Debbie Nathan
By Debbie Nathan:
Essay: Ties That Bind
Driving last year into one of the poorest, most violent slums of Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican border metropolis known worldwide as “Murder City,” my taxi driver hunched over the steering wheel and gripped it tight. Read More
This American Life
Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-speaking United States Mexican New York: On a road trip through the Midwest boonies in the early 1990s, I was astonished to see signs plastered in Liberal, Kansas, advertising a local … Read More
Truth of the Matter
Trail of Feathers: Searching for Phil True. A Reporter’s Murder in Mexico and His Editor’s Search for Justice In 1998 Phil True, a good-looking, hippie-ish foreign correspondent for the San Antonio Express-News, vanished while backpacking alone in the Sierra Madre … Read More
A Butter Take on Texas History
A Butter Take on Texas History BY DEBBIE NATHAN A Journey through Texas: Or a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier By Frederick Law Olmsted University of Nebraska Press 539 pages, $21.95 A Journey through Texas: Or a Saddle-Trip on the … Read More
Drawing on the Right Side
Delegates and protesters duke it out: Who draws the best map of Texas?
Outside the RNC, angry protesters from Texas cursed GOP delegates from Texas as fanatics, elitists, and deceivers. Inside, at Madison Square Garden and endless parties, delegates rolled their eyes and called protesters everything from naive to girlie to terrorists. The … Read More
The Face Maker
Combining science, art, and intention, Frank Bender tries to restore identity in Juarez
Frank Bender is an East Coast native who knows maybe four words of Spanish and not much more about countries where Spanish is spoken. Lately, though, he’s become obsessed with Ciudad Juarez: with bringing the women murdered there back from … Read More
Lone Done Gone
A revisionist historian tackles the curse of T.R. Fehrenbach
Lone Done Gone A revisionist historian tackles the curse of T.R. Fehrenbach BY DEBBIE NATHAN Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star StateBy Randolph B. CampbellOxford University Press500 pages, $35 few years ago I was traveling Texas’ Ivory … Read More
El Mayor vs. Los Good Old Boys
The trials of Ray Caballero
The Chihuahuan desert sky is forever deep in El Paso, and the Franklin mountains seem to lie outside time. For years, the whole place has felt as still as rocks—even though the stillness includes many things abandoned ages ago by … Read More