Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted with permission from How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, out from Haymarket Books this July.

The Prison-Immigration Knot

By the late 1980s, thanks to over a decade of laws criminalizing immigrants and expanding the camp system, prison and immigration detention industries were operating by their own economic logics. Even in the face of recessions, the prison industry kept growing. Immigration detention was seen by the Reagan administration as “recession-proof.” For private corporations like CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), founded in 1983, immigration de­tention was a financial lifeline. Federal contracts insulated companies from state budget crises and guaranteed steady revenue streams.

Detention was sold as both a law-and-order necessity and an economic opportunity, welding together the rac­ist politics of the drug war with the rise of private prisons. Communities hollowed out by deindustrialization wel­comed detention centers as employers of last resort. Local politicians who couldn’t secure new factories or union jobs instead competed for prisons and INS contracts. Officials in Port Isabel, Texas, for instance, saw the expansion of what was known as El Corralón, or “the big corral,” as a way to cash in on Reagan’s willingness to lock up asylum seekers.

But if Reagan set the foundation, the Clinton admin­istration built the superstructure. Clinton rode into office pledging to be tough not only on crime but also on im­migrants. Governor of Arkansas at the time of the Mariel boatlift, he was furious at the Jimmy Carter administration for detaining migrants at an Arkansas camp. The political backlash had been costly for him, and his resentment carried into his presidency. Clinton’s 1994 crime bill funneled bil­lions into prison construction and policing, while his 1996 immigration laws fundamentally reshaped the landscape of enforcement. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Pen­alty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (both of 1996) expanded the categories of deportable offenses, introduced mandatory detention for a wide range of crimes (including minor and decades-old convictions), and sharply curtailed judicial discretion. The antiterrorism law, ostensibly in response to the most home-grown of terror acts (especially the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by white nationalist Timothy McVeigh), in fact focused on purported threats coming from abroad. The law changed the detention of many migrants from discretionary to mandatory, allowing migrants to be detained for up to two years before seeing an immigration judge.

How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention

The 1996 laws, the “aggravated felony” category intro­duced in 1988, and the expansion of INS camps like Krome in Miami and Port Isabel in Texas marked the complete in­sertion of immigration detention into the American carceral state. Now, the same logic that incarcerated millions of Black Americans under mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws also ensnared migrants—justified by the same political rhetoric of danger, disorder, and deterrence. Both carceral outgrowths served the same economic interests of private prison companies and, purportedly, struggling rural econo­mies. And both entrenched a culture of disposability, where human beings were warehoused in the name of public safety. The expansion of the immigration camp system was rapid and dramatic. In 1994, there were fewer than 7,000 im­migrants in detention on any given day. By 2001, the INS was detaining an average of 19,500 noncitizens daily, with nearly 190,000 detained over the course of that fiscal year. And while the expansion was sold to localities as an economic windfall, the promise was empty. Researchers Amy Glasmeier and Tracey Farrigan compared fifty-five rural counties with prisons constructed between 1985 and 1995 to simi­lar counties without prisons. They found “little evidence of prisons fostering economic growth especially in persistently poor communities.” As the “century of the camp” began to sunset, the prison industrial complex had become a catchall political solution.

The course was set in the 1990s, but, as they did for so much else, the September 11, 2001, attacks marked another key inflection point for immigration camps. In one of the first immigration enforcement moves after the towers fell, INS Acting Deputy Commissioner Peter Michael Becraft imple­mented a new parole policy targeting Haitian asylum seek­ers: No Haitian could be paroled out of detention without direct approval from INS headquarters in Washington, even if they had proven their eligibility for asylum. As migrant justice organizer Silky Shah tells me, “Anti-Black racism is the underlying component of the rise of these anti-immi-grant systems.” 9/11 also prompted the creation of the De­partment of Homeland Security and its subagency ICE.

Many such senseless, vindictive, and downright racist policies would follow, such as the PATRIOT Act, allowing for indefinite detention, or the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which mandated ICE in­crease detention capacity by eight thousand per year from 2006 to 2010.

From the inception of his administration in 2000, George W. Bush oversaw a massive expansion of border mil­itarization, including hundreds of miles of border barriers and doubling the number of Border Patrol agents. The vilification, scapegoating, surveillance, and arrests of Muslims, in particular, presaged the open revilement cast on Haitians and other darker-skinned migrants during the Trump administra­tion. At the same time, looking at either the Clinton presi­dency before Bush or Obama’s presidency after highlights the bipartisan reliance on criminalization of migrants and on the camp. In 2009, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia introduced a clause in the DHS Appropriations Bill that the department “shall maintain a level of not less than 33,400 detention beds.” In 2012, that “bed quota,” as it be­came known, was raised to 34,000. The federal government pays out contracts for those beds—via the so-called “guaranteed minimum” clauses—whether they’re filled or not.

On the state level, Arizona, followed by both Georgia and Alabama, led the way in 2010 by trying to make unau­thorized migration not only a federal crime but also a state violation. The hypocrisy of crackdown culture continued: All three states passed harsh anti-immigrant laws at the same time they courted ICE contracts to open new detention cen­ters, meaning local jurisdictions increasingly depended on detaining the very people they wanted out.

The experience of detention in Georgia’s Irwin County highlights the local effects of that dependency. What had been a US Marshals facility in the rural county in the early 1990s had shut down. In 2004, a private company re­opened the facility to serve as an overflow lockup, detain­ing people from other counties. With the economy in Irwin struggling—a drought and a lack of migrant agricultural workers were making things worse—in 2007, the county passed a $55 million bond package to expand the prison. They were hoping to attract federal agencies in the deten­tion business and turn the prison into the county’s lifeline. It didn’t quite work. There simply wasn’t enough revenue, and by 2011, after another change in ownership, the facility was nearly a million dollars behind on its taxes. As reported in The Nation, Hazel McCranie, president of the Ocilla-Irwin Chamber of Commerce, told local officials: “You’ve got to go out and get a contract with ICE. That’s your salvation.” 

To entice ICE, the joint owners of the prison, with the support of members of Congress and former Senator Johnny Isakson, offered a deal: Instead of spending the typical $60, $90, or sometimes over $160 per day to lock a person up, ICE could cage someone in the Irwin camp for only for­ty-five dollars a day. ICE soon began transferring people from Alabama’s Etowah jail (where, as we saw in the intro­duction, Juan was locked up for almost five years) to Irwin.

In January 2011, four people locked inside the Irwin camp went on hunger strike and were sent to solitary con­finement as punishment. One detained person held in the Irwin camp, Florent Firmin Kalonji Kalala, told reporters, “We’re fed like dogs.” He added: “I just feel humiliated—that’s the feeling I have every day.”

Years later, the county’s moral and financial compro­mise deepened. In 2020, reporter José Olivares and I broke a story about Irwin that made international headlines: Besides dangerously lax protocols amid the COVID-19 pandemic, an ICE-contracted doctor who treated patients at Irwin was multiply accused of performing invasive, nonconsensual, and unnecessary gynecological surgeries. We spoke with one woman, Yuridia, who was held in the camp and went to see the doctor after suffering lower abdominal cramps. With­out proper explanation, she was soon on the operating table. It wasn’t until she was deported to Mexico that, still suffering the after-effects of the surgery, she learned she had had her uterus removed.

Once exposed, the conditions prompted international outcry, lawsuits, and a Senate investigation, while giving more fuel to people inside and out fighting to shut down the camp. In 2021, ICE announced it was closing the Irwin camp. Then, just as we’ve seen time and again with other camps that aren’t demolished or turned into something new, in 2025 the Trump administration announced its reopening. Steady source of tax revenue, reliable employer, wholesome community partner the camp is not.

Much of the camp infrastructure we see today was es­tablished in the Obama years. In 2014, as more families, mostly from Central America, fled violence and poverty and headed toward the United States, the Obama administration—following the encrusted playbook first written in the nineteenth century to try to dispel the Chinese—reverted to using detention as an attempted means of deterrence. First they reoutfitted a law enforcement training site in Artesia, New Mexico; then, they opened the 2,400-bed South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, to lock up moth­ers and their children. In 2015 I spent a week in and out of the camp in Dilley—then one of the largest detention camps in the country—frequently referred to as a “baby jail.”

Though school-age kids attended classes inside Dilley and had ready access to milk and apples—adding a thin ve­neer of humanism to the camp—the atmosphere was starkly punitive. Many of the children I met had colds or coughs. Medical attention was slow and, according to women I in­terviewed, sick kids were regularly told by medical staff sim­ply to drink water. This was the same tap water that a cook at a local drive-thru taco shop told me not to drink “cuz of the oil”—a reference to the fact that residents in and around Dilley were concerned about fracking wastewater contam­inating their groundwater. Many of the kids had trouble sleeping, and women I spoke with reported that their chil­dren were depressed and not eating. One told me that her 11-year-old boy had lost more than ten pounds since coming to Dilley. “We are creating a mental health crisis,” one attor­ney representing the moms and kids, and working to shut the place down, said. “These kids are going to have PTSD and need serious therapy.”

The same year, in 2014, the Obama administration also opened an ICE staging facility in Alexandria, Louisiana:a camp with an airport, allowing for more efficient deporta­tions. As Nora Ahmed, the director of ACLU Louisiana, ex­plained to me, the facility was “really what allowed Obama to become the deporter-in-chief.” (In the Trump era, the cruel efficiency of the Obama administration’s camp-airport infrastructure has proven incredibly useful.)

Protests, hunger strikes, shutdown campaigns—all of it pushed the Obama administration to issue cosmetic changes and scale back some of the most dehumanizing excesses of the camp system. While Dilley was finally shuttered in 2024, the following year the Trump administration announced it was reopening it. A few months later, a legal complaint de­tailed how young children held in the Dilley family camp, sometimes for months, did not have reliable access to clean drinking water, soap, or shampoo. The echoes of 2015— nearly identical human rights complaints coming out of the same camp—were clamorous. Parents and their young children reported sleep deprivation due to lights being on 24/7 and a lack of emergency medical attention for kids in acute medical distress. One 11-year-old girl wrote to her at­torneys, “Sometimes I see kids who are sad. Most of the kids don’t play because they are afraid.” One nine-year-old boy regressed so severely he could no longer control his bowel movements and had to start using diapers.

Kids who don’t play, diapers on nine-year-olds—this is Clinton, Obama, and Biden’s immigration policy legacy: building out the camp infrastructure to humiliate, starve, abuse, and lay the groundwork for their virulently anti-immigrant successors.

And yet there are ways—long established and newly dusted off, storied and hardly recognized—to push back.

It can start with simply questioning the legitimacy of the camps.

A fascinating 1993 Department of Justice report, Reso­lution of Prison Riots, mentioned Cuban migrants protesting their detention and included a section called “Breakdown of Legitimacy of Imprisoning Criteria,” which notes: “We observe that most inmates most of the time accept as legitimate the imprisonment of their fellow inmates. They may protest their own con­viction or sentence but, at the same time, be­lieve that the other inmates are guilty of crimes, deserve prison sentences, and ought not to be discharged en masse. In uncommon periods in history, however, these beliefs may be challenged. Once it is held that the criteria for imprisonment are arbitrary, it is a short step to the belief that rebellion is justified.”

In other words, if we recognize the arbitrariness of imprison­ing people because of where they are from or where they have moved, we begin to see through the illusion of the camp. We are in such an “uncommon” period now. We can see through the illusion, and we can take that short step toward rebellion against the camp.

The post Excerpt: How to Close a Camp appeared first on The Texas Observer.

When you were 8, you could control the wind. The trees would listen, waving their long branches at you. The leaves would applaud as you made your way down Marcus Street. That was when the birds called your name and the squirrels followed you.

Back then, imagining was easy. Secret hidden treehouse sanctuaries that rivaled Peter Pan and the crew. The red wagon that could take you far, far away. That was when you still carried around that white stuffed dog, a bit nappy and dingy. You took him everywhere but don’t recall his name. 

I can tie my earliest days of imagining to my time spent growing up and playing in the woods. Crowns made of the twigs from privets. Mud pies made with hose water in rusty pans, baked in old broken ovens behind the house. 

I was molded from the clay soil in Deep East Texas, in the small city of Lufkin. This region has an antebellum history shrouded in violence, mystery, and resilience—much like the ecosystem of the Big Thicket, which is arguably the most diverse in the world. 

By total population, Texas is the Blackest state in the country and home to over 500 Freedom Colonies—Black townships founded after Emancipation—because of the large plantation economy that depended on slave labor. But we are not equally distributed. East Texas, where I’m from, is the beating heart of Black Texas. It’s a place where the majority of enslaved people were concentrated, and it’s where 90 percent of cotton was grown in the state.

From very early on, the Black women around me drew the maps that guide my life’s trajectory. I have had the privilege of growing up under their watchful eyes. My earliest memories of Black womanhood were not only of my young mother, aunties, and cousins, but my great-great-grandmother, great-grandmothers, and grandmothers. 

The author with her mom in San Augustine

When I wasn’t at school or with my cousins, I was with my Ain’ B—my aunt. She was an English teacher in the Houston area at the time. When she visited her small East Texas hometown, I would eagerly jump in her car to ride along. During her college years—in the early 2000s, when I was still in elementary school—I would go with her to classes at Jarvis Christian University, an HBCU tucked away about 20 miles north of Tyler.

I would take those trips with my older cousin. When we weren’t at my aunt’s lectures, we would participate in praise dance performances with her and her Delta Sigma Theta line sisters. My aunt was the perfect picture of beauty. Clear and dark skin, high cheekbones with long straight hair, beady piercing eyes like my great-grandmother’s. She always smelled of perfume and Chi hair oil. She would play songs like “The Battle Is the Lord’s” by Yolanda Adams.

It was my Ain’ B who introduced me to the Rev. Bettie Kennedy. I remember sitting on the floor of Rev. Kennedy, whose house was located off Paul Avenue in the historic and predominantly Black Lufkin Land portion of the city, which today includes sizable Latino and white populations as well. 

It was from the Rev. Kennedy’s petite, light-skinned body sitting in a rocking chair that I would hear stories about the African masks and spears on her cluttered walls. It was the first place where I learned about cowrie shells being used as money and for religious rituals. In the early 2000s, it was at her feet that pride in my Blackness was cemented. I found the language to recall a home within myself. 

These stories of my matrilineal line have been whispered to me since childhood, coalescing and engulfing me like kudzu vines—forming along the roadsides of my own journey.

It was on Marcus Street that you remember no longer being a young girl, when you had to come into yourself. It was around the age of 8. 

That nameless stuffed dog, you gave to a real rescued hound your grandfather and stepfather brought home one night. The rescue was flea-ridden and sad, so after they washed him, you snuck into the backyard and into the doghouse. You sang to him and left your gift. The next morning, both were gone. One was sick, and the other was no longer yours to hold onto. 

I remember crying the first day of first grade. That was when I discovered there was no nap time like there’d been the year before. That was important because I wasn’t getting adequate sleep at night. Like far too many Black and brown girls, I was living with the ramifications of a broken system under capitalism.  

That year, I went to Brookhollow Elementary, in what was once a more affluent neighborhood of Lufkin. This year was memorable because it was the first time I remember being targeted by my teacher. There was a petite, blond-haired, blue-eyed girl who would pester me. One particular day, she kept putting her nails in my face and telling me to call them pretty. After I ignored her, my teacher put her hand in my face and forced me to call both her and the girl’s nails beautiful.

For me, my memory will always call me back to the Thicket.

Around this time, I began to form an opinion of myself from the lens of the outside world. My self-perception was being forcibly remolded.  

According to a 2017 report from Georgetown University, adults view Black girls as less innocent than white ones. That was true for me in that class. I got in trouble not for talking but just for being a child who was curious about the world. 

Once, my backpack fell on the floor. At the time, my family was living in a low-income housing complex that, like others, had roaches. I reached inside my backpack to grab my winter cap before we left to go  outside, and two small ones crawled out. In disgust, the teacher made me stand outside with my cap in hand upside-down, held by two fingers in case more roaches emerged. 

You were 8 when the suicidal ideation began. You would have daydreams about running your forehead into a giant rusty nail sticking out of your grandfather’s wood-chipped wall, there in the room where you spent your infant and toddler years after your mom had you young. 

You weren’t afraid of death. In fact, it was your first memory. 

When you were around 1 or 2, you swallowed a quarter from a swept-up pile your mother made in the middle of the floor. You blacked out and remember floating in a bright white light. You were weightless and had no worries. Your mother said she remembers screaming while she hit your back until the coin came up. She claims you were too young to remember. But you do.

“Survival is the greatest gift of love,” wrote Black feminist author Audre Lorde. “Sometimes, for Black mothers, it is the only gift possible, and tenderness gets lost.”

The women I grew up with are backwoods women. Women who come from a tradition of both nurturing to survive and knowing how to navigate the land with their guns and knives. 

My grandmother talks of my great-grandmother as a tough woman. She was a cigarette-smoking Aries I remember from my childhood and family photos of her on a couch, laughing with a Budweiser in hand. She made cracklin’ cornbread and held long dinner-table conversations.

(Top) The author’s grandmother on a motorcycle. (Middle- left) The author’s great-grandmother. (Middle-right) The author’s great- grandmother handled payments for sharecropping jobs. (Bottom) The author’s grandmother on a cruise (Scan from photo album)

My own mother describes her grandmother as observant. She could be seen frequently taking walks on our family land, surveying the plants closely because she knew something we didn’t. Like many Afro-Texans, the women in my family come from hunters and farmers who had an advanced understanding of the local ecology. 

My great-grandmother worked for a white family down the street as a housemaid. She began having kids when she was around 14, and she eventually had 13 children. My grandmother said her mother became a bit more discontent by the end of her life.

I can only imagine the sacrifices she had to make for her and our family’s survival.

You remember reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. You were an avid reader then, hiding from the rest of your family in backrooms. 

You were around 9. Your aunt had fed you Maya, as she usually did with books back then. In that book, you found the language for what had happened to you. You didn’t know it was bad, but you knew it wasn’t good. You had questions about your body parts. Once, your mama told you to never let anyone touch you, but you were too young to understand. All you knew then was that you found the language. 

Those nights on Marcus Street were heavy. Waking up to the yelling, your stepfather and your mother, pregnant with your youngest sister. Back then, you still believed you could fly far, far away. 

During this time, I was babysitting my siblings and cousins while our parents were away for work. My starkest memories of having to take care of others began then. When my middle sister or cousins made a mess, I was responsible for cleaning it up. When the younger kids got into trouble, it was my responsibility to get them out of it or risk being punished myself. This, researchers have also found, is another way that childhood is cut short for Black girls.

Maya’s work gave me the gift of story. But the love for storytelling had been planted already. Much of this was learned listening to my grandparents. They were and are my solace. They were where I could be in my girlhood, unbothered and protected. 

My fondest moments were spent outside with my grandfather, walking the land with his Black Mouth Cur hunting dogs and driving along backroads. My time with my grandmother was spent looking over the counter as she kneaded dough for dumplings, cleaned greens for Sunday meals, or patted hot-water cornbread into shape before frying the dough. When she wasn’t in the kitchen, she was in the garden planting tulip bulbs or mowing her lawn, which she’s still able to do. With a Budweiser in hand like her own mother, she still plays us under the table at dominoes.

She grew up as a backwoods woman, raised off-grid in nearby San Augustine along with 12 other siblings. She still shares memories of hunting blackbirds with her brothers, which they’d pluck for their parents to fry. She resisted and resented being forced to wear dresses. Instead, she wanted to hunt and roam the woods.

She met my grandfather through her brothers, who were his hunting buddies. He was a tall, dark, and handsome woodsman from Woodville. They met after they’d each had two children—she had her first at 17—and after his first wife passed. They lived on land bought and cultivated by my grandfather’s family. For Black Americans, stories like this are increasingly rare—as 90 percent of agricultural land for Black farmers has been lost since 1910, in part due to forced property sales, intimidation, and limited access to financing.

My grandmother talks begrudgingly about this time. She speaks of how my grandpa’s family despised and mistreated her. She didn’t have a job; she was a stay-at-home wife.

She later found work after my mother left the house. The independence enabled her to get a divorce, over her mother’s objections, and rent out a trailer. By happenstance, the owner of the trailer was selling the property. After some negotiation, she was able to get her own land and settle in the woods alone—an achievement in a country where Black women have long been denied ownership through discriminatory lending.

There, on her land, she could care for herself. It was a place where she would find her freedom, not subject to rules like wearing a dress. A place to be with the trees.

In fifth grade, you wrote an essay titled “Rigamortis.” It was the description of a black, gooey blob that had been following you everywhere. Sitting in your gut. She filled you with lies about yourself, and the only time you could quiet her was when you read or wrote in your journal—lying under the same trees as your ancestors.

Back then, you were beginning your ascent into your matriarchal role.

One time, when you were hanging in the garage with the men, you got a whoopin’. Your mom had told you about it before, but you just wanted to spend time with your grandfather—away from the gendered expectations. It was your mother trying to protect you from what you faced as a young girl, but she didn’t realize she was too late. 

My mom was the youngest child. As a kid, she would sometimes sneak off to steal and, in one case, crash my uncle’s motorbike. She would trudge through what were still the forests of Lufkin Land to sneak behind the nearby chip factory and take from the dumpster. She and her siblings would even go cow-tipping—a practice I scold them for today.

Much of her childhood was also spent with my grandfather. She was a daddy’s girl, which is a privilege I’ve been afforded in short supply. She remembers back-road rides down tributaries of Highway 59 as well as hunting and fishing trips.

My mother was a star basketball and volleyball player who got in trouble in practice and on the school bus for joking and talking. Once, she made the whole team have to take laps. She’s always been the funny, goofy, quick-tempered cousin. A bit calmer these days, in her late 40s, she is still as spirited and free as she was when she was younger, which I know because I saw my mother become a woman.

She was only 17 when she became pregnant with me. It was the first time she’d had sex, she would tell me when we talked about the subject, which she hadn’t discussed with her own mother. During that time, her greatest shame was walking down the hallways of her school with her belly her senior year. 

Today, Texas is home to some of the strictest abortion laws in the country. Teen births remain high, as sex education programs often rely on an abstinence-only approach. Reproductive health disparities hit Black and rural women the hardest. Oftentimes, when young parents must come into themselves, it’s the eldest children who witness and experience the ramifications of that learning. 

Early on, my mother was intentional about making sure her three girls knew about sex, even answering the questions of friends whose parents weren’t as open. 

After experiencing a torrential relationship with my birth father, she later married my stepfather. Although he made sure we kids were able to experience the fun parts of childhood, he had a temper. Some nights, my middle sister and I would stand in the doorway of our living room, hoping our crying would silence their yelling. 

During those years, my mom’s disposition was a bit rough toward me. Often, the survivors of domestic violence, physical or verbal, take some measure of their pain out on their children. As much as I love and respect my mother, and as much as we get along today, it took a toll on me, just as a similar roughness took its toll on her own mother and her grandmother before.

“I know the anger that lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit,” wrote Lorde. “It is easier to be angry than to hurt.”

Today, my mom talks about how much she loves her solitude. Seeing her take back parts of her life with no kids at home defines for me the womanhood that has now been passed through generations.

Driving on Highway 59, you know you’re home when chills come over you like a wave grabbing and settling the floating parts of your body into itself. The trees grow thicker. The air smells emptier. The familiar sounds of truck engines, busy streets, and nosy people turn into the sounds of warblers, chichi birds, crickets, and cicadas. Here, your heart doesn’t race. Your body knows where home is. You don’t want to be far, far away.

Since I was a kid, my mother told me and my sisters to leave our hometown. If we didn’t, we would be stuck. So, for a long time, I didn’t return. Just an occasional visit during the holidays or to pick up urgent mail. 

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was,” writes Toni Morrison in a 1987 essay. “Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.” 

For me, my memory will always call me back to the Thicket.

Where I’m from, backwoods women learn the truth that our lives are entangled in the ecology of the land. We are the children of maroons and Freedmen who knew which crushed plants stopped bleeding and how cobwebs in the dusty corner of a room could sanitize wounds, who opened their windows during storms to spiritually cleanse their homes and sat on porches observing the animals to foresee the incoming season.

As time moves on, we lose the language of our ancestors, but our bodies will always know the technologies of the land. And even when the names of the terrain no longer lie on our tongues, we’ll always know it by heart—even when we fly far, far away.

The post A Love Letter to the Black Woodswomen of Deep East Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.