Editor’s Note: Lupe Mendez, poetry editor of the Texas Observer, is author of the new book We Exist in the Whisper: Huelga School Verses (Arte Público Press, 2026)–one of the first works to tackle Houston’s 1970s huelga school movement. Mendez’s moving mélange of poetry, interviews, and journal entries describes a citywide strike, during which Mexican-American students and parents protested the district’s attempt to skirt integration by classifying them as white. Mendez calls this book an attempt to “sit with the movement.” Excerpts reprinted by permission of Arte Público Press.

Introduction

On August 31, 1970, more than 3,000 children were withdrawn from Houston Independent School District classrooms. The district’s desegregation plan, designed to comply with federal mandates, rezoned and bused Black and brown—Mexican and Mexican-American—students in ways that many Mexican families experienced not as justice, but as displacement and disregard. In response, families organized boycotts. They formed the Mexican-American Education Council (MAEC). They established Huelga Schools—strike schools—so that their children could continue learning with dignity.

Hell No, No Vamos [excerpt]

I.
The shiny yellow stage empty
at home protesting
the pairing of Chicanos and Blacks
Mothers march up and down

at home protesting
in signs “hell no, no vamos” and
Mothers march up and down
“Education Sí, Mickey Mouse Games, No” …

Loco Boundaries [excerpt]

Es imposible
leer the new school maps
El PAPEL CHICANO
made every possible effort
de traerles los mapas
en esta edición
actual photographs, en dibujos

the maps showing boundaries
of the new school zones
We had a professional
photographer, nos ayudó
at the school district offices
for hours trying to
find a way to bring you these

An engineer
accompanied our reporter to
draw the maps onto drawing
or tracing paper
so we could write in the street boundaries
Both were shocked

at the complexities of the maps …

Research Site Visit Log #2
Date: July 1, 2019
Site Type: Residential,
Address: 1146 Gazin St.

This is another house on a corner lot. There is overgrown grass
along the sidewalk around the house, and it looks abandoned
or neglected, then abandoned. There is a
“no trespassing” sign on the outside of the chain-link fence
and no breeze to speak of.
There is one wooden chair on the cement porch—
not a shotgun house, but a manufactured-siding house.
It sits on blocks. It was once a mobile home.
The grass has been recently cut. The outside is dirty—
there is a film over the house. The windows on the inside
carry ripped-up black trash bags as drapery, the water meter
cover is broken and rusted, and on the left corner
there’s a sycamore tree, tall enough for shade,
the one grace it holds. Did this place hold students as well?
Was the line of Huelga School kids out of the yard
and around the corner? Across the street are the warehouse
structures for a shipping company. There is a steady
stream of eighteen wheelers coming and going;
at least twelve have come in and out as I write this.
Did I count that right?

Interview with “Tía Belinda” Belinda Miller
Student, Resurrection Church Huelga School, High School campus

Belinda Romo (now Belinda Miller) is a current resident of San Antonio, Texas. She is one of ten kids, who at the time of the Huelga School Movement were in the 1st through 10th grades.

Belinda’s family lived in Denver Harbor, close to the Houston Ship Channel, on the Eastern side of the city. All six sisters attended a Huelga School. Belinda should have gone to Furr High School for 10th grade year, but received notification that she was re-zoned to Wheatley High School for the 1970–71 school year. Her younger sister, Laura, was the only other sister to attend Wheatley with her. Their younger sisters were assigned to McReynolds Jr. High.

Belinda said her parents were not very involved in school: “They weren’t no PTA parents.” They nevertheless were upset with their children being zoned to Wheatley instead of Furr because their girls would have to walk to get to Wheatley. They were aware of talk in the neighborhood and worried about the violent acts between Brown/Black communities. “Everybody was fighting for jobs and space.”

Belinda’s mom had heard from locals in the neighborhood that you could go to Furr and demand spots be given back. So, she called the school and was given the run-around. Then, she physically went to the school to ask about what could be done for her daughters and was told that the “spots” were given to other kids. Furr was already half white. The school was mostly a “50/50 split.” In fact, in the 1970-71 academic year, there were more white students at Furr High.

Her mother learned about the ongoing protests and knew of the Huelga School at Resurrection Church. Belinda would be a student there for six months. She remembered students took classes in the bingo hall or in the classrooms after regular Catholic school let out. She recalled there being partitions in the bingo hall to divide out the classes.

“I just remember being grateful we had some place to go,” she told me.

As we are talking, I map out the distance between Furr HS and Wheatley HS. It is 5.2 miles. I locate the house address for Belinda’s family residence.* The house sits on the “border” of Denver Harbor and 5th Ward, closer to Wheatley High School.

“It was all just a lot for us to handle,” Belinda says.

The post Inside Houston’s 1970 School Strike appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Every Thursday and Sunday evening, a dozen volunteers file into the back room of Vesper, a community space in East Austin. In the workroom-turned-library, there is a small kitchen, bright overhead lighting, and hundreds of books and magazines stacked every which way on floor-to-ceiling shelves that line the walls. Each person plucks a handwritten letter from a neat stack on the folding table in the center of the room. The letter, written by a Texas prisoner, contains a request for three books, sometimes accompanied by details about daily incarcerated life. Then they search the stocked shelves for books that fit the person’s genre or author preferences. They write a return letter, assemble the package, and pass it off to “quality control”—the lead volunteers who check and seal the package, before it gets mailed to the inmate’s prison. 

These volunteers fuel the nonprofit that is Inside Books Project, which sends around 40,000 free books per year to incarcerated men and women in correctional facilities around the state. In 1999, Dave Martinez, who had previously developed the Prisoners Literature Project in San Francisco, moved to Austin to start a Texas-based prison book project, working with a handful of other activists in the area to get the organization off the ground. 

That included Scott Odierno, the current coordinator of Inside Books Project, who’d moved to Austin from New Orleans, where he’d worked at Crescent Wrench, a now-disbanded bookstore collective with a radical bent, and joined the group in 2000. In 2009, the organization moved operations to Vesper and obtained nonprofit status in 2012. Now, Odierno, 55, is the only full-time employee and receives a small stipend for his work.

There are about 56 prison book programs in the United States, serving almost every state. Most of these are entirely volunteer-run and rely on donated books to operate. At Inside Books, the only prison book program in Texas, about 80 percent of all books are donated, but the organization buys some from secondhand retailers to bolster its inventory. The scrappy team is constantly scrambling to keep up with the never-ending demand for books from what is the largest imprisoned population in the country. The group usually works two months behind, fielding letters and fulfilling requests twice a week. It’s necessary, rewarding work that benefits everyone involved: Not only does maintaining access to books and educational materials in prison preserve the intellectual freedom of incarcerated people, but it also makes facilities safer and reduces recidivism rates. 

Almost half of all requests sent to Inside Books are for fiction—generally mass-market paperback titles by authors like Dean Koontz, Louis L’Amour, and James Patterson. Prisoners often request dictionaries, reference books, and topical works on psychology, business, and self-help. Travel books and National Geographic magazines are unsurprisingly a common request. Each requester has a goal for their reading lives: to be entertained, to better themselves, to learn, and most often, to escape from their confined reality. 

Olly Wasser, a volunteer, said the mission of the nonprofit immediately grabbed him when he started with Inside Books last year. “I just instantly fell in love with the whole place and the whole idea,” he said. Some inmates write from solitary confinement or share specifics about their lives and the moments that led to their prison sentence. Volunteers write letters back to those incarcerated in state prison explaining why they chose certain books, offering other reading recommendations, and otherwise responding to other information in the correspondence. “I think in some ways that is the real highlight in the way that it helps one reflect on one’s own life,” Wasser said. 

But despite its enormous output and impact, Inside Books Project is facing a new hurdle: In April, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), which runs the state prison system, implemented a new ban on hardcover and used books in its prisons. According to prison officials, the new restrictions are designed to curb drugs coming into prisons via the spines and binding of hardcover books and via used books soaked in narcotics like K2, a synthetic marijuana, or fentanyl. 

The full extent of the contraband problem is murky, and definitive data is hard to come by. Amanda Hernandez, a TDCJ spokesperson, told the Texas Observer that in 2025, the department logged 385 instances of books allegedly laced with narcotics. Hernandez also said that between January and April of this year, facility mail rooms scanned 25,000 packages that contained two or more books. The department recently introduced RaySecur scanning machines into facility mail rooms designed to “detect powders and liquids” on mail and books—a new technology that critics argue sometimes flags false positives. 

The roughly 140,000 people incarcerated in Texas state prisons now have two options for receiving books: They can have a loved one send a new paperback book through an approved retailer or they can check out books from their facility’s prison library, which is operated by the state’s Windham School District. Hernandez pointed out that Windham School District accepts general book donations but not for individual recipients. If an inmate has access to a tablet, they can read preloaded public domain books—those that are over 100 years old—for free. 

Eldon Ray James, a retired researcher and librarian, was incarcerated in a federal prison in Texas for five years. He received an associate degree while incarcerated and after his release obtained a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Access to books, particularly textbooks, was critical to his educational success. To James, the new TDCJ restrictions are shortsighted: “To ban books simply because they have a hardcover or they’re used is just trying to solve a problem that may exist in prison by finding the easiest target,” he said. “And the easiest target they can find is to change the rules for what books can come in.” 

Since the ban was announced, Inside Books has been stuck in an exhausting limbo. Odierno says his group has had to decline almost half of the books they would normally take as donations and been forced to donate or recycle books that are no longer accepted. Prisoners write almost daily to volunteers with concerns over how to access free books. Questions remain: How used is too used? Is a cracked spine or underlining on a few pages disqualifying? Will all mail room employees use the same set of criteria to assess books? Hernandez said “no stains and no tears” is the criteria mail room employees will be looking for, but she was unsure about underlining or highlighting in books. 

At a recent board meeting, Odierno urged TDCJ to reconsider the ban and has repeatedly expressed concerns that being unable to send certain types of books will severely limit what Inside Books can provide for free. TDCJ has also moved to implement an online portal that would require volunteers to input the information of every inmate and every book in each package. “We send about 250 packages every week, and having to enter everything in each package is just overwhelming,” Odierno said. 

For now, Odierno said, Inside Books has a stockpile of about 5,000 books that meet the new TDCJ criteria, though he’s not certain how long that will last. “In a year, we might wind up having to purchase a lot more books,” Odierno said. 

Limiting accepted book formats adds another layer of difficulty to what is already a challenging process. The need for free, accessible books in Texas prisons is clear from the overwhelming amount of requests the organization receives and the genuine appreciation for the volunteers’ work expressed by each letter writer. 

In one recent letter Wasser read, an incarcerated person wrote that while he felt he never learned anything in school, he’s now trying to educate himself through reading. “It’s a pleasure to help such a person,” Wasser said. “It really opens up worlds for people, doesn’t it?” 

Medar de la Cruz is a Pulitzer Prize winner for a visually driven story set inside Rikers Island jail using bold black-and-white images that humanize the prisoners through showing their hunger for books.

The post Throwing the Book at Books in Prison appeared first on The Texas Observer.