Nine days after Farmers Branch voters overwhelmingly approved an ordinance that would ban apartments from renting to illegal immigrants, a federal judge on Monday issued a restraining order blocking the law from taking effect on May 22. Since last August, the suburb has been consumed by protests, counter-protests, shouting matches…
We round a corner to see White Rock Lake shimmering under a crescent moon. A few fishermen sit on the docks with lanterns, smoking and waiting for the crappie to bite. Michelle Nuñez is just as patient. After leading us through oak groves and up the path that winds along…
Scriptural commands that Christians should respect the law and help strangers in their midst are the two themes driving a lobbying effort by Hispanic evangelical leaders on behalf of immigration reform measures that would both tighten the border and allow the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country…
The guys who line up at the Garland Day Labor Center usually get a day or two of work when a contractor pulls up to the curb. Sometimes a job stretches to a few weeks or, if they’re lucky, months. So when a man named Victor Varela drove up in…
When I was growing up, my mother’s chocolate bundt cake and the handmade star we put on the tree were cherished Christmas traditions. But we dreaded the inevitable Mannheim Steamroller Christmas album, which my mother played for a week straight, until we thought we’d go mad and hang ourselves with…
Amanda Salcido was standing in line clutching a package of ground beef when she saw the $100 bills. The man in front of her at the United Supermarket opened his wallet to pay for groceries, and she watched over his shoulder as he riffled through the bills, looking for a…
Slappy’s Puppet Playhouse says its shows are “outstanding family entertainment.” Phew. I was wondering where I’d take the kiddies after their purity was spoiled at the “fun for the whole family” St. Patrick’s Day Parade, in which one float glided down Greenville Avenue bearing a troupe of thong-clad strippers gyrating…
It’s probably because my mother happens to be in Vietnam right now for a conference, and also because my mother is a huge Frida Kahlo fan, but one of the paintings featured in Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women from Vietnam, reminds me of a Frida self-portrait. Nguyen Thi Chau…
On a Friday morning in early March, the tiny, three-room office of DFW International Community Alliance is abuzz with people entering and exiting and talking logistics, while in the background the phone rings constantly. Conducting the loosely managed chaos is Anne Marie Weiss-Armush, the nonprofit’s founder and executive director. The…
When he was 16, Cesar Ramirez was eating in a café in rural Guatemala when guerrillas threw a hand grenade into the restaurant in an attempt to kill the town’s mayor. Ramirez recalls running from the explosion, bleeding from shrapnel wounds to his legs, hip and arm. Two people inside…
I saw Shut Up and Sing and loved it before the Dixie Chicks won five Grammys, but the stubborn remarks by country DJs—whose hatred of the Chicks was only deepened by their recent success—made me love the film even more. The documentary chronicles the aftermath of the Chicks’ Natalie Maines’…
All those who toil in an office have come up against it: the afternoon slump. You know, when you eat one of those monstrous burritos at Chipotle and then return to your desk a walking vegetable? So what better to pull you out of it than an afternoon quickie—not that…
Adel Elkenan, an Iraqi Shiite, fled his home in 1991 after the failed Shiite and Kurdish uprisings against Saddam Hussein’s government. He spent weeks in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia before being flown to the United States and placed in Dallas by a refugee agency. Sixteen years later, after…
The grassy hills and lakeside pier of a sprawling park in Coppell have been transformed into a makeshift boot camp. It’s a windy Saturday in December, and as the bullet-gray clouds grow heavy and drop low, newly enlisted soldiers march, read maps and learn rank symbols. One group stands in…
In the summer of 2004, it seemed impossible to escape the song “Culo”—ass—by Miami rapper Pitbull: “Mami, feel me, let me see you touch your toes…tiene tremendo CULO!” Using the term in a more symbolic way is a trio of Latina artists with an exhibition called Bésame mucho. Besa mi…
Standing at the counter after an hour-long wait, Susana Mutzus couldn’t believe what she heard. She’d left Dallas at 5 a.m. with her elderly mother, and now the attendant at the Guatemalan Consulate in Houston was telling her they had to go all the way to Austin for a signature…
Ricardo Garcia plays it cool, but he’s nervous. One of the guys who just finished has a chiseled, martial-arts physique and knocked out 60 rapid-fire push-ups without breaking a sweat. “How many sit-ups do I have to do?” Garcia asks the female soldier supervising the practice test. “Fifty-three,” she says…
I wasn’t a fan of the portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the 2005 rendition of Pride and Prejudice starring Matthew Macfadyen and Keira Knightley–Darcy is supposed to be dashing, not just socially awkward, more along the lines of Colin Firth’s performance in the BBC miniseries. Maybe the cast of Garland…
I was raised in a blue state where the most popular sports are skiing and soccer, and we mocked people who meant “choppers” when they said “bikes” and lived for Monster Trucks and Nascar. But a couple years ago, I was at the IMAX theater in downtown San Francisco and…
Ella Fitzgerald won 13 Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts and in 2005, nearly a decade after her death, was inducted into Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz Hall of Fame. This week, she won another posthumous honor when her image debuted on a new 39-cent stamp. The U.S. Post…
At 19, Fernando Careaga was a recently arrived immigrant from Mexico picking cantaloupes, tomatoes and onions in the fields of California. Thirty six years later, he’s a veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol and the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, and he’s joining forces with his son to launch a…
In my efforts to figure out what exactly an aquatint is, which failed miserably, I came across a couple of interesting Picasso vignettes: As a boy, the legendary Spanish painter took lessons from his father, an art teacher who often took his son to bullfights. When he noticed his son’s…
