Texas Monthly

An Underground Joint in Dallas Goes Legit, and Its Barbecue Has Never Been Better

Daniel Vaughn — Fri, 10 May 2024 14:00:00 +0000

A pair of code compliance officers from the City of Dallas approached Jamie Sosa on a Sunday afternoon in February. A line of customers looked on as the officers told him to shut down his barbecue trailer for the day. He was operating without a permit, and received a $250 ticket. Sosa took the ticket and kept serving. “I have hundreds of dollars’ worth of barbecue in my smoker, and I have a crowd that I need to feed,” he told the officers. They promised another ticket for every two additional people he served. He got five more tickets before they left. “I’m not mad at them,” Sosa said. “They’re just doing their job.” Such is the life of an underground barbecue slinger. Sosa has…

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Henry Cuellar Wouldn’t Answer Questions About His Indictment. He Offered Us a Playlist Instead.

Pablo Manríquez — Thu, 09 May 2024 19:25:32 +0000

Henry Cuellar has never been shy with the D.C. Capitol press. The ten-term congressman from Laredo is known to be a great source to reporters, both on the record and off. That is, until he was indicted last week on fourteen charges alleging political corruption involving the Azerbaijani government and a bank in Mexico. Cuellar skipped votes at the Capitol on Monday, returning Tuesday, when he slipped past the TV news crews waiting for him in and around the U.S. House of Representatives. The glad-handing centrist Democrat typically walks to votes alone, often holding court or taking phone calls in the Speaker’s Lobby just loud enough for reporters to hear. Not anymore. On Wednesday, Cuellar walked to the Capitol from his office in the Rayburn House…

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Horny Moms and Lost Souls: How Kimberly King Parsons Crafted a Modern, Hallucinatory Texas Novel

Dina Gachman — Thu, 09 May 2024 18:37:50 +0000

If you do an image search for Wink, Texas, you’ll find pictures of a wee Roy Orbison Museum, aerial photos of two massive sinkholes, and not much else. The small West Texas hamlet, about eight miles south of Kermit, is the setting for part of fifth-generation Texan Kimberly King Parsons’s debut novel, We Were the Universe. Kit, the main character and narrator, grew up in Wink and is living in a fictional Dallas suburb named Pivot. She’s a young stay-at-home mom reeling from the loss of her sister Julie to alcoholism, searching for a way to process her emotions. Her old comforts of casual sex and psychedelics don’t mesh with her desire to be a dependable, loving mom to her daughter, Gilda, so Kit starts…

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Ken Paxton Mistakes Catholic Teachings for “Bohemian Commandments”

Sandi Villarreal — Thu, 09 May 2024 17:42:02 +0000

It’s Ken Paxton versus Catholics, round two. Back in February, the Texas attorney general targeted the migrant shelter Annunciation House, in El Paso, on his stated suspicions of “alien harboring” and “operating a stash house.” He cited no evidence for the latter claim, but demanded that Annunciation House turn over a host of records, including its clients’ names and medical records. Annunciation House, which receives migrants from the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other government agencies and feeds and houses them, refused to turn over all the documents. It argued that Paxton was violating several constitutional protections, including the Catholic organization’s right to free exercise of religion. Instead of waiting for a final ruling on the document request, the attorney general filed for…

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Del Rio’s William Beckmann Proves That Even Twentysomethings Can Be Cowboy Crooners

Kaiya Little — Wed, 08 May 2024 18:26:27 +0000

With all the earnestness of a love letter, country singer William Beckmann sings classic country tales of pining—for the one that got away, for the red-dressed women from the bar. Over the sounds of his staple bluesy harmonica, he swings from raucous boot-stomping music to ballads with the relaxed feel of a sunlit drive through the Texas towns he sings about. The common denominator is honest storytelling, and an undeniable energy that’s propelled him from his home in Del Rio to venues such as the Corona Club in Acuña, Mexico, which hadn’t seen a country act in almost two decades before Beckmann walked in.Inspired by the likes of Elvis, Frank Sinatra, and Johnny Cash, the 28-year-old sings in a deep bass, with a smooth cadence…

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What Azerbaijan Wants From Texas Politicians

Christopher Hooks — Wed, 08 May 2024 16:02:00 +0000

It’s harder to be a moderate in Washington, D.C., than ever before. Nobody knows that better than the veteran centrist Democrat Henry Cuellar, who faces prosecution from the federal government for his work on one of the few remaining bipartisan causes in Texas politics: the glorious nation of Azerbaijan. On Friday, the Department of Justice indicted Congressman Cuellar, who represents Laredo, on fourteen counts, including bribery, conspiracy, failure to register as a foreign agent, and money laundering. Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, are alleged to have used a network of shell companies to hide $600,000 in payoffs from a Mexican bank and an Azerbaijani oil company. For those payments, the feds allege, Cuellar offered concrete deliverables, the “quid” for the “quo.” Cuellar is supposed to have…

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LA23 BBQ Is Doing Texas Right in Plaquemines Parish

Daniel Vaughn — Wed, 08 May 2024 14:00:00 +0000

“Texas is the motherland of barbecue, and if somebody says it’s not, they’re just an idiot,” Bobby Monsted III told me. Monsted is co-owner of LA23 BBQ in Belle Chasse, Louisiana. It’s a small place with covered picnic tables for seating along State Highway 23 in Plaquemines Parish. He was raised just upriver in New Orleans, but often sampled barbecue while visiting family in Fort Worth and Texarkana as a kid. When he opened a barbecue shack in 2012, he knew Texas-style was the way to smoke.After graduating from Mississippi College with a business degree in 2002, Monsted didn’t return to New Orleans, where his father ran a successful insurance company. He instead took the unusual step of opening a fishing charter service on the…

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Texas Parents Are Terrified for Another Triple-Digit Summer

Saba Khonsari — Wed, 08 May 2024 13:43:49 +0000

“No more than ten minutes!” I yelled after my eleven-year-old daughter as she darted out the back door. It was late on an August evening, and the temperature in Houston continued to hover over 100 degrees, refusing to offer even a brief reprieve. Last summer was less of a breaking point and more of a languishing, as persistent triple digits kept our family of four increasingly confined to our home. The sun was so relentless that I often drew the curtains by noon. Right outside our door was a huge yard with a tree swing, a neighborhood park, and miles of bayou trails. Inside was a lethargic mom trying to console two kids with more screen time that none of us wanted.During my own adolescence…

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Texas Might Be Ready to Fall Back in Love With the WNBA

Jeff Miller — Tue, 07 May 2024 16:14:17 +0000

With less than ten seconds left in the game and the score tied at 76, Dallas Wings guard Arike Ogunbowale, dribbled past half-court. She dribbled between her legs a couple times and then nudged forward beyond the three-point line, just enough to put her Indiana Fever defender, Lexie Hull, on her heels. Ogungowale’s juke created just enough space for her to release a step-back three-pointer, which toilet-bowled around the rim before dropping through the net with 4.5 seconds remaining. NOT HER FIRST TIME. WON'T BE HER LAST. https://t.co/SINX2gAt6x pic.twitter.com/D9WCDCIyMi— Dallas Wings (@DallasWings) May 4, 2024 The 6,251 spectators who gathered for the Wings’ preseason opener erupted. And they erupted again seconds later, after Indiana guard Caitlin Clark—the college hoops phenomenon and top overall pick…

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Ethan Hawke’s ‘Wildcat’ Proves a Good Film Is Hard to Find

Scott Ray — Tue, 07 May 2024 15:45:51 +0000

Early in Ethan Hawke’s new film, Wildcat, a young Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke, Hawke’s daughter) tells a skeptical editor that she’s “amenable to criticism—but only within the sphere of what [she’s] trying to do.” That editor doesn’t end up publishing the work in question, perhaps illustrating that the gulf between what a piece of art attempts and what it achieves can be hard to bridge, no matter the affection the artist might have for the material.As O’Connor once admitted herself, a biopic about the author is a tall order. An epigraph of one biography quotes her: “There won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.” Indeed, she spent…

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Mexico City Is Finally Embracing Tex-Mex

José R. Ralat — Tue, 07 May 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Culinary purists and many Mexicans have long denigrated Tex-Mex as a bastardization of regional Mexican cooking (which is one reason why I started my Tex-Mexplainer series). At the late Urban Taco in Dallas, owner Markus Pineyro, a Mexico City native, had a cheeky doormat at the taqueria’s entrance that read “Friends Don’t Let Friends Eat Tex-Mex.” Now Pineyro, who also cofounded ghost kitchen Oomi, says he’s come around to it. “I have an appreciation for everyday Tex-Mex,” he says.That attitude has recently taken hold in Mexico City as well, especially at Coyota, a casual restaurant from chefs Cristina Rubio and Juan Escalona, who’ve come to understand Tex-Mex as a chapter in the greater narrative of Mexican food. Their friendships—such as one with Monterrey, Mexico–born, McAllen–raised…

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Four Years After COVID Canceled Prom, College Kids at Sam Houston State Got a Second Chance

Bryan C. Parker — Tue, 07 May 2024 13:31:54 +0000

WHO: The students of the Sam Houston State University Department of Theatre & Musical Theatre, led by assistant professor and coordinator of theater studies Patrick Pearson.WHAT: In conjunction with a musical performance of The Prom this spring, the Sam Houston State theater department hosted an actual prom the evening after the musical’s closing night and invited the whole school.WHY IT’S SO GREAT: Students who were seniors in high school four years ago, when COVID-19 shut down the world, got a chance to enjoy the prom they never had. Plus, the organizers of the event turned it into a fundraiser for LGBTQ students in Houston who might not feel welcome at their own high schools.In February 2020, Leah Bernal purchased her dream dress for prom. It…

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Archaeologists Dug Up a Vanished Texas Town and Found 10,000 Artifacts

Pam LeBlanc — Mon, 06 May 2024 14:15:47 +0000

In 1843, Sam Houston toiled away at a desk in a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot log cabin not far from the muddy banks of the Brazos River. From that makeshift office in Washington-on-the-Brazos, about halfway between Austin and Houston, the then-president of the new Republic of Texas penned letters inviting the chiefs of several Native American tribes to join him for a council meeting. Many of the chiefs came, among them leaders from the Caddo, Delaware, and Shawnee tribes. They spent nearly two weeks in the rough-around-the-edges little town, meeting with officials, demonstrating skills, dancing and playing music, and signing a treaty.Today, there’s not much to indicate the significance of the spot where Houston’s cabin once stood, at one end of the long-vanished town of Washington-on-the-Brazos. This place…

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Iowa Is Cleaning Up Its Massive Pile of Wind Turbine Blades. Why Can’t Texas?

Russell Gold — Mon, 06 May 2024 14:00:00 +0000

The Sweetwater Cemetery welcomed its first permanent resident, an infant, in 1880. That was four years before the incorporation of the city, about forty miles west of Abilene, where the short-grass prairie that sweeps down from Canada peters out. Today the graveyard houses the final resting spots of many pioneers, immigrants, and Civil War veterans, according to a historical plaque on its gate.Across the street sits another graveyard, of sorts. It opened in 2017 and has become a long-term home for thousands of discarded wind turbine blades. Each has been cut into thirds that remain as long as modest ranch houses. They are not buried in the earth but stacked haphazardly in rows of undulating off-white fiberglass.This blade boneyard was built by Global Fiberglass Solutions,…

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Meet the Houston Power Couple Spurring a Pinball Renaissance

Dwight Silverman — Mon, 06 May 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Tim Hood is standing inside a building he calls the Vault, giving me a tour on a warm spring day in Houston, when there’s a knock at the door. He isn’t expecting anyone, and as a man and woman step inside, they’re also taken by surprise.“Is this the embroidery shop?” the man asks. Clearly it’s not, but the pair are not really sure what they’re looking at.That’s because the Vault is filled with pinball machines in various states of assembly. There are several dozen here, some set up and ready to play but many still wrapped in shipping plastic, their back boxes separated from the cabinets or opened to reveal their electronic and mechanical guts.There are valuable rarities alongside popular titles you’d see in many…

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Recognition for Four Texas Monthly Editors

Texas Monthly — Fri, 03 May 2024 20:46:19 +0000

On April 30, the James Beard Foundation announced its 2024 Media Award nominees. For the third year in a row, taco editor José R. Ralat and Texas Monthly have been nominated in the Columns and Newsletters category for José’s Tex-Mexplainer series. According to the organization’s website, “This award recognizes the work of an individual or team/group that demonstrates thought-provoking opinion and a compelling style on food- or drink-related topics.” José’s pieces “Defining ‘Guisado’ Is Just as Messy as the Dish Itself,” “A Head Above: How Barbacoa Paved the Way for Barbecue,” and “Red, White, and Covered in Salsa: How Two Colors Came to Dominate Taquerias” were specifically cited in the nomination. Winners of the 2024 James Beard Media Awards will be announced live in Chicago…

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Henry Cuellar Has Been Indicted on Charges of Bribery and Money Laundering

Matthew Choi, the Texas Tribune — Fri, 03 May 2024 19:47:06 +0000

U.S. representative Henry Cuellar (D-Laredo) was indicted with his wife, Imelda, on Friday on charges of accepting almost $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani energy company and a Mexican bank, the Justice Department announced.Cuellar allegedly accepted the payments after they had been laundered through fake consulting contracts to shell companies owned by Imelda Cuellar, according to the DOJ. In exchange, Henry Cuellar allegedly pursued policy in favor of Azerbaijan, the department said. Cuellar also allegedly took money from a Mexican bank and influenced members of the executive branch to make policy favorable for the bank, according to the department.Cuellar asserted his innocence in a statement Friday after NBC News reported federal prosecutors’ plans for an indictment. The Cuellars appeared in a federal courthouse in Houston…

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Meet the Rebel Alliance Taking On the Texas History Establishment

Michael Hardy — Fri, 03 May 2024 15:52:00 +0000

At a symposium organized by the newly formed Alliance for Texas History in Fort Worth last weekend, University of Houston doctoral student Shine Trabucco, who is of Taos Pueblo and Quecha descent, began her talk by “acknowledging that we are on the ancestral lands of the Caddo, the Comanche, and the Kickapoo. We are just visitors and guests on Indigenous people’s land.” Later in the day, University of New Orleans professor Max Krochmal declared that “we are meeting on stolen land in a city built by enslaved Black people and exploited migrant labor.” Not to be outdone, University of North Texas professor Michael Phillips pointed out that the state of Texas was built by “exploiting the labor of enslaved people, Indigenous people, and poor whites.” Such…

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Inside Major League Rugby’s Texas-Size Growth Plan

Daniel Vaughn — Fri, 03 May 2024 14:47:13 +0000

For an American sports fan, following a rugby match can be disorienting. The constant action is a remedy against boredom, but the experience is like watching every other sport you might be familiar with happening all at once. “It has a combination of basketball, football, hockey, soccer, and even some elements of track,” said Rodd Newhouse, COO and part owner of the Dallas Jackals. The pace of play drew him to the game, and he’s hoping it will draw new fans to a professional league that most Texans have never heard of, Major League Rugby.MLR was founded seven years ago in Dallas, though North Texas has only had a team since the Jackals debuted in 2022. The Houston SaberCats have played since the inaugural 2018…

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Country Singer Parker McCollum Doesn’t Believe in Forcing It

Lauren Castro — Thu, 02 May 2024 18:10:03 +0000

Country singer Parker McCollum epitomizes cowboy swagger. His usual white tee, gold chain, and heavily starched jeans are as much of a uniform as Orville Peck’s mask of fringe. Heck, he even has a whole album, Gold Chain Cowboy, dedicated to the classic look. It’s the cowboy version of effortless chic. McCollum says his fashion sense is a tribute to MTV Cribs and Pure Country, the shows he spent his youth watching in Conroe, north of Houston. “I grew up cowboying a lot from my granddad but also, I wanted to be a country singer and have a big ranch, have a bunch of cars, and maybe some jewelry and some fly stuff like that,” McCollum says. The “weird hybrid mix of the two” has worked…

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How Dan Rather Helped Turn “TV Journalism” Into an Oxymoron

Josh Alvarez — Thu, 02 May 2024 16:45:17 +0000

Dan Rather was perhaps the most famous journalist in America back when being a news anchor at one of the big three network television channels—ABC, CBS, and NBC—mattered. The Texas native’s long career, including 24 years as the face of CBS’s Evening News, is one of the most storied in the history of American journalism—even when considering his sudden, ignominious fall from his CBS perch—and is the subject of Rather, a new documentary streaming on Netflix. The film, directed by longtime Hollywood producer Frank Marshall and featuring Rather, who is a sprightly 92, is snappy and well-crafted, but it’s mostly interested in defending and celebrating the newsman. In its more transcendent moments, it touches on larger questions about journalism, how it should be done, and…

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Texas Monthly Wins Two Awards

Texas Monthly — Thu, 02 May 2024 15:36:52 +0000

Last week, it was announced that Texas Monthly was recognized by two prestigious entities: the Religion News Association and the Webby Awards. The RNA awards ceremony took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 20. According to the organization’s website, “The Religion News Association has been the premier professional association for people who report on religion in the news media. Our mission is to equip journalists throughout the world with the tools and resources they need to cover religion with balance, accuracy and insight.” At the awards, Texas Monthly‘s deputy editor of digital, Sandi Villarreal, won first place in the RNA’s Multimedia: Analysis category, for “The Biblical Womanhood of Angela Paxton,” which was published online in September 2023.On April 23, Texas Monthly Studio‘s The Official Love…

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Meet Max Chiefari, Globe-trotting Barbecue Consultant

Daniel Vaughn — Thu, 02 May 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Mauro “Max” Chiefari was in the Nile Delta, about a hundred miles north of New Cairo, when he felt his stomach rumble. He had just eaten some raw-milk cheese shared with him while on a search for hardwood to fill the smokers at Longhorn Texas BBQ. It was late 2020, and the restaurant was to open soon. Wood is scarce in Egypt, so Chiefari had answered a Facebook ad promising something better than the old furniture scraps he was sometimes offered. “The drive took six hours,” he recalled, and was mostly off-road, but the person who put out the ad had good acacia and oak. As he loaded the wood, he saw a motorcycle carrying four people being pulled by a donkey. “It was just…

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Robo Truckers Will Soon Roam Free on Texas Highways

Mark Dent — Thu, 02 May 2024 13:00:00 +0000

On a sunny Wednesday morning, a cyclist pedals furiously down the shoulder of Interstate 20, just south of Dallas. He’s no more than ten feet from dozens of cars zooming by at seventy miles per hour. One tiny mishap—say, a passing driver distracted by changing the radio station and swerving at the worst possible moment—could kill the cyclist. And he has no idea that approaching rapidly behind him is an eighteen-wheeler without a driver in control.Fortunately for the cyclist, pods mounted on the truck’s sides are equipped with cameras, lasers, and radar that give the vehicle a 360-degree picture of its surroundings and help it gauge distances. The sensors identify the cyclist as a moving object that needs to be avoided and send data about…

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How to Tell Joel Osteen and Haley Joel Osment Apart: A Guide for Kendrick Lamar

Dan Solomon — Wed, 01 May 2024 19:52:26 +0000

Kendrick Lamar surprise-released a new single on Monday, and Drake had a bad day. The track, a six-and-a-half minute instant classic, was a howl of rage and mockery at the Canadian megastar, escalating a war of words that had recently tipped from cold to hot in a way that effectively salts the earth beneath poor Drake’s feet. Neither of those fellas are Texans, though, so why are we writing about it? You won’t believe this, but it’s because of Houston megachurch pastor Joel Osteen.Nearly five-and-a-half minutes into the track, Lamar drops yet another brutal simile in a song full of devastating insults. “Am I battling ghost or AI?” he asks, referencing both a song Drake released in April that featured an AI-generated verse mimicking Tupac…

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