Essay
Up From the Desert
To Understand the El Paso Massacre, Look to the Long Legacy of Anti-Mexican Violence at the Border
The El Paso shooter wasn’t a “lone wolf.” His act of white supremacist terror is part of a century of racial violence targeting fronterizo communities.
In the immediate aftermath of the El Paso shooting—the largest massacre of Latinx people in the history of the United States—politicians of all stripes stoo...Read More
Lost in Limbo in the Hays County Jail
For 45 painful, lonely days, I waited and waited to be convicted of a crime.
The cold bit through the thin wool blanket and climbed up the short sleeves of my Women of the World Poetry Slam T-shirt as I lay on the cement floor of the Hay...Read More
The Trouble with Yoga
Why yoga studios are the new country clubs.
It was a sunny Wednesday afternoon in south College Station when I arrived for yoga class, like I had on any other Wednesday for the past three years. After bat...Read More
Heads in the Mud
A year after Hurricane Harvey, what has the Bayou City learned?
“The people of Houston and their officials will have to decide whether they are building a great city or merely a great population.” These words, from a 192...Read More
The Day the Windows Shook
Grappling with the damage wrought by the Texas City disaster, more than 70 years later.
We were all gathered in the auditorium of Beaumont’s Millard Elementary School when the windows began rattling, a strong enough vibration that 71 years later ...Read More
Women’s Work
Lessons from my great-aunt, an East Texas original.
Women’s Work Lessons from my great-aunt, an East Texas original. I was a child in a magical place, in a house my father built in the piney woods of East T...Read More
I Grew Up on the Texas-Mexico Border, but Now I Barely Recognize It
In Brownsville, you can't go home again.
It’s a part of the human condition to romanticize your place of origin, to look nostalgically back upon the things you grew up with, and then wistfully shrug ...Read More
Somewhere It Hides a Well
Learning to look past borderland tropes in Presidio.
The photograph, taken in 1975, shows a long dirt road receding into blue mountains. A chain-link fence runs along the left side of the road, and on the right, a...Read More
Drinking the Kool-Aid at the Garden of Eden
Searching for community at a North Texas “ecovillage.”
Searching for community at a North Texas “ecovillage.”...Read More
