DALLAS COUNTY JUDGE CLAY JENKINS WAS THE FIRST Texas official to declare a stay-at-home order for COVID-19 in March—more than a week before Governor Greg Abbott issued a similar statewide measure. This isn’t the first time Jenkins has navigated a maj

IN JANUARY 2017, ROSALIE DOWNING WAS ADMITTED TO MOUNTAIN View Health & Rehabilitation, a low-slung nursing home with four wings in El Paso’s Golden Hill neighborhood. Rosalie had kidney disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. She used a wheelcha

WHEN GARY BLAKE LAUNCHED Creative Solutions in Healthcare in 2000, he started small, opening a single modest nursing home in Granbury. Now Blake runs a nursing home empire. He owns or operates 64 nursing facilities across Texas, from big cities to ru

It starts at sunrise. Two lines of teenagers in military garb form on either side of the international bridge between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. A February chill permeates the air high above the placid Rio Grande. From the United States, customs offici

FOR THE PAST THREE YEARS, Josh Thomas labored away on a sweltering shop floor as a valve technician. He would build, inspect, and test frac stacks—lookingfor the smallest imperfections, flagging parts in need of repair or replacement, testing compone

IN THE DECADE LEADING UP TO 1920, SUFFRAGists in Texas won a series of dramatic victories for women’s voting rights. They organized to impeach a governor, convinced his replacement to partially enfranchise women by promising to support his reelection

TEXAS-BORN DRAG QUEEN SHANGELA LAQUIFA WADLEY, also known as DJ Pierce, makes a splash in HBO’s docuseries We’re Here. Along with Bob the Drag Queen and Eureka O’Hara, the fierce Shangela travels to small towns to recruit local residents for one-nigh

APPRECIATION PAY. PROUD PAY. SERVICE PAY. THE kaleidoscope of PR names all amount to one thing: a small raise for the poorly paid food retail workers who risk their lives so the rest of us can eat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now—as infections persi

STARTING IN LATE MAY, A WAVE OF PROTESTS SWEPT across Texas cities to oppose police brutality and systemic racism, a response in part to the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man and Houston native, was killed wh

LUBBOCK // Retired flight attendant Leslie Fylling wanted to move to Lubbock. But when she found her dream house, COVID-19 had made traveling to the city to see it in person untenable. Instead, she arranged to view the house via FaceTime, purchasing

It was the middle of the night when the call came, and she sprung out of bed and threw on the scrubs she’d hung up the day before. She piled boxes with oxygen tanks, medications, and other supplies into the trunk of her gray Hyundai and set off from

Rachel Rodriguez remembers her son Ruben being a very attached child. Even as Ruben got older and started getting into trouble, the mother and son remained close. “He was always just right there, right next to me,” she says. In 2013, when he was 20,

WHEN THE RAIN BEGAN, THE antelope and deer of the Y.O. Ranch Headquarters gathered to chew idly beneath the sparse trees. For 10 days in October 2018, a line of storms pounded the Texas Hill Country. Brown currents rose over a bridge on the ranch, sp

DURING MY FOUR YEARS AT THE TEXAS Observer, I’ve scrambled after stories about the progressive movement all over the sprawling Lone Star State. So while watching The Pushback—a new documentary that chronicles the Texas left—I sometimes felt the disti

CARMEN ZUNIGA LEAVES HER HOUSE IN MCALLEN EVERY Monday, Wednesday, and Friday before dawn to go to a dialysis center about 4 miles away. Zuniga has had diabetes for nearly three decades; the disease has left her mostly blind and reliant on dialysis t

ON SATURDAY, MARCH 21, THE UNITED STATES AND Mexico partially closed their border in an attempt to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. In El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, where life is defined by transnational movement, the decision completely altered the soc