of the department’s newest hires, he was certified then only as an emergency medical technician, not a firefighter, and only allowed to respond to EMS calls.

GHOSTS FROM TEXAS’ PAST

Dispatch from a haunted—and historically fraught—building in Austin

By MICHELLE PITCHER

Photography by JOSEPH RUSHMORE

Initially, the inside of the historic building on Cedar Street in Austin’s expensive Hyde Park neighborhood seems ordinary: Fluorescent lights line a narrow, carpeted hallway off of which branch offices, most just big enough for a desk and a few shelves. Some share jack-and-jill bathrooms with their next door neighbors, a relic of the building’s original use.

But this structure has been altered and added onto so often that there’s a disjointed, Frankenstein’s monsterfeel to some spots where former exterior walls are exposed or limestone switches to manufactured brick.

I’m there in the morning, and in the light of day, it isn’t terribly eerie. Someone brought VooDoo donuts into the reception area, so one side of the building smells like warm sugar. Everyone we pass in the narrow hallway gives a polite and knowing smile. They know why I’m here, touring the building. I’m not the first person to sniff around for ghosts.

This spot has developed a reputation for being haunted. Jeanine Plumer, who met me there, wrote a chapter on it in her 2010 book, Haunted Austin. She and her team have conducted paranormal investigations after working hours, during which they heard voices, clicks, and bells chiming. She’s been down to the former morgue, an unfinished basement area that has since been closed

off. She can recite the history and lore of the building from memory. History is the key. “Ghosts love historical accuracy,” she says.

The building now houses AGE of Central Texas, a nonprofit that provides resources and services to older residents and caregivers. That’s a modern twist on the building’s original historic purpose—which was to house older women without the means to support themselves— but there is a glaring difference: It was erected as a place to serve those who served the Confederacy.

The Confederate Woman’s Home was opened in 1908 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy for older wives and widows of Confederate soldiers who couldn’t support themselves. (Confederate veterans received no federal pension—many lived in a Confederate Men’s Home across

town constructed in the late 19th century.) The original two-story home for women had 15 bedrooms. After the state took over the property just a few years later, officials built a massive brick wing with 24 new bedrooms. Later, a hospital building and an annex were added. These buildings still stand today.

During its 55 years of operation, the Confederate Woman’s Home housed more than 3,000 women. As the women with direct ties to the Confederacy died off, the need for housing dwindled. In 1963, the state footed the bill to send the last three living residents to private nursing homes.

Since then, the building has changed hands and served different purposes—as a learning center used by the Texas State School for the Blind for children affected by the rubella epidemic in the 1960s, as a practice space for a local high school football team, and, since the 1980s, as a resource center for aging Texans. When AGE Central Texas turned the building into a senior center, it was the first of

its kind in Central Texas.

On our visit, Plumer and I walk the building’s perimeter while she tells me about her work as a paranormal expert. People call from across Texas to discuss purported paranormal experiences. The day before, she was on the phone for two hours with somebody from a retirement community in Georgetown who described seeing angels in the window of the building across the street.

We soon arrive at dilapidated brick structures that used to house the infirmary and now hold AGE’s outdated heating and cooling systems as well as studio space rented out by local artists. Looking at the aging, boxy brick structures, I decide to risk sounding ignorant in front of a ghost expert. I tell Plumer that this space looks haunted.

“One of the reasons why buildings that are haunted tend to have this rundown look is because, when a building has a lot of that energy in it, it is off-putting,” she says. This building appears heavy because it once held people against their will, she explains, “which

Community Engagement Officer Rob Faubion walks though the AGE of Central Texas building.

was probably about 50 percent of the women in the Confederate Woman’s Home.”

Inside the main building, I’m escorted by Rob Faubion, chief community engagement officer for AGE, as we peer inside offices, converted long ago from the women’s original rooms. Two large rooms bookend the side of the building that runs along Cedar Street. These were originally parlors. Faubion tells us that there are four widely accepted “entities” who seem to haunt here: two women who spend time in the former parlor, a little boy who runs up and down hallways, and a little girl who plays upstairs. The little boy once accompanied AGE’s previous chief financial officer home in order to play with her two young sons, he said. “So in the morning, she would get up and say, ‘Okay, we’re going back to the building’ and get the car,” Faubion said. The ghost, very well behaved, would listen.

Before we enter the former cafeteria, Plumer whispers that this room is particularly haunted. The large space has one exposed-brick wall, and the footprint is taken up mostly by tables and chairs. Faubian verifies the hotspot: One ghost apparently had strong opinions about seating, showing displeasure for any rearrangement by flipping chairs over in the middle of the night.

“Nothing here is malevolent,” Faubion assures us.

Today, the biggest problem for the building at 3710 Cedar St. isn’t the ghosts, but the weight of its history.

In front, a marker from the Texas Historical Commission declares the significance of the original building site. Beside the metal marker, erected in 2013, a larger green sign reads, “This subject marker was placed by, and belongs to, the Texas Historical Commission. It was funded by the Descendants of Confederate Veterans who have an interest in conserving Confederate History.” The sign goes on to condemn the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which is still in operation today, and whose “values are in direct conflict” with AGE’s.

In 2020, during widespread Black Lives Matter protests, AGE placed a dark plastic bag over the historical marker and requested that the Texas Historical Commission remove the marker altogether—a request the commission denied unanimously. The massive clarifying sign, it seems, is the compromise.

While the current tenants attempt to distance themselves from the building’s origins, the ghosts make it hard to forget the place’s—and Texas’—past.

I saw no ghosts here myself. But in a report adapted from a 1987 memo from a former AGE board member, two psychics who toured here said they sensed a group of women, former residents of the Confederate Woman’s Home, who are “troubled, afraid, and confused” about the changes they’ve witnessed through the last century.

“The spirits themselves are not all wise just because they are spirits,” one psychic reported. “They can have the same blindness and misunderstandings that the living have; they do not like change.”

A window reflects tree branches outside the AGE of Central Texas Building.

In a hall, the play of light and shadow seems to invite ghosts, or at least questions, about the building.

Jeanine Plumer, author of Haunted Austin, says the AGE of Central Texas building may feel “heavy” because it once held people against their will.

THE ORIGINS OF WHITE CHRISTIAN SUPREMACY

Can 15th-century doctrine explain today’s culture wars?

By DAVID R. BROCKMAN

America is undergoing an identity crisis, author Robert P. Jones writes. As revealed in recent studies by Jones’s research organization, Public Religion Research Institute, dramatic demographic shifts have rendered once-dominant white Christians a minority; the nation is more ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse. So it’s no surprise we find ourselves embroiled in bitter debates over who we truly are.

Many in Texas still insist (despite historical evidence) that we’re a Christian nation, founded by godly (white) men. Countering this mythos, the 1619 Project locates the nation’s genesis in the year Africans were first brought against their will to Great Britain’s American colonies, framing our subsequent history as one of stubbornly systemic racism.

In the new book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, Jones offers an intriguing alternative, which analyzes our racist and violent past and suggests a path to a more pluralistic democracy.

Though he applauds the 1619 Project, Jones argues that it neglects Europeans’ prior violence toward Indigenous

peoples and “obscures the headwaters” of European colonialism. Jones locates those headwaters in the late 1400s, in the so-called Doctrine of Discovery. Promulgated in papal edicts, this doctrine proclaimed the superiority of Christian civilization and authorized Europeans to claim ownership of any newly “discovered” lands inhabited by non-Christians. The doctrine became part of U.S. law in an 1823 Supreme Court ruling that held the U.S. government had “an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy.”

Jones views the doctrine as a “Rosetta Stone” for understanding the “sense of divine entitlement, of European Christian chosenness, [that] has shaped the worldview of most white Americans.”

To show how whites’ sense of entitlement has played out in America, Hidden Roots examines three localities, each the site of white outrages against African-Americans: the Mississippi Delta, site of the 1955 murder of Emmitt Till; Duluth, Minnesota, where in 1920 a mob of more 10,000 whites lynched three Black men; and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in 1921, whites descended on the prosperous Black

district of Greenwood, burning homes and businesses and killing between 100 and 300 people. In each case, the whites responsible faced little or no punishment.

These atrocities were foreshadowed by earlier white violence in those areas toward Native Americans. A century before Till’s murder, the U.S. government forcibly removed the Choctaw people from the Mississippi Delta, clearing the land for white settlement and a plantation economy exploiting Black slave labor. Jones then shares tales of white depredations against Native Americans in Minnesota and Oklahoma. In 1862, some Dakota people in Minnesota rebelled against white mistreatment and treaty violations. At the end of the five-week uprising, the U.S. government hanged 38 Dakota men after sham military trials, most lasting “only a minute or two,” Jones notes, in the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

As for Oklahoma, Jones writes poignantly of the Osage people, who suffered forced assimilation, violence at the hands of white mobs hungry for their land, and then, after oil was discovered, a “Reign of Terror” in

which whites systematically swindled and murdered them.

Yet Hidden Roots speaks of hope as well as horror.

In 1841, a company of Texan volunteers under General Edward Tarrant attacked an extensive settlement of Caddos, Cherokees, and Tonkawas; burned down huts; then engaged in a running gunfight, killing 12 Native Americans and wounding many more. In the wake of the attack, the tribes were forced to desert the settlement.

HOW

DID CHRISTIANITY, WHICH PURPORTS TO PROCLAIM GOD’S LOVINGKINDNESS TO ALL HUMANITY, END UP LEGITIMIZING RACISM AND VIOLENCE?

Interracial groups in all three areas are taking steps to confront the legacy of white violence. Thanks to the work of the interracial Emmitt Till Memorial Commission, the Mississippi Delta has seen what Jones—a Mississippi native who previously authored The End of White Christian America—calls “an explosion of cultural memory work” around Till’s legacy. Duluth and Tulsa have seen similar efforts of truth-telling and reconciliation.

Though Hidden Roots doesn’t directly address the Lone Star State, Jones notes that “[e]very U.S. state contains similar legacies of white racial violence, because every … state was built on the same foundation … the conviction that America was divinely ordained to be a new promised land for European Christians.”

That’s certainly the case with Texas. Consider, for instance, the Battle of Village Creek, which took place just six miles from my Fort Worth home, not long after the removal of the Choctaw from Mississippi and for much the same reason: white hunger for Native American lands.

Four years before the 1920 Duluth lynchings, Waco saw its own gruesome act of white mob violence when Black teenager Jesse Washington “was beaten, stabbed, mutilated, hanged and burned to death” before thousands of “screaming, cheering spectators.” Viewed through Jones’s historical and religious lens, these Texas atrocities are not isolated acts, but part of a broader legacy of racism with religious underpinnings.

While Hidden Roots explores white supremacy’s origins, it begs another question: How did Christianity, which purports to proclaim God’s lovingkindness to all humanity, end up legitimizing racism and violence?

My book No Longer the Same traces this hypocrisy to Christianity’s long theological tradition of regarding nonChristians as largely ignorant of divine truth. Christianity’s confidence that it alone has “the way, the truth, and the life” has too often resulted in the exclusion and mistreatment of religious others. But such theological questions lie beyond the frame of Hidden Roots.

Instead, Jones’s religio-political perspective offers a compelling picture of who Americans are and where we came from. Thought-provoking, solidly researched, and skillfully written, Hidden Roots is a clear-eyed indictment of white supremacy and its religious foundations, one that can help us make sense of our troubled past and envision possibilities for remembrance and renewal.

David Brockman is a nonresident scholar in the religion and public policy program at Rice University’s Baker Institute. He also teaches at Brite Divinity School, Southern Methodist University, and Texas Christian University. He is the author of Dialectical Democracy through Christian Thought: Individualism, Relationalism, and American Politics

The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future

Robert P. Jones Simon & Schuster September 2023

‘DRAG IS SO HEALING’: AUSTIN’S QUEENS DEFY BAN

Capitol-area performers remain committed to their art in the face of persecution.

By KIT O’CONNELL

Photography by CINDY ELIZABETH

In an orange prison jumpsuit and chains, a tall, lean drag queen writhed to a cover of “War Pigs” by Brass Against, which sounds like someone swapped Black Sabbath’s lead singer for a woman and added a highly caffeinated marching band. As she lip-synced, Hermajestie the Hung completed a dramatic strip tease down to an army fatigue jacket and fishnets, all to riotous cheers and a rain of dollar bills.

It’s April at the Swan Dive on Red River in Austin’s club district, where

“Tuesgayz” night LGBTQ+ gatherings— which include “Queereoke” sing-along sessions—are a tradition. For over a year, the Black-led drag troupe Vanguard, with an informal membership of about a dozen performers that includes both drag kings and queens, has opened each show with the same invocation:

“On our stage we proudly proclaim that Black lives matter, trans rights are human rights, no human is illegal, all bodies are beautiful, and my body, my choice.”

Hermajestie—who described herself as

a “postbinary, polyamorous, pansexual pot-smoking parent” and goes by “any pronouns but he/him”—explained later that she started each night the same way because she “realized that once I mention these things, the trash usually takes itself out.”

(We are using performers’ stage names in this article to protect their privacy.)

Vanguard, she explained, serves as a “declaration and celebration of queer freedom, queer love, queer existence and queer solidarity.” The space she has created

is often politically charged. Each night, she recounts the latest legislative attacks on queer rights, urging her audience to get involved. Tuesday’s routine culminated in her holding aloft the severed head of former President Donald Trump and hurling it into the audience (a similar stunt that earned comedian Kathy Griffin public censure shortly after Trump’s election).

The members of Vanguard represent an evolution in drag. While elder performers were often cisgender, gay men, many of today’s queens are transgender or nonbinary and explore their identity through the art form.

Austin’s drag scene is thriving: From

the heart of downtown to the Hill Country, patrons can attend events every day of the week, including late-night revues and brunches on weekends. One monthly show highlights new, amateur queens, another the elders of the community. Drag has made inroads in non-LGBTQ+ spaces as well— queens frequently perform at birthday parties, fundraisers, and, last year, at a new student orientation at the University of Texas at Austin.

At the same time, drag is under attack. Senate Bill 12, scheduled to go into effect September 1, will levy fines against venues that host performances appealing to an ill-defined “prurient interest in sex” where

minors are present; performers could also face up to a year in jail. The legislative affront goes hand-in-hand with protests and harassment from right-wing activists outside of nightclubs and on social media, where drag performers are frequently doxxed. While most performers remain defiant in the face of oppression, the growing pressure leaves them concerned for their future.

Hermajestie began performing professionally in 2019 after moving to Austin but felt drawn to the stage from an early age.

“Technically, I have been doing drag since I was lip-synching when I was three

Previous page: Adonis performs during “Vanguard: The Drag Revolution” at Swan Dive in Austin.

Ray Ray Topaz prepares for a performance backstage at the Swan Dive.

and four years old to my mom’s CDs: Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston and Chaka Khan,” she said.

She explained that drag allows her to explore who she might have been without childhood trauma. While Hermajestie describes herself as “shy and reserved” offstage, drag allows her to express herself “without any rules or boundaries.”

“I was conditioned, being queer and Black, raised in rural Texas … to be a Black boy that was not intimidating or threatening,” she said. With drag, “I was given spaces to explore the real me, not the me that I had to be in order to stay alive.

“Drag is so healing,” she added.

Hermajestie started the Vanguard troupe in 2020 with financial support she was able to secure in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. Then the pandemic hit, which forced her to perform at outdoor venues like rooftop bars. But lockdowns and social distancing also sparked creativity for people who were stuck at home while receiving a short-lived additional income from the government.

“People had time to sit around at home and just create art,” she said. “It was just a time where we could do what humans are supposed to be fucking doing.”

Another member of Vanguard, Amber Nicole Davenport, has earned herself the

informal title of “the Legs of Austin.” A tall, transgender Black woman, Davenport has “always felt like a girl.” She started doing drag in 2015 to explore her gender in a way that was acceptable to her family.

“When I was growing up, that’s when [RuPaul’s] Drag Race started,” Davenport remembered. “So VH1 was on and my grandma called me into the room and told me, ‘Sit down and watch, this is what you’re going to be.’”

Davenport explained that drag is often how people find “other families” when their birth families won’t accept them. But Vanguard’s shows are also a place to showcase queer, Black identities.

Ray Ray Topaz performs during “Vanguard: The Drag Revolution.”

“Here, you’re able to take as much time as you need to perfect your craft behind stage and then go out on stage and present who you are as aesthetically and authentically,” she said.

Another queen who stayed busy during the pandemic was Brigitte Bandit, a white performer who wears massive prosthetic breasts that have earned the nickname “the Double Dees of Austin.” Bandit works for Extragrams, a local “drag delivery” service that launched in March 2020, which allows you to hire a performer for private events.

“You could order a socially distanced ‘drag telegram,’” Bandit explained. “I was performing in people’s front yards all over Austin.”

Bandit has appeared everywhere from traditional drag revues to birthday parties and Drag Queen Story Hours. They say they make adjustments to their wardrobe at events where young kids are the target audience. The giant exposed fake breasts stay home, but the colorful costumes and makeup remain.

“[Republicans] think drag is inherently sexual, therefore there’s always a ‘prurient interest in sex’ no matter the content or what’s happening,” said Bandit, who compared youth-oriented performances to what Disney princesses do at that company’s theme parks. “It’s just like seeing somebody larger-than-life and like a character of some sort.” Bandit recalled a memorable outdoor performance at Rock the Park, an outdoor event sponsored by public radio station KUT.

“It was literally like a sea of children and I was trying to perform and I thought I was going to trip over them because I could not move,” she said.

Davenport defended the right of queens to perform where kids are present, noting that they give LGBTQ+ young people much-needed role models. “Kids should be able to see themselves in someone,” she said. “We’re not going to do the same performance at a nightclub that we would at a school.”

At 67 years old, Topaz—another frequent Vanguard performer—is the oldest actively performing Black drag queen in Austin. An elegant queen who evokes Tina Turner or Whitney Houston, he first started dancing in the 1980s, when drag shows served as fundraisers for victims of the AIDS crisis.

Topaz said drag can be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation: “When I was growing up, the first men that I saw in drag were Bob Hope, Milton Berle, and Jack Lemmon.”

Perfectly coiffed and made-up, drag queens performed at venues just blocks from the Texas Capitol, where legislators had met to consider SB 12, which prohibits minors from attending performances that exhibit a “prurient interest in sex”—a category so broad and vague it can as easily apply to Hooters waitresses and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders as to drag performers. The law also targets the use of “accessories or prosthetics that exaggerate male or female sexual characteristics.”

This provision has alarmed performers like Brigitte “Double Dees” Bandit, who uses prosthetics in her performances, but the law is written so broadly that it may as easily apply to prosthetic devices used every day by transgender people. Bandit, who is nonbinary, was assigned female at birth (AFAB), making them a rarity among drag queens, though not unheard of—drag is about portraying a highly exaggerated form of gender regardless of one’s underlying identity. The earliest versions of the drag bill banned people from performing as the “opposite” gender from the one they’d been assigned at birth. In early testimony at the Lege that went viral, Bandit pointed out that they would have been exempt.

“Whenever I’m in drag, everyone, especially the haters, sees me and thinks, ‘That’s a man,’” Bandit said. “You’d never say that if you saw me when I wasn’t in drag. You’re literally proving that gender is socially constructed.”

When the revised bill came back before lawmakers, so did Bandit. They wore a dress emblazoned with the words “Protect Texas Kids. Defend Our Kids From Gun Violence. Restrict Guns, Not Drag” along with the names of the victims killed at Robb Elementary School. Ultimately, Bandit waited 13 hours, wearing full drag makeup and costume, to have their say before the lawmakers. After delivering remarks, they refused to give up the podium until they were forced out of the chambers by Texas Department of Public Safety state troopers.

“I just kept speaking until I said what I

needed to,” they told the Texas Observer. “I didn’t expect them to get the police just because I talked 15 seconds over.”

Davenport told us she only performs in 21-and-up clubs like Swan Dive, so she doesn’t think the drag ban will affect her dancing. But, as a trans woman, she does worry about the anti-trans backlash in public. Like many trans people, Bandit’s legal documents still reflect her given name, which she fears may cause others to question her gender. “Just leaving that house, someone may be like, ‘Oh, you’re doing drag,’” she said. “No, baby, I’m not doing drag. I’m living my life. I’m walking down the street being the lady that I am.”

The extremist anti-LGBTQ+ group Protect Texas Kids, which has mobilized some of the state’s most virulent antidrag protests, published Bandit’s real name on social media in June to encourage harassment. Bandit said Extragrams has lost some repeat customers, who have cited safety and legal concerns. Venues have canceled a handful of shows. But Austin has been spared the worst of the anti-drag demonstrations seen in other cities, where white supremacists have performed stiffarmed Nazi salutes outside a few clubs.

Community members, including antifascist groups and the organization Veterans for Equality, have provided protection at spaces hosting drag events. Bandit, like many queens, trusts community volunteers more than law enforcement, which historically has had an antagonistic relationship with the queer community.

“They understand we don’t really want a police presence, but we do need some kind of security,” Bandit said.

In August, Bandit became one of five plaintiffs in the ACLU of Texas’ lawsuit against SB 12; Extragrams is another. Citing the threats she and other performers have faced, she said the legislation had already contributed to a chilling effect on the free speech of drag queens and kings in the state.

Bandit sometimes performs in a Dolly Parton costume, a look that involves stuffing her bra to make her chest look larger. Although this use of prosthetic body parts may be considered illegal under the new law, she doesn’t consider dressing up as Parton to be inherently sexual or inappropriate for children. After all,

West Texas Sage

Heading into the desert sun, I tail an enthusiastic storm. Tires zing on sizzling pavement, slash through puddles on the rain-darkened highway,

Like a guardian flanking the road to El Paso, a muscular mountain heaves up, sable master of the horizon, his head silvered by rayed spotlights streaming through cracked charcoal clouds like lake water breaching a dam.

I stop to relish the sudden chill, feel retreating thunder rumbling my bones, hear breezes sliding over damp sand, greedy for its moisture.

I sniff the air like an elegant lady shopping for perfume, as pungent desert sage, rain-released, drifts like piñon smoke, like incense, sends shivers drug-like through my skin.

I gulp the rare essence, reluctant to leave, store expansive breaths in my lungs like treasure. The fragrant air scolds, reminds me gently I’ve been gone too long—far too long.

Cade Huie is a member of several poetry organizations, including the Poetry Society of Texas. Her work has appeared in the Texas Poetry Calendar and numerous anthologies. She lives in Grand Prairie.

To submit a poem, please send an email, with the poem as an attachment, to poetry@ texasobserver.org. We are looking for previously unpublished works of no more than 30 lines, by Texas poets who have not been published by the Observer in the last two years. Pay is $ 100 on publication. Poems will be chosen by our guest editors.

Parton herself has become known for her philanthropy, which often includes reading and giving books to kids.

“So I can’t perform as Dolly Parton in front of kids like Parton can perform in front of kids?”

Speculating on the potential effects the law could have on trans and nonbinary people’s ability to give artistic performances and express themselves, Bandit concluded, “They’re trying to ban queer expression from public life, so it’s not just going to affect drag performers.”

All the queens we spoke with said they intend to keep performing, even after the law goes into effect.

“Oh, I’m not going to stop,” Topaz said. “I’ve been on the planet since before the politics and they ain’t stopping me now.”

At another Tuesday night Vanguard drag revue on May 30, just days before the final passage of SB12, Hermajestie cavorted, crawled, and mimicked swimming on stage in a shimmery mermaid costume. She danced to “Thirsty” and “Wishes” by Ophelia

Cache, at one point holding an oversized prop fork—a reference to Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, whose live-action version was then in theaters. A sign language interpreter rapidly kept time to the lyrics as Amber Nicole Davenport, her hair in a gravity-defying updo, stripped down to a blue lingerie set accentuated by matching blue faux-fur fox tails. That night featured eight drag queens and kings, all Black, in a showcase of the city’s finest talent.

Hermajestie is bold, opinionated, and strong—which is why it came as such a shock when she suddenly left town, moving almost overnight to Washington state days after that final Vanguard performance. Although hundreds of people came out to testify against the drag ban, she feels more people should be speaking out nationwide, given the severity of the attacks on the ability of LGBTQ+ people to exist in public.

“I honestly don’t understand why there is not a more extreme reaction from everybody everywhere,” she told us. “This blatant violation of human rights is absolutely disgusting.”

She knew it was time to “retreat” and let others continue her work.

“I’ve been in Texas my whole life and being queer and Black in Texas is like existing under constant attack,” she said. “I’m also a parent, so I have to be able to look my child in the eyes and tell them that I have done everything in my power and ability to keep them safe. And I kind of feel like I can’t offer my child safety in Texas. … I think about Uvalde every day.”

While Hermajestie looks for Washington clubs to perform in, drag continues at the Swan Dive, but in the hands of Diamond Dior Davenport (Amber Nicole’s “drag daughter”), who also hosts Melanin Magic, another regular revue featuring non-white queens.

“I still want to keep some of the values [of Vanguard] because I believe so strongly that we need spaces for the POC community,” Davenport said.

While she admitted feeling uncertainty about the future of the community under the drag ban, she said she expected it to be halted by the courts, as similar bills have been in Tennessee and Montana. “You’re quieting voices, taking away our freedom of speech, taking our art,” she said.

— CADE HUIE

SUPPORT

Dear Texas Observer Community,

I’m excited to share the news that, in October, the Observer will host our first in-person fundraising event of 2023, where Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed, author of On Juneteenth, will be in conversation with Kathleen McElroy, professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication.

As many of you know, this summer McElroy was at the center of controversy over academic freedom and journalism education. On October 19, instead of our traditional MOLLY prizes, we will present her with the MOLLY First Amendment Prize for her commitment to academic freedom and the education of young journalists.

We are honored that Kathleen has agreed to let us celebrate her at this extraordinary moment, and we’d like to share this honor with you. You can celebrate her courage in taking a stand now by making a donation to the Texas Observer at texasobserver.org/ donate or by scanning the QR code below. Let us know your gift is in honor of Kathleen. As always, thank you for the many ways you support and contribute to the Texas Observer and our growing community of readers, members, and friends. This issue is made possible by you, and everyone at the Observer thanks you for your support.

Best,

Lize Burr President, Texas Democracy Foundation

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Kathleen

Annette Gordon-Reed, author of “On Juneteenth” and the landmark “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings,” grew up in Texas and then distinguished herself as an historian, author, and Harvard professor.

October 19th, 2023

The Stateside at The Paramount Theater

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