The sun is low over Nuevo Laredo as David Patricio and three friends start unloading gravel and mountain bikes for their evening ride along the Rio Grande, but the weather is still in the 90s and the humidity stifling. In the early 2000s, the City of Laredo began buying up land to create a series […]

The post Cycling the Rio Grande as Trump’s Wall Looms appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Bobby Pulido descended a staircase bedecked in flowers to face the quinceañara in her shimmering blue ball gown. Her magnificent hoop skirt swayed as the Tejano star-turned-South Texas Democratic congressional candidate launched into a rendition of “Hermoso Cariño.” It was Pulido’s second quince of four that night, part of a marathon run of birthdays, weddings, […]

The post Can a Tejano Star Restore Dems’ Power in South Texas?  appeared first on The Texas Observer.

My parents lived through Jim Crow. Around our dinner table, they told stories that sounded impossible to me as a child. They talked about not being allowed to eat in certain restaurants, or even to try on clothes or shoes before buying them. My father often spoke about growing up in a sharecropping family. At […]

The post ‘Where Do We Go from Here’: Forward or Backward? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted with permission from How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, out from Haymarket Books this July. The Prison-Immigration Knot By the late 1980s, thanks to over a decade of laws criminalizing immigrants and expanding the camp system, prison and immigration detention industries were operating […]

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In 2022, longtime Tarrant County Judge R. Glen Whitley, a consummate moderate Republican, opted to retire after a nearly 30-year reign.  Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price, another moderate GOPer, was his most likely successor. But the county’s conservative movement rallied instead behind Tim O’Hare, a right-wing activist backed by West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn […]

The post The Tides of Tarrant appeared first on The Texas Observer.

When you were 8, you could control the wind. The trees would listen, waving their long branches at you. The leaves would applaud as you made your way down Marcus Street. That was when the birds called your name and the squirrels followed you. Back then, imagining was easy. Secret hidden treehouse sanctuaries that rivaled […]

The post A Love Letter to the Black Woodswomen of Deep East Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In late June, the Texas State Board of Education set controversial new curriculum requirements for the state’s public schools, which educate approximately 5.5 million students. Alongside further curtailing of cultural, ethnic, and geographic diversity, the new requirements mandate the teaching of Bible passages in Texas public schools. Though widely discussed in various media outlets, coverage […]

The post The Real Lesson Behind Texas’ New Bible Curriculum Requirements appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Amanda Eyre Ward is an Austin writer and author of 13 novels—three of which are set in Texas and the rest scattered all over the world. Her latest book, Arrivals and Departures, out June 16, delves deep into the dark world of international romance scammers and how they masquerade as lovers by employing deepfake videos, […]

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We have a plan for the day you are born and the day you die.  We can make you breathe—or at least try to—when your lungs fail and your blood can no longer clot. At the Texas Medical Center (TMC) in central Houston, we repair spinal defects before birth and replace hearts after a mother’s […]

The post A Birth Plan for the Dying appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In 2015, a 25-year-old flooring installer named Roendy Granillo collapsed and died of heat stroke on a construction job in Melissa, a small town northeast of Dallas, after his family said he was denied a water break. They carried his story to Dallas City Hall, and the council passed an ordinance on a 10-5 vote, […]

The post The Hard Ceiling Over Texas Cities’ Climate Plans appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Paul Skalnik was a con artist, passing bad checks, role-playing as a successful businessman, and racking up a series of sometimes overlapping marriages. Over the years, he bilked numerous people out of their savings with hollow promises and half-cocked schemes, which often ended with him fleeing town.  That in itself would make him a compelling […]

The post A Jailhouse Snitch and the System that Made Him appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: This story was supported by grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California. Seated inside a Starbucks café last February, Grace Bellido, 14, shares some of her favorite books by penciling the names in a small floral notebook. “Song of Achilles … […]

The post In Texas Schools, a Crisis of Arrests of Kids as Young as 10 appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The gaping mouth of Bracken Cave, created when limestone collapsed into a sinkhole in this rocky patch of Hill Country millennia ago, reveals only darkness to the human eye. Yet the room inside is filled with the pulsing life of tiny, furry, pregnant Mexican free-tailed bats in April—a massive maternity ward that will, by summer, […]

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You’ve probably heard about the Trump administration’s plans for a border wall through Big Bend. Or its plans not to build a wall at all, but instead to put up a futuristic forcefield of lights and sensors. You may have even heard that public pressure backed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into a corner […]

The post What Is (and Isn’t) Happening with the Border Wall in Big Bend appeared first on The Texas Observer.

If Texas is, as its pledge of allegiance states, “one state under God,” this begs a question. What God? Whose God? For many Texans, it’s undoubtedly the Christian God, because (so they say) we’re a Christian nation. They can point, for instance, to the 190-foot-tall “Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ” near the Panhandle town […]

The post One State Under Whose God? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: Lupe Mendez, poetry editor of the Texas Observer, is author of the new book We Exist in the Whisper: Huelga School Verses (Arte Público Press, 2026)–one of the first works to tackle Houston’s 1970s huelga school movement. Mendez’s moving mélange of poetry, interviews, and journal entries describes a citywide strike, during which Mexican-American […]

The post Inside Houston’s 1970 School Strike appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Every Thursday and Sunday evening, a dozen volunteers file into the back room of Vesper, a community space in East Austin. In the workroom-turned-library, there is a small kitchen, bright overhead lighting, and hundreds of books and magazines stacked every which way on floor-to-ceiling shelves that line the walls. Each person plucks a handwritten letter […]

The post Throwing the Book at Books in Prison appeared first on The Texas Observer.

To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section. Find Observer political reporting here.

The post Turning Back the Clock appeared first on The Texas Observer.

At this year’s Texas Democratic Party convention, sounds of the Corpus Christi coastline lulled Lone Star liberals into the recurring dream of a blue wave crashing over the state. After 30 years of Republican rule, Democrats once again insisted that 2026 would be their best shot at flipping Texas in decades. Emboldened by a viral […]

The post Unity and Discontent at the Texas Dems’ Corpus Convening appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Texas Observer reader, The following are my remarks, in part, from our May 6 MOLLYs fundraiser gala: Last year, some of you may remember, we published a very viral story in which we identified an ICE prosecutor in Dallas as the operator of an extremely, extremely racist X account.  In terms of impact, everything seemed […]

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The post Portrait of Us, 2019-2023 appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Around 4 a.m. on May 15, in the 1-year-old South Texas town of Starbase, Jose Luis Bautista, a 25-year-old man from nearby Donna, rode a scissor lift around 50 feet up toward the ceiling of the “Starfactory,” where Elon Musk’s SpaceX makes parts for its Starship rockets. Bautista and other workers with Delta Fabrication and […]

The post Worker’s Death at SpaceX Factory Followed Hundreds of Injuries in Recent Years appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. This story was produced in partnership with the Texas Newsroom, the state’s network of public radio stations. A decade ago, Corpus Christi’s regional water plan projected shortages as soon as […]

The post Texas’ Refusal to Plan for Climate Change Created a Crisis in Corpus Christi  appeared first on The Texas Observer.

 (Editor’s Note: The author is a social work student at Texas A&M University–Central Texas.)  On May 20, a black hearse drawn by dark horses led the march of University of Texas at Austin students, clad all in black clothes, past the Governor’s Mansion and the Texas Capitol. The mourners carried signs with the words “Academic […]

The post The Last Safe Haven for DEI in Texas Higher Ed? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

At least 135 public schools have closed or have been approved to close all across Texas since late 2023, as districts face budget crises amid state funding shortfalls, according to data gathered by the public school advocacy organization Our Schools Our Democracy.  Carrie Griffith, executive director of the Austin-based nonprofit, said every region of the […]

The post School Closures Are Escalating Across Texas. ‘It’s Not a Local Failure.’ appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Four years ago, after authorities in San Antonio found 53 immigrants dead in a trailer in San Antonio, Governor Greg Abbott knew exactly whom to blame. “These deaths are on Biden,” Abbott posted on social media about the then-president, going on to say that “deadly open border policies” encourage migrants to risk life and limb […]

The post Deaths Uncovered in Laredo Show the Ongoing Toll of Border Militarization appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Texas does not have enough water. Texas also cannot get rid of the water it has. Both of those things are true right now, and in the dry stretch of West Texas where the two collide, they are turning into the same problem. On one West Texas cattle ranch, the problem looks concrete. Old and […]

The post Texas Has a Water Shortage and a Water Glut. They Are the Same Problem. appeared first on The Texas Observer.

John Steinbeck was already suffering serious heart trouble when, in 1962, he and his dog clambered into a pickup with a camper topper for a cross-country trip chronicled in his famous final book, Travels with Charley. Six decades later, Austin writer Lauren Hough sets out in a 2001 Dodge Ram van with her dog, a […]

The post A Queer Texan Retraces Steinbeck’s 10,000-mile trip appeared first on The Texas Observer.

From deep within I heard: “not a woman.” The desert stretched out in front of me as I drove. For months, feelings I couldn’t put my finger on simmered. I realize in the rearview mirror that my egg had been cracking, a term that refers to the process of discovering one’s transness. I am the […]

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In Texas, Juneteenth is often described as the day that Union Major General Gordon Granger marched upon the shores of Galveston to announce the Emancipation Proclamation—on June 19th, 1865.  But freedom in Texas was achieved both after and before formal emancipation.  Following June 1865, those newly freed Afro-Texans who’d heard the news still had to […]

The post From the Plantation to the Thicket: Juneteenth, Black Freedom, and ‘Marronage’ in Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.