I still remember my last high school football game on the Red Oak Hawkette drill team.
I was 17, and our dance group had spent hours rehearsing in our maroon leotards and bright white ankle boots with mini silver bolo ties on the side. We wore nude dance tights and white hats with matching maroon lipstick. Big white smiles, rosy cheeks, and fake eyelashes.
That was my favorite uniform.
I loved the way I could swing my hips side to side and feel the fringe on my legs during high kicks to rival any Dallas Cowboy’s cheerleader. The sequins and sparkles refracted the glow from the Friday night lights.
That last game of the season, our varsity boys played at the old Dallas Cowboys’ Texas Stadium in Irving. It was the first time our varsity football team had made it to playoffs in at least a decade, and it seemed like the whole of Red Oak — then population 7,000 — was in the stands. We lost the game, but those memories stayed with me.
As a Latina and a child of immigrants, I didn’t always feel like I belonged in my small, mostly white town. But in that uniform, I did.
I grew up just south of Dallas, and my parents — who were originally from Mexico and Guatemala — turned to assimilation for survival. My mom and (step) dad taught me to blend in and to embrace being Texan. Not Mexican. That was hard for a brown-skinned girl who didn’t look white passing at all.
I remember the look on my parents’ faces when I told them I was dating a Mexican kid from band class instead of a white church boy like my sister.
Now I see that they were trying their best to protect me: It was normal to see confederate flags on lifted pickups in the high school senior parking lot. At lunchtime, the kids at school self-segregated. Just last week, the Supreme Court made it legal to discriminate against people who speak Spanish or look brown.
In grade school, kids are taught that Texas rebels stood their ground at the Alamo. But not that Mexico invited Texas settlers onto their land under the promise that the colonists wouldn’t enslave people — a promise they broke. Despite the myth that Alamo defenders valiantly fought to the death (to defend the right to own slaves), historians now agree that many, including Davy Crockett, probably surrendered and were executed.
Schools and museums leave out the stories of Texans of color, including Mexicans and Indigenous people who were on this land first. They often excuse and sidestep slavery. Many of us never learned that the state was the home of multiple internment camps during World War II (one of them about 20 minutes northeast from Red Oak in Seagoville), which housed detainees of Japanese descent, as well as immigrants from Germany and Italy. And American-born civilians. (Just weeks ago, that site reopened as the largest ICE detention facility in the country’s history.)
The Texas I knew in my high school years, after we moved from Dallas to the suburbs, was a watered-down and whitewashed version of reality. It seemed quaint — far removed from the homeless shelter where we lived when I was 10 years old.
It wasn’t until I left the dome of life in Red Oak that I realized that there was more to the story of Texas.
That assimilation veil was lifted the moment I set foot in Dr. Maggie Rivas Rodriguez’s Latino Media and Policy class at the University of Texas. There, I learned our state is home to generations of Latinos who’ve molded our culture — George I. Sánchez, who helped end Texas’ segregated schools for Latinos; the Hispanic golf team that won the Texas state championship in 1957 — despite the fact that they weren’t even allowed into the local golf course; and the Chicana cheerleaders in Crystal City who were denied spots on the high school squad and helped start the Latino Civil Rights movement in 1969.
At the University of Texas at Austin, Rodriguez is a professor in journalism and media, director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and the director of the Voces Oral History Center, which is dedicated to recording, preserving and disseminating the stories of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Her class is where I learned about the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights volunteer-based organization. She also taught me about MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, which also champions civil rights.
Her class is where I learned about La Matanza, or the “The Massacre,” a brutal period of sustained violence against Mexicans in Texas from 1910 to 1920. Cattlemen, U.S. Army soldiers, and the Texas Rangers lynched hundreds Mexicans during La Matanza. Some, like migrant worker Antonio Rodríguez, were burned alive. Other mobs hanged, shot, or whipped Latino U.S. citizens who just also happened to be Mexican, The New York Times has reported.
In the Porvenir Massacre in 1918, Texas Rangers woke landowners and farmers in the middle of the night and executed 15 men and boys, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
While La Matanza isn’t taught in grade school, a group called Refusing to Forget is committed to increasing awareness about state-sanctioned violence against Latinos in Texas.
In Rodriguez’s class, I also learned that — in the face of discrimination and fear — Tejanos, Mexicans and Black people worked together in the name of freedom. Communities in the Rio Grande Valley helped enslaved east Texans escape to Mexico, which had outlawed slavery in 1837, more than 30 years before the U.S. Civil War.
I learned, too, about the Latinos who fought for civil rights when under the thumb of poll taxes, segregation, and corporal punishment for speaking Spanish in schools. I learned what it really meant to protest — and why people do it.
Learning about these hidden Texan stories cracked open a world where I saw myself not as an outsider, but as a real Texan. A Texan like Jovita Idar, the Mexican American journalist and activist from Laredo; Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who was the first Black state senator since the 1800s; Opal Lee, who fought for Juneteenth to be recognized as a federal holiday; Gov. Ann Richards and her daughter Cecile; Beyoncé and Tina Knowles.
It’s that legacy and Texas spirit that has made this past year at The Barbed Wire feel like one of the most impactful experiences in my career as a journalist.
If journalism is the first draft of history, then who and what we cover — in what context, with which words — matters more than ever. The stories that working journalists tell today will be in those same history books and museums that shaped my understanding of my home, and my place in it.
Before I helped launch our newsroom, I spent 12 years as a television journalist. I was a morning news anchor for the last five of them. Months into that job, a pandemic and the murder of George Floyd drastically changed the reality that we knew. As I saw the world shift, I had a hunger to do more and say more.
For many journalists of color like myself, it felt like we could finally talk about racism and microaggressions out loud in a way that was often only whispered in break rooms amongst ourselves.
But that was short lived. It wasn’t long before I was reminding coworkers that using the term “illegal” to describe immigrants was dehumanizing. I heard one of my TV colleagues defend photos showing border patrol agents on horses terrorizing Haitian immigrants. The same colleague went as far as to say “not everything is about race Leslie” when I challenged why we didn’t have more positive stories about people of color.
I left that newsroom, thinking I’d take a break from the news. Then Olivia, The Barbed Wire’s editor in chief, came to me with a vision of a Texas newsroom that felt akin to the spirit of professor Rodriguez’s class. Olivia spoke about elevating voices that were underrepresented and not buying into the sugar-coating of racist or sexist behavior. That’s how I knew this newsroom would be different.
Texas isn’t the monolith the rest of the country thinks it is, but it’s also not the myth we tell ourselves and our children. It’s not just platinum blonde hair, football, cowboy hats, and pickup trucks. Texas has the second largest Latino economy in the U.S. with businesses like Chasing Camilla and JZD generating thousands of dollars each year.
At The Barbed Wire, we’ve covered Rosita Fernández, who Lady Bird Johnson once called “San Antonio’s First Lady of Song.” And the Houston DJ collective Bombón, which started out of exclusion from other Houston nightclubs and was tapped as the producer for the 2026 FIFA World Cup official song. And Tashara Parker, a former fellow TV news anchor, who was instrumental in helping pass the Crown Act in Texas, which aims to ban hair discrimination from the workplace.
I edited our contributor Cat Cardena’s piece, “How Do You Celebrate a Country That Doesn’t Love You Back?” thinking about my own family members who crossed the Rio Grande to get here. One of my favorite pieces was from a Pakistani teenager growing up on the borderlands of El Paso and seeing what life has been like through her eyes after a racist man murdered 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in the name of an “invasion.” I’ve personally reported on what it’s like to be an immigrant — or a child of immigrants in Texas today.
Sometimes those stories involve trauma, but they include more than just hardship. Take, for example, the Refugee Collective’s farm in Elgin, which helps Austin-area refugees and immigrants by providing land to farm, fair wage jobs, and a sense of community. While reporting that story, I learned that Texas saw more newly arrived refugees than any other state from 2023 to 2024.
Did you know that the first-ever Mexican American Civil Rights Museum will be built in San Antonio? Or that there are a set of Latino chefs leading the state’s vegan taco revolution?
Still, it’s been a hell of a time being a Latina journalist in Texas.
In October, I shared a story about my sister who voted for Trump and then had two terrifying miscarriages. Her story resonated with many people both in the state and out. That story prompted the late Cecile Richards to make sure our publisher Jeff Rotkoff shared a message with me, “This is excellent and incredible and heartbreaking. Congratulations.” It felt like a testament to the marginal stories other outlets were not telling. Real stories about real Texans.
In November, we reported on the story of a 63-year-old San Antonio woman named Lulu Francois who set out to learn about her Mexican great-grandmother and the fight to get access to her ancestor’s burial lands.
We told the story of 197 students from Houston’s HBCU, Texas Southern University and their epic performance with Texas icon Beyoncé for Beyoncé Bowl on Christmas day.
We also reported on how maternal and infant deaths are rising because of the state’s abortion bans. We shared the stories of Texas mothers, doctors and midwives begging lawmakers to not ban modern medicine.
This past summer I told Jonatan Pech’s story. He’s an aspiring architect studying at Texas A&M University on an academic scholarship. His mom, Teresa, was taken by ICE while enroute to Jonathan’s freshman student orientation. Teresa, a Guatemalan native was living in Houston for more than 20 years, has no criminal record.
The reality is living in Texas is truly heartbreaking, but it’s also the place where communities are resisting. Texas communities are organizing not in spite of the oppression, but because of it. Texans create joy even in the midst of the tragic headlines.
And as journalists, it’s our job to tell the full story — to tell the truth about injustice and violence and success and jubilation, and everything in between.
We can’t do this work alone, we need you and this storytelling work keeps us seen.
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It’s been a hell of a time to fight against the half-truths I grew up with, and if resistance can live in Texas, it can live anywhere.