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Reprint from Tempest Magazine By Snehal Shingavi The events of February 13 to 19, 2021 devastated Texas, as winter storm Uri swept through the state bringing historically low temperatures and exposing deficiencies in the delivery of power and heat to households and essential services. The total devastation has yet to be calculated but it includes […]
The year began with some relief for abortion rights in Texas, when the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated any legal basis for Gov. Greg Abbott’s opportunistic ban on abortion during the first months of the pandemic as a “non-urgent medical procedure.” It was the latest and far from last maneuver in a decades long project of the Texas […]
On January 21, Ronald Llewellyn Jones premiered his documentary, “Again, Together: the Cumulative Impacts of Environmental Racism in Houston,” on Zoom to an audience of activists. The documentary focuses on the devastation brought to the Kashmere Gardens community in Houston’s Fifth Ward. The production and dumping of creosote at Union Pacific’s Englewood Railroad Yard released untold quantities […]
In January, the Department of State Health Services declared another cancer cluster in Houston’s Fifth Ward, with skyrocketing rates of leukemia and other illnesses in the area. Kashmere Gardens is a recently settled, historically African American neighborhood within Houston’s Greater Fifth Ward. Established as a freedman’s town following the Civil War, Texas Southern University-professor Robert Bullard describes the […]
At Albertsons’ locations in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, union drivers represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have been waging labor actions for basic protections. Ever since Albertsons acquired Safeway (which had also bought Randalls) It has become one of the largest and most profitable grocery store chains in the US. But that merger also allowed […]
Reprinted from Rampant Magazine. Written by Snehal Shingavi Two images capture the crisis in Texas perfectly. First, nurses at St. David’s South Austin Medical Center came to work on Thursday to this: “A notice said the water went out. The notice then listed some instructions for using the restroom, such as to not put toilet paper […]
By now, it’s obvious to just about everyone that something serious is taking place in Bessemer, Alabama. In the heart of the Deep South, a majority-Black and women workforce of about 6000 workers at an Amazon facility is marching towards unionization against all odds. After an unsuccessful attempt from Amazon to compel in-person voting during a pandemic, […]
The attacks on homelessness have been heating up in Austin in the midst of the pandemic and a breakdown in services more generally. Part of this debate has between state and municipal powers, as Governor Greg Abbott (R) has repeatedly threatened what is seen as a more tolerant Austin city leadership if the city does not […]
Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas. Harvard University Press, 2018. 387 pp. Mucho antes de que existiera el campo de concentración que se ubica hoy en McAllen, Texas, existía uno en Crystal City que albergaba familias japonesas y alemanas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Ambos centros han sido establecidos […]
Emma Tenayuca and Homer Brooks wrote “The Mexican Question in the Southwest” in 1938 as an attempt to theorize the experience of Mexican Americans for the Communist Party USA. Tenayuca and Brooks had just concluded a bitter fight in San Antonio against pecan growers, in which they had organized some 12,000 pecan shellers, largely Mexican American […]
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