It's the first day of early voting
in the Texas primaries, and there
are lots of statewide races for
consideration.
Comptroller, Lieutenant Governor,
Governor, and of course there are a
lot of eyes and ears on the
Democratic and Republican races for
U.S.
Senator, plus plenty more on the
ballots in Travis Hayes and
Williamson Counties too.
We've got a whole lot more coming up
on today's show.
The Austin Signal is a production
of KUT News, hosted by
Jerry Kehanoff.
Plus, the Austin Rays college
student who was deported while
trying to visit family last
Thanksgiving could soon be headed
back for the US.
The latest from a judge's order and
from the attorney representing the
student. And we mark the start of
the Lunar New Year by hearing what
the occasion means to some
Austinites.
We have more on those stories and a
whole lot more coming up on
today's Austin Signal.
Howdy out there, thank you for
tuning in.
This is Austin Signal.
You're listening to Community
Powered Public Radio KUT
News. I'm your host, Jerry
Guijano.
It's Tuesday, February 17th,
and it's the first day of party
primary early voting in the Austin
area and across the state of Texas.
Now, as a reminder, that means
you're gonna be choosing to vote in
either Republican or Democratic
primaries. This go around.
And statewide, there are plenty of
important races that will be on the
ballot in the next few weeks, and
again, later this fall.
Those include governor, lieutenant
governor, attorney general, and the
race to represent Texas in the U.S.
Senate. Austin State Rep James
Tallarico is running for the
Democratic nomination against House
Rep Jasmine
Crockett of Dallas.
Meanwhile, incumbent Republican
Senator John Cornyn is looking to
hold onto his seat against Attorney
General Ken Paxton and Wesley
Hunt.
Here in Travis County, four
Democrats are running for the
Precinct Four Commissioner seat,
which has been filled for more than
three decades by Margaret Gomez.
Gomez is retiring at the end of her
term. The candidates running to
replace her include Susana Ledesma
Woody, who nearly unseated Gomez in
the primary four years ago.
Ledesima Woody has served on the Del
Valle ISD School Board for 15
years.
You know, we were just like, what's
the next step? You know how can we
really push this needle?
And you know, it was just run
for the position, right?
If you really want to make a
difference, you know you have to
scare these politicians that this
seat is not theirs.
George Morales was elected and has
served as Travis County Precinct 4
constable since 2016.
He says improving transportation for
his constituents will be a big deal.
That's gonna be my main first
priority is to go in there and say
how can we fix these roads?
How can we go get access for the
people to drive through these roads
safely?
Ofelia Maldonado Zapata
has served in leadership roles in
education and religious nonprofits
for more than three decades.
She doesn't think of herself as a
politician, more so rather as
a community organizer.
Because one thing I learned
is that, you know, we
can be angry about the
injustices that we're living in
or we can do something about
it.
And Gavino Fernandez Jr.
Rounds out the candidates for the
precinct for commissioner seat.
He has a very simple priority,
keeping his precinct affordable.
No tax increases.
No Republicans are running in this
race, which means whoever wins the
primary will run unopposed in
November.
We have more about this story at
KUT.org, and we will have more
about elections in Travis Hayes
and Williamson counties at Kut.org
slash Signal, and in the show
notes for today's podcast.
Aniopis Beyoza, the college student
who was detained, then deported by
immigration authorities last
Thanksgiving, could soon be on her
way back to the U.S.
That's according to a recent court
order directing the federal
government to bring her back.
For more about this update, we are
speaking with KUT's government
accountability reporter Andrew
Weber. Andrew, thanks for being on
the show. Of course.
Thanks for having me, Jerry.
So listeners of the show and
followers of KUT know that we have
been following this case for a long
time. Catch us up, we know
that Ani-Lopez Belloza was deported
back in November, what's happened
since then?
Right. So since that deportation
in November, they've gone to
court a couple of times.
And last month, attorneys for
the federal government basically
admitted that Lopez Belloza
was wrongfully deported.
And that was kind of a remarkable
admission on the part of the federal
government.
And, that also started
a clock. The judge up in
Massachusetts said the government
had three weeks to make
up for that wrongful deportation.
And the feds, the attorneys for
the fed's basically waited until the
last minute to file anything in
court.
So last Friday,
the federal judge up in
Massachusetts issued another
order.
Boston attorney Todd Palmerlow is
Ani Lopez Beyoza's attorney.
He's also aggressively a Patriots
fan. He likens it to football.
He says attorneys for the government
didn't offer a solution to the
deportation and they basically gave
up any standing.
So that kind of forced
the judge's hand to
rule in Lippis Beos's favor.
It basically responded with
really no offer to do anything to
resolve the case.
It effectively punted the ball.
And now the judge has basically put
it in the end zone for us.
So we're very happy to see this
result and hopefully they facilitate
a return on.
Very quickly.
Okay, so let's follow the football
analogy. You get the punt right and
then you get the setup and you're
gonna start.
And then you have to do something
with the ball once you've gotten it.
So what happens next?
We know there's a deadline, but
what does Lopez Belloza's attorney,
Todd Palmerlo, expect to?
Happen next.
He's basically,
it's kind of a wait and see
approach.
They punted the ball, sure.
But the government
has to respond.
Otherwise, they'll be held in
contempt of court.
And because of that delay earlier,
the federal judge basically wants
progress reports on all of
this. So there's a two week deadline
in which they have to
basically get Ani Lopez-Pellosa
back into the US.
February 27th is the deadline.
Todd Pomerlow, the attorney said
he's trying to work to get this,
to have this process be as smooth as
possible.
Because Ani Lopez Belloza was,
you know, she was ignorant of it,
but she did not have legal status.
Neither did her mother.
They fled Honduras when
she was a kid,
and she was under the impression,
as was her mom, that she was here
legally. So, Palmerlo
is trying to find ways
to get them legal status.
Her and mom were basically
wrongfully informed that
there was nothing wrong with their
situation.
That's why they lived their lives
out in the open for so many years,
completely blindsided.
But we have a green card application
pending on behalf of Ani and her
folks.
So some things have changed and
she's been deported because we've
been looking at every stone
to unturned to see what we can do to
make it right for her because we
don't want her coming back on the
same posture that she left on.
So, Palmerlo has gotten a lot of
help from a bunch of different
attorneys who have come onto the
case while that green card
is being processed.
But whatever they do is dependent on
what the attorneys for the
federal government do.
Whatever they do, whatever they
file. And that deadline for
the sort of progress reports that I
mentioned earlier is tomorrow.
So hopefully by Thursday we'll have
a clearer sense of what they're
going to do, what the plan is
going forward. But again, the
deadline to get her back into the
country is.
On or before February 27th.
Okay, that is Andrew Weber.
He is KUT's government
accountability reporter.
You can find more of his work and
updates on this case at KUT.org,
and we will continue to bring you
those updates right here on Austin
Signal. Andrew, thank you very much.
Yes, sir. Thank you, Jerry.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson died
today at the age of 84.
Jackson was a civil rights leader, a
minister, and a politician who was
a protege of Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1984, when Jackson
was candidate for president, he
spoke with John L.
Hanson Jr.
For his show in Black America.
And even though it was more than 40
years ago, some issues like
equal protection under the law and
forced policy decisions
were as important then as they are
right now.
I would think that the present
policy of
gunboat diplomacy,
big stick diplomacy,
manifest destiny, nuclear
threat, and choosing
deployment over negotiations is
a way of progressively isolating
America from the world community
and making the world a
more dangerous place in which to
live. I think a
sense of
mutual respect
and reciprocity and
human rights and democratic
principles must be the guiding line
of that determines how we
engage in foreign policy for example
latin america's not our back door
it's next door
they are our neighbors indeed latin
american's are our good neighbors in
foundation to engage in an attempt
to over to overthrow of
the government of Nicaragua and
violated sovereignty.
Is illegal, but it's also
unethical and it is short-sighted
and it's identifying with the wrong
side of history.
After all, it was our investment
in and cooperation with Somoza
across the years that created the
tyranny there in the first place.
For our nation to embrace
the tyrannies of El Salvador
is to be identifying with wrong
side history.
Our nation loses its
credibility, its moral authority,
It's legitimacy.
Will invade and occupy a nation the
size of Grenada and then
log out the American press that the
people might not have adequate
information.
That was the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
You can hear In Black America
tonight at 10 o'clock in its regular
spot, and you can hear a special
rebroadcast of this 1984
show with Reverend Jesse Jackson
at 10.30.
That's on KUT News 90.5
on the KUT app and online
at KUT.org
10.32 tonight.
We have more Austin Signal coming up
for you after this break.
This is Austin Signal, thanks for
being with us today.
It's the start of the Lunar
New Year today and KUT's
photojournalist Patricia Lim has
some great photos from a celebration
that she recently went to up
at kut.org.
Couple years ago she met up with the
Summit Lion and Dragon dance team
based out of Summit Elementary
School in Northwest Austin.
Today we're gonna hear from students
and dance team members Chloe Pham
and Story Palifox and the team's
leader Derek Galban.
But first, here's Thai Chuan, better
known as Mr. T,
a Vietnamese dual-language
interventionist at Summit
Elementary, who coordinates the
Summit Lion and Dragon dance
team.
The Lunar New Year is
a huge festival where
people come together with
joy, with happiness and they
just pretty much want to start a
brand new new year.
Lion Dance performances happen
during Lunar New Year, and it's a
time where a lot of my family
and my friends from out of town come
in here.
A week or two before New Year's, we
usually just clean up the whole
house.
You can't clean it after, because
it's not good.
It's bad luck.
They will want to get rid of all the
bad things that happened last year
and hope for the best for the
following years.
The red envelope is the lucky
envelope in Vietnamese language.
It's called bali si.
The lions come to the stores or to
the venues, and we bless the area.
And so in return, the owners,
the audience, they can also give
donations to it.
When I was in the lion, it felt
kind of like surreal, and I felt
like I belonged there.
I grew up outside of the Asian
community. Now I actually feel
connected with them, and it
feels really good.
We are considered the pioneer
of the Vietnamese dual-language
program for the state of Texas.
We have extracurricular activities
after school.
We have to do the stands and it's
really painful on
our legs.
Push the heads.
It's got a whole stance.
Not many people like it,
but I don't mind it that much.
That's a lot of work.
When I was in sixth grade,
a few of my buddies, they were
already doing it.
So they invited me and ever since
then, I've just stuck around.
I'm not Vietnamese, but I grew up
around the culture my whole life.
Now I'm at the point where I'm just
trying to give back as much as I
can. Let's see how much it's helped
me.
Back in the day, it was majority
Vietnamese, but now it's
expanded a lot to every culture.
If you provide these cultural
opportunities, they become more
respectful of the culture and
it also gives them a chance to have
self-identity.
It helps keep tradition alive,
it helps keep culture alive, but
also educates young
people who have an ethnic
background, either from Asia or
from any other country.
I feel a lot of other people
aren't as lucky as me to be able to
do line knits and feel like really
connected to their culture.
So I think it's a really big honor
for me to do this.
Those were the voices of
Thai Chuan, aka Mr. T,
a Vietnamese dual-language
interventionist at Summit Elementary
who coordinates the Summit Lion and
Dragon dance team, as well as
students and dance team members
Chloe Pham and Story Palafox,
and dance-team leader Derek Gauban.
Mental health is essential for
all of us.
For creatives especially, mental
health can shape everything from
inspiration to burnout.
But one legendary music pioneer
and certified peer specialist is
putting a special focus on the
well-being of creatives.
He has a live podcast taping
tomorrow night at 6 p.m.
At DAWA HQ, hosted by
Jonathan Chaka Mahone, called
Clarity is Sublime, Mental
Health in a World Gone Mad.
Host Miles Bloxton spoke with
Bevis M.
Griffin about this.
You've worked as a musician for
decades.
How has that experience in the
industry shaped the way you think
about mental health today?
Oh my goodness, it touches, it
checks so many boxes when I think
back historically in the
arc of my career, because I
basically started my career at the
tender age of 18 in
Austin, Texas, back in 1972.
So when you see those little bumper
stickers that say, Keep Austin
Weird,
we're the people that were making
Austin Weird in 1972,
okay? And the reason that I say that
is because at that point in time,
drug use was fairly prolific
in the youth community
at large because no one had
exposure to the ramifications of
long-term exposure to
recreational drug use.
So I actually kind of fell into
the deep end of the pool, you know,
very naive, but
in a situation where so many of my
peers were older and more
experienced, it was just a natural
case of in Rome, do as the Romans
do, and you get in where you fit in
and you go with the flow.
So one thing led to another,
and over the course of five, six
years, I had ascended
to the point to where I was a
professional musician looking to
extend my career into a more
national platform.
And so I relocated to New York City
in 1982,
because at that time, Austin was
not established as a musical
powerhouse the way that
it has been in the last 20
years since South by Southwest,
right? At that time, Austin.
Was much more colloquial.
The quality of musicianship was very
high.
And so that really elevated
my skill set, so to speak.
But as far as taking that next step
to getting a national
record deal, so to speak, there
were no major labels in Texas.
So I had to make a
pivot to either New York, Los
Angeles, or even London, for
that matter. And so I got
an invitation to come to New York
and pursued that from that
standpoint. Having said that...
That literally coincided with the
crack epidemic by the time that
I moved to New York City.
And personally, I never had any
exposure in
engaging in crack per se.
But what I could attest
to was that the degree of
recreational drug use had
proliferated the industry to such
a point to where it was completely
normalized, right?
So I'm here to tell you,
you know, I
had a lot of exposure at a very...
Tender age.
And so having gone through all of
those experiences as
a mature adult, once
I kind of turned the page at
the age of 40, so to speak, I really
wanted to start thinking of myself
as a, mature individual,
you know, with the future, right?
And I wasn't so precarious
to be so nihilistic living
on the edge, so, to speak.
Right? And that literally set me on
my path to sobriety.
Then I just embraced that,
you I'll see you in the next one. That's
literally the platform that
I stand on today.
How did you decide to
pivot from being a musician
to then being a manager, and
now you're on the board of
Sims Foundation, which is all
about mental health and supporting
artists in the Austin area?
I literally had a moment of clarity
while I was performing in a club,
thinking like, where do you wanna be
in five years?
And the voice answered, I don't
wanna be chasing these gigs around
town, you know?
I wanna be a position where I'm
actually, you now, opening some
doors of possibility for other
people, maybe as a mentor.
I was fortunate that by the time
I made that pivot,
one of the first acts that I started
working with was the band Death
out of Detroit that had a very...
Powerful backstory and a
documentary called A Band Called
Death.
And so that kind of
put me in the arena of national
exposure.
And then from that I went on to
manage the band Living Color who
were friends of
mine from my early days in New York
City.
And then the rest is history,
as they say.
Once I'd gotten to that echelon,
things just started opening up and
rolling.
Right. And so it seems like a very
natural evolution for you.
So when did you decide to step into
the mental health space?
During the pandemic, I really
started thinking along the lines of
education, right?
I wanted to develop a
curriculum of education to kind of
bring to focus the influence of
black popular culture on
pop culture writ large.
So I started collaborating with
the School of Rock.
And along that line,
I started having some...
Deep conversations with my younger
sister, who passed away a few years
ago, but she was a very savvy
executive in
Los Angeles, and she and I
started thinking about the idea of
me getting into my autobiography,
right, in earnest.
And going, tracing back through the
stages of my early development,
I realized that I had actually been
exposed to a lot of heavy childhood
trauma, you know,
and...
I won't go into the details here,
but what I can say was that my
personal journey informed
me of how
traumatized I had been and why
I had such a proclivity
to kind of escape into
the land of, let's say, drugs
and alcohol as self-medications,
so to speak.
I also was probably
trying to
address an underlying
sense of chronic depression.
For all intents and purposes.
So that really kind of
illuminated my intrigue, right?
And I happened to meet a
lady that told me about peer support
as a means of
participating in a mental health
field that
didn't require like the same rigors
of being a qualified mental
health professional that would need
a bachelor's degree, so to speak.
The criteria was lived experience,
which I had an ocean of.
And so once I pursued
the criteria for the
certifications, that really
kind of lit my fire, right?
Because I could understand how just
expressing a sense of identity and
empathy with individuals that are
going through challenges that you
yourself have endured is
very powerful.
You know what I'm saying?
And I wanted to participate in a way
to use the platform that I had
acquired culturally,
right, to pour back
to younger.
Aspiring musicians and let them know
that, first of all, you have
everything that you need to be
successful. You don't need like an
extracurricular activity
to bolster your
talent.
As a matter of fact, those external
influences can actually
be debilitating to
your best self.
You know what I'm saying?
So I'm just saying it's
so important for me to let
young individuals know that
your Talent is a gift.
From most high.
That was music pioneer Bevis M.
Griffin speaking with host Miles
Bloxson. The live taping of the
podcast, Clarity is Sublime,
Mental Health in a World Gone Mad,
hosted by Jonathan Chaka Mahone.
It's happening tomorrow night at 6
p.m. We'll have a link to more
information at kut.org
slash signal.
That's it for today's show.
I'm your host, Jerry Quijano.
We will be back with you tomorrow.
Have a great day.