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Voters will ultimately get the final say on the new property tax cuts passed by the Texas Legislature. What’s in it for them, and what’s missing?
The investigation of a Texas A&M professor raises new questions about political pressure on campus coming from very high places.
U.S. military academies make way for a big change: allowing cadets to be parents.
Japanese snow monkeys were brought to Texas for research 50 years ago – and a journalist was driven to find out whatever happened to them.
A deadly fire burned through a migrant processing facility in Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso – we’ll hear the latest on the catastrophe that claimed the lives of dozens of people.
Green energy firms are scrambling to snap up federal dollars, but first they need to know what “made in America” really means.
And after the pandemic caused a “she-cession,” the Dallas Fed reports that women entrepreneurs are bouncing back.
Cicero said, “If you have a library and a garden, you have all that you need.” Texas Standard commentator WF Strong says you can begin to understand that wisdom when you enter the gates of Quinta Mazatlan. It’s an urban oasis in south McAllen.
Is South Texas ground zero for a political shift in 2022? Republicans, Democrats and the Latino vote are in the spotlight. Politics watchers say three republican Texas women, Latinas themselves, stand to lead an historic shift in voting patterns. We’ll take a closer look at what’s behind that. Also, has Mark Zuckerberg’s company gone too Meta? As valuations of the company formerly known as Facebook continue to slide, a reality check on whether its Metaverse strategy is grounded in reality. And from far west Texas, a sweet sound 50 years in the making. And for a family, a dream come true.
Those stories and much more when today on the Texas Standard:
Democratic primaries in South Texas pit progressives against moderates. The big question is which brand will have a better chance against the GOP. We’ll have the latest. Plus for immunocompromised people who don’t get enough protection from COVID-19 vaccines, there is another option. Why most Texans don’t know about it. And COVID-19 is still having a huge impact on the Texas criminal justice system, just look at Dallas County. And as the November Governor’s race approaches we’ll fact check a claim from Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke on property Taxes. And we’ll settle in for a little music exploration as an iconic Texas album turns 50. Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:
One hundred years ago, Col. Sam Robertson stood on the same Boca Chica Beach in South Texas that Elon Musk owns today and dreamed a different dream. Instead of Musk’s spaceport, Robertson dreamed of seaports and an oceanside highway.
Robertson owned 800 acres at Boca Chica, about 20 miles northeast of Brownsville and it was likely some of the same thousand acres now managed by Musk’s companies. Back then, Robertson built the railroad that connected the Rio Grande Valley to the wider world. He had founded the town of San Benito, serving as sheriff and helping to run the Ku Klux Klan out of the region.
He had repurposed the old channels known as resacas to irrigate the lower valley. In 1926, he gathered RGV leaders in Brownsville’s El Jardin Hotel to make his pitch for an oceanside highway that would run from Boca Chica all the way up Padre Island to Corpus Christi. It would become, in his words, “the most beautiful 150 miles of highway in the world.”
Robertson laid out his vision before the Rio Grande Valley Commercial Club. “I have traveled somewhat extensively in this world,” he said, “and have never seen any scenery wilder or more beautiful than this stretch of beach.”
Robertson was not only an entrepreneur; he was a decorated soldier and noted engineer. In 1915, he served as a scout for General Jack Pershing in the pursuit of Pancho Villa in Mexico. During World War I, he served in Europe as a commander of the 22nd Engineers, building railroads and bridges for Allied troops in France. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for bravery under fire.
The business leaders of the Valley trusted his vision because they believed his claims. He wasn’t pitching a blacktop road.
“The beach is as smooth as a billiard table,” Robertson said. “No road can be constructed by man as good for autoing as the beach, and the Gulf of Mexico maintains it.” All you would need is maintenance crews to move driftwood out of the way, he said, telling those assembled that he had explored the beach from Corpus Christi to the mouth of the Rio Grande River and that a highway was quite possible and would bring in enormous numbers of tourists. Just “throw across” some bay bridges at either end, he suggested, and you’d be open for business.
Such a development would be good for the Rio Grande Valley, too, he argued. With good roads to Boca Chica Beach, Valleyites could have a Sunday lunch at home, then drive to the beach for a Sunday afternoon swim at the beach and still be home by 10 p.m.
Robertson’s oceanside highway was never developed. But looking at South Padre and North Padre today, just north of Boca Chica with their causeway bridges, carefully maintained beaches, opulent hotels and verdant landscaping, you can see that his dream for the island has been partially realized.
Robertson opened his Del Mar Resort on Boca Chica Beach in 1931, but the resort was virtually wiped out by a hurricane two years later. He rebuilt within six months and constructed an asphalt road from Brownsville to Boca Chica Beach because his personal mantra was: “Civilization follows transportation.”
Musk would like that, too.
My friend of many years, Tony Zavaleta, told me the following story: He said, “There was once a married couple who lived in Rio Grande City back in the late 1800s. They had tried for some time to have a baby, but had had no luck. They went to see doctors and followed their advice, but still, God had not seen fit to bless them with a baby. So they decided that they would go to see Don Pedrito the ‘curandero’ – a healer – who lived near Falfurrias. They had been told that he could work miracles. It was a three-day journey by wagon, but they knew it would be worth going because Don Pedrito would certainly give them a ‘receta,’ a ritual to follow that would give them a baby. When the couple was a half a mile of Don Pedrito’s home, a boy came running to them and stopped their wagon. He said, ‘Don Pedrito said to turn around and go home. She is already pregnant.’ The young couple was shocked, but they did as Don Pedrito commanded. They turned around and went home, never doubting his word. Eight months later they had a gorgeous and healthy baby boy.”
My friend Tony paused for a moment and said, “And that baby boy was my grandfather.”
I’m connected to Don Pedrito as well, but not through my ancestry. I grew up only a few miles from his shrine, which still exists to this day. I walked by it many times in my teenage years and went into the shrine’s little room, hot from dozens of prayer candles that always burned there. At 15, I was astounded that there were faded and glossy new photographs from all over the United States and Mexico, leaning against the candles, asking for cures. Don Pedrito had died fifty years before, in 1907, and yet his fame as a healer not only endured, it thrived. People from far away made “promesas” and asked for his blessings because they had faith in his potential to still deliver cures. He was a much loved folk saint, and remains so to this day. Right now you can walk into any H-E-B store in much of Texas and buy a Don Pedro prayer candle. (In fact, you can even order it from H-E-B online.)
Don Pedrito never took credit for cures. He always said that he didn’t cure anybody. He was only God’s intermediary.
He rejected worship. If someone tried to kneel he would tell them to get up. Don Pedrito insisted that God was the one doing the healing. Don Pedrito only provided the “receta,” the prescription, which he said was provided by divine inspiration. Lest you think he was a con man, using Jesus to rob people, quite the opposite was true. He was Christ-like in that he never charged for his healing. People would give him money, and he would often refuse it, saying “you need that to get back home,” or “you should give that back to the man who loaned it to you.” If he did accept money, he would often use it to buy food for the many people who camped, sometimes by the hundreds, at Los Olmos Creek, waiting to see him. As one man said of him, “What he accepted with one hand, he gave with the other.”
Proof of Don Pedro’s enormous popularity is provided by author Jennifer Seman, who published a map of that era showing that all roads and trails of the region led to Don Pedro. He was Rome. It is an incredible map provided by the General Land Office for 1892 and shows clearly that the most heavily trafficked roads and paths of the time in that general region led to Don Pedro on Los Olmos Creek.
Ruth Dodson wrote the first significant book on Don Pedro, in Spanish, in 1934: Don Pedrito Jaramillo, Curandero. At the encouragement of J. Frank Dobie, she collected the Don Pedrito folk tales. After collecting the tales about him for two decades, Dodson concluded “There has never been another so honored and appreciated among the Mexican-American people of South Texas as this curandero, this folk healer, Don Jaramillo. It can also be said that no one else in this part of the country, of whatever nationality, religion, economic or social standing, has done, through a lifetime, as much to try to relieve human suffering as this man did through 25 years of living in South Texas.”
The first person to waltz across Texas – okay, waltz is the wrong word (just tipping my hat to Ernest Tubb there). The first European to walk across Texas was Cabeza de Vaca. And he did it barefoot and mostly naked. Why? We shall see.
His full name was Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Bet they just called him “Al.” “Alvar” means “guardian.” Turns out that he tried to be just that for the indigenous peoples of all the Americas, North and South.
He started out as a Spanish Explorer in the New World, with an expedition of 300 people in Florida in 1528. Within a few months, Indian attacks and starvation had driven the Spaniards to the coast where they quickly built 5 crude rafts to escape into the Gulf. They hugged the coastline and made it to the Mississippi River, which pushed them out to sea where they were separated by currents and storms. Many died from drinking sea water. Many fell overboard and drowned. Cabeza de Vaca’s raft and one other, along with about 80 survivors, washed up just south of Galveston Island.
Aboriginals on the island saved them from starvation, but many of the Spaniards still died of malnutrition and illness. Many of the native Texans died, too, likely from European viruses that Cabeza de Vaca’s group carried. Within months, only he and three others of his expedition were still alive. That was out of the original 300, a 99 percent death rate. Not exactly a confidence builder.
And then the fun really began. The tribe turned hostile. They made slaves of these castaways – forced them to dig for edible roots, gather firewood and keep fires going all night to ward off the swarms of mosquitoes. They were beaten if they didn’t work hard and sometimes they were beaten just for fun. The castaways were stuck in captivity for several years, though Cabeza de Vaca himself got some relief as they allowed him to trade with other tribes on their behalf.
Despite the horrors they endured, a tiny hope sustained them – Cortés was only 1,000 miles away down in Mexico. Maybe they could reach him and their countrymen. Finally, as their tribe migrated south one summer, they seized the opportunity and escaped.
They headed southwest, following the coastal route that is today highway 35. They had no clothes and no shoes. They walked mostly naked and barefoot through increasingly brutal terrain of mesquite thickets and cactus and sharp coastal grasses. They ate pecans, at what Cabeza de Vaca called the “river of nuts,” which ironically was not the Nueces River – nueces meaning “nuts” – but the Guadalupe. They also ate prickly pear fruit, prickly pear itself, mesquite beans and roasted corn (elotes). Bet they would have given about a million gold Escudo coins for a Whataburger.
One thing they did have going for them is that they became known as shaman or healers. They were called The Children of the Sun by tribes in the region. Many in these tribes flocked to them to be healed. They did the best they could, blowing gently on their patients’ bodies and making the sign of the cross over them. Sometimes they recited rosaries. Fortunately, most people they treated were cured, or at at least reported feeling much better.
Their reputation preceded them and the tribes they encountered greeted them as holy men and demigods. This was quite a welcome reversal from their lives as slaves.
Despite the difficulties of their journey, Cabeza de Vaca still marvelled at the beauty of the coastal plains of Texas. He saw buffalo, which he called huge cows, and even tasted the meat once or twice. He declared it better than European beef. He later wrote: “All over the land there are vast and handsome pastures with good grass for cattle, and it strikes me that the soil would be very fertile were the country inhabited and improved by reasoning people.” He was a bit ethnocentric on the criticism, but it turned out he was a healer AND a prophet – predicting the great cattle ranches that would flourish in Texas 300 years later. Back in Spain, he would argue for peaceful coexistence and cooperative colonization with the American Indians. The Crown was so amazed by his idea that they imprisoned him to kill it.
Though the exact route is not known, many believe that Cabeza de Vaca and the castaways trekked southwest through present day Falfurrias and Roma where they crossed the Rio Grande and then turned Northwest. They walked all the way to the Pacific Coast. Ten years after they left Spain, they made it to Mexico City.
Cabeza de Vaca was the first European to get a good look at the magnificence of Texas and to leave behind a record of what it could become. He was Texas’ first tourist and he was Texas’ first travel writer. He gave Texas a five star review for its potential. And in terms of making the most of the land, our ancestors fulfilled his prophecy. In terms of getting along with the native Texans, well, not so much. Let’s just say, it’s complicated.
Pope Francis won’t be coming anywhere near South Texas, but his visit this week strikes close to home for many. Also, what’s the lowest price for gas you saw all weekend? And Is it time to lift the seventies era ban on US oil exports? And a 17 minute lost recording rediscovered in Texas -reminiscences of an African American slave in her own voice. Plus blowback over millions in bonuses for some state workers…those stories and much more on today’s edition of the Texas Standard
After protests and hunger strikes freedom for scores of south Texas detainees…congressman Joaquin Castro joins us. $300 million in spending cuts…with the stroke of the governor’s pen. We’ll hear what got dropped over the weekend, and what it means for the bigger picture. Using well water in the Barnett shale could be hazardous to your heath…that according to one of the most comprehensive groundwater studies in US history. We’ll have details. You can do anything if you really try. Really? We’ll hear from a Texan who went all in to learn how to dunk a basketball.