8 May 2026

Jesse Jackson Comes to Town

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On February 19, two days after the death of the reverend and civil rights icon Jesse Jackson, the Observer’s longtime contributing photographer Alan Pogue emailed me a shot of Jackson shaking hands with Molly Ivins, our onetime co-editor and unofficial patron saint.

In the moments following the photo, Pogue said, Ivins injected some of her typical humor, acting as though Jackson’s squeeze had “squashed her knuckles,” which is captured in a separate, blurrier image. “Playing it for a laugh,” Pogue wrote. “That Molly, always the card.”

(From left to right) Hazel Overby, Molly Ivins, George Bristol, and Jesse Jackson in January 1995 (Alan Pogue)

I liked the picture, but, to run it here, I needed to suss out more of the context. Pogue’s contact sheet for the shoot in question provided a handwritten date—January 27, 1995—and the name of Austin artist Mercedes Peña. By sheer luck, I had worked with Peña some 20 years later (before I became a journalist) at Casa Marianella, a shelter for immigrants in Austin.

I called Peña, who remembered the photo’s setting without hesitation. Jackson and Ivins had shaken hands in the parking lot outside what was then Peña’s condo on West Sixth Street near the capital city’s downtown. Her partner, the developer and philanthropist Ed Wendler, had assembled a gathering of liberal luminaries with a personal goal of getting Jackson involved in a project to support a school in a Haitian slum, she said. (Pogue’s contact sheet does record the word “Haiti.”) 

Others who attended told me their memories of the occasion had understandably faded, but they did help me confirm the woman on the left as Hazel Overby, a longtime Austin Democratic Party and civil rights activist—also a leader of the Texas wing of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition—who passed away in 2006 (two years after Wendler and a year before Ivins). In addition, the white man in the middle is George Bristol, then a Democratic political consultant, fundraiser, and advocate for public parks, who now lives in Fort Worth. (At press time, I have not identified the younger man partly visible over Jackson’s shoulder.)

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No one could precisely recall why the civil rights leader was in town—though surely it wasn’t just for this gathering. 

According to the Observer and Austin American-Statesman archives, Jackson was in Austin on that date to speak at the funeral of John C. White, a former Texas agriculture commissioner and Democratic national chairman who advised the reverend during the latter’s 1988 presidential bid. At a Capitol service, Jackson delivered “a thunderous 30-minute eulogy,” the Statesman reported, before speaking again over White’s casket, down the road at the Texas State Cemetery.

Curious, I decided to check the Observer’s archive for coverage of the progressive, outsider reverend’s 1980s runs for the White House. Seven years before Pogue took the photo printed here, the Observer (not yet being a nonprofit) endorsed Jackson, praising his “progressive and humane political and economic agenda,” including his proposal to force private pension funds to invest in public works and his support for “the creation of a Palestinian homeland.” 

In the same issue, we printed a speech then recently given by Ivins. “Jackson is an interesting political problem for the Democratic party. The leadership of the Democratic party is terrified of him,” she said.

“My own reading is that it’s folly for the Democratic party to try to distance itself from Jesse Jackson. … He can bring into the political process voters no one else can.”

Jackson fell short, of course, in his bid to secure the Dems’ presidential nomination, but he did place a strong second in the Texas primary.


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7 May 2026

In Diverse Southwest Houston, Longtime Incumbent Hubert Vo Forced into Runoff Row

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At an office tucked in the corner of the Universal Shopping Center in Houston’s Alief area, among Vietnamese restaurants and immigration service offices, I met Democratic state Representative Hubert Vo to talk about the runoff election for House District 149. Instead of meeting at his district office a few streets away, we met at the office from which manages the shopping center. Nearing 70, he wore a light blue suit that seemed to engulf his small frame; he stooped slightly when he stood. 

Vo leafed back and forth through a prepared memo with talking points about his record. “I continue to keep the district growing in terms of the economy. … You can see it’s had a lot of changes from many years ago,” Vo said. 

Twenty-two years ago, Vo drove from office Talmadge Heflin, a powerful Republican incumbent who had voted against anti-hate crime bills and a proposal to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a state holiday. After 20 years in office, Talmadge had become increasingly out of touch with his rapidly diversifying district while Vo made a targeted effort to court immigrant voters—and won by just 33 votes. 

At the time, he told Texas Monthly: “The Democratic party is the underdog party, and as immigrants, we are underdogs,” he says. “Sometimes when Vietnamese people achieve success here in the U.S., they forget how hard the road was to get here. We need to remember where we came from.” 

HD 149 is anchored in southwest Houston and also spans most of Alief along with portions of West Houston and Katy. It’s become one of the most internationally diverse districts in Texas: 44 percent of residents are foreign-born. Hispanics account for nearly 40 percent of the population. Black residents—both African Americans and immigrants—make up more than a quarter of the district. About one in six are Asian, and most are of the Vietnamese community. Today, just 14 percent of the district is white. Nearly one in five residents lives below the poverty line.

Vo’s own story of fleeing the fall of South Vietnam to the Communists, finding refuge in Houston, and then working his way up to become a successful business owner, resonated with the district’s heavily immigrant populace. After a few years of working in local restaurants and shops, he got into the computer wholesale business, became a millionaire, and bought up several McDonald’s franchises. He also owns some commercial and residential properties (where he’s been accused of being a slumlord in the past because of subpar health and building standards). 

These days, his critics say it’s Vo who’s out of touch with the district. After running unopposed in the Democratic primary for most of his 20 years in office, this cycle he faced three challengers: college professor Mink Jawandor, David Romero, a residential organizer in the district’s northern area, and Darlene Breaux, a former educator and activist who’s been a board member of Alief ISD since 2017. Breaux—with endorsements from the Texas AFL-CIO, The Houston LGBTQ+ Caucus, and a handful of local elected officials—bested Vo by just 9 votes, forcing a runoff contest, which is often a fatal outcome for legislative incumbents in Texas. 

Vo’s signature contribution to the community hailed from 2007 when he passed state legislation to create the International Management District, a business improvement district that collects taxes to finance security and infrastructure upgrades, credited with helping the area’s bustling restaurants, cafes, and shops. “It is growing economically, and also crime is way down,” Vo said. 

But the Houston Chronicle editorial board, which endorsed Breaux, wrote that Vo has “struggled to add to that accomplishment” of the International Management District and that “his wins in the Legislature could be called modest at best.” In 2021, Texas Monthly’s “The Best and Worst Legislators” feature designated Vo as “furniture”—a title reserved for the most inconsequential members of the Lege. The magazine skewered the passage of his one resolution to make April 21 “McDonald’s Virtual Legislative Day.” Two years before that, Vo had passed a resolution establishing a “Salad Day” and a day to “commend all Texas McDonald’s owners/operators for their role in furthering the economic vitality of the Lone Star State.”

When I asked about his recent legislative record, Vo read from his prepared memo, repeating talking points about bills he passed this last legislative session, including two laws that tighten access to unemployment benefits. 

Vo’s primary opponents told the Observer they felt that Vo was neglecting the district beyond the Vietnamese community in Alief. 

In 2023, state redistricting added an area north of Interstate 10 to House District 149 where Romero lives. He had decided to run in the Democratic primary this year “because we need a representative, somebody that actually represents our whole district, and not just the Alief side.” He formed the One Creek West neighborhood organization to represent residential communities north of I-10 in the district. 

Romero said simply getting sidewalks built in front of schools and homes has been an issue. He told the Observer he hasn’t been able to engage Vo in their community’s problems. “We work with elected officials, our police department, our constable, businesses, to keep our area clean and safe, working on flooding mitigation, things like that. Those are things that I believe he [Vo] should be doing. But every time we try to schedule something with him, there’s no response,” Romero said. 

Mink Jawandor ran for similar reasons. He came as a refugee from Sierra Leone 30 years ago to the Alief area and now teaches government at Houston City College. “Only Asiatown is developing, “Jawandor said.” “The other parts of the communities are not developed.” 

Both Romero and Jawandor are supporting Breaux. 

As a school board member who’s served as president of the body since 2023, Breaux said she helped navigate Alief ISD through difficult times, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the budget crisis caused by Governor Greg Abbott withholding state education funding increase in 2023. She says she’s also helped pass more than $520 million in bond projects for improvements for the district. 

As she told me over coffee at a Starbucks on the outskirts of Alief, Breaux said the biggest concerns in the district are for safety, workforce training, and healthcare. While she didn’t concretely describe what priorities she would pursue in the state legislature, Breaux said she’s been hitting the streets, listening and speaking to people in all parts of the district. 

“I had to make sure that I’m reaching all areas of our district,” Breaux said. “I’m out in the community and talking to all the demographics, they have some real concerns. They want some representation that they could communicate with and would be out there for them.” 

It’s her background in education that will help carry her in the race, Brandon Rottinghaus, professor of political science at the University of Houston, told the Observer. “Vo has been a stalwart among the Asian American community, and that’s carried into victory for several years, but the Democratic coalition is changing,” Rottinghaus said. “She’s an education-first candidate, and that’s something that is front of mind for a lot of voters.” 

Vo said he’s counting on Vietnamese representatives and media to turn out the votes for him to beat Breaux. “The Asian community needs to turn out more,” Vo said. He said he first ran in 2004 because the Vietnamese community “was not strong enough to stand on their own by themselves,” and always had to “ask for favors to help us with this and that.” Nowadays, “The Vietnamese community is very much organized,” he said. 

But some leaders of Vo’s own community have soured on him. 

Peter Pham, the chairman of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce of Houston, which represents nearly 100 member businesses, told the Observer he’s not sure he’ll vote for Vo. Besides showing up at one of the organization’s events three years ago, Pham said Vo “never shows up; never says anything.” 

Bryan Chu, the president of the Vietnamese Community of Houston and Vicinities, a cultural and social service organization, told the Observer he’s planning to vote for the Republican candidate Dave Bennett. Chu said he stopped inviting Vo to the organization’s events since Vo stopped engaging after the first few years he got into office. Chu himself challenged Vo as the Republican candidate back in 2016 but was easily defeated. “The Vietnamese community is very sick and tired of him,” Chu said. “A lot of people wonder how he keeps getting elected. 

In response to criticism about his lack of visibility and public engagement, Vo said, “I’m always available and people know me. …Every time we have any meetings in the district, I’m there. I was there.”

And yet, despite a serious threat to his hold on elected office, he appears to be largely absent from the campaign trail. His social media accounts have made no mention of his reelection effort throughout the primary and into the runoff. Nor, his opponents say, has he shown up for any Democratic town halls or endorsement meetings. 

So is this Vo’s time to go? 

Even with the incumbent’s lethargic campaign, expectations of very low turnout makes the runoff fight difficult to gauge—just 11 percent of the district’s registered voters showed up in the primary, and even fewer are likely to show up for the late May showdown.  

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6 May 2026

The Aesthete from Archer

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The ironies that affix themselves to the life and literature of Larry McMurtry are best exemplified by the title of his autobiographical meditation on storytelling, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, wherein the eponymous German cultural critic, who warned of the dehumanizing dangers of mechanical reproduction, is imagined at the fast-food eatery beloved by Texans and responsible for the Dilly Bar.

Despite the blue jeans and cowboy boots McMurtry wore to accept his 2006 Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of Lonesome Dove did not consider himself a cowboy, and he spent the bulk of his literary life letting readers know that.

Now, David Streitfeld’s masterfully paced and carefully researched biography, Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry—out this March from Mariner—paints the picture of an artist at odds with the materials at hand, a writer whose every attempt at illustrating the reality of his region was met with misreading.

As a kid born into a cattle-ranching family in Archer City in 1936, not only did McMurtry care nothing for cows and only tolerate horses, but he was also a bookish child, terrified even of chickens, who would sneak off to read Don Quixote in solitude.

“When Larry thought about cowboys, he thought about his family,” writes Streitfeld, who goes on to note that McMurtry wrote his most celebrated work, Lonesome Dove, to understand his father, Jeff, a cowboy who came of age in a time that no longer needed cowboys.

Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry

If McMurtry’s magnum opus was an attempt at figuring out his father, it was an attempt also aimed at demystifying all that his father’s world represented.

Lonesome Dove, which was first conceived as a film script in 1972, was intended to give voice to the dispirited and displaced character of the cowboy and by extension the myth of the Old West.

“I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but, to the public at large, I had produced something closer to an idealization; instead of a poor-man’s Inferno, filled with violence, faithlessness and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone with the Wind of the West,” McMurtry wrote in the introduction to the 2000 edition of the novel.

McMurtry cushions his failure to decenter the core of the Western myth, which he identifies as the belief that cowboys are brave and free, by deciding in the same introduction that the Western myth was “essentially unassailable.”

In a kind of happy defeat, he notes: “Readers don’t want to know and can’t be made to see how difficult and destructive life in the Old West really was. Lies about the West are more important to them than truths, which is why the popularity of the pulpers—Louis L’Amour particularly—has never dimmed.”

But it was not just the “pulpers” whom McMurtry took critical shots at.

“BY NECESSITY, I INVENT.”

In his 1981 Texas Observer article “Ever a Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature,” the author, who in 1986 would try to turn Archer City into a mecca for bibliophiles by bringing his legendary Booked Up store to his hometown, attacked iconic Texas writers such as Katherine Anne Porter, Bud Shrake, Bill Brammer, and John Howard Griffin as being woefully overrated. 

As Streitfeld notes, McMurtry felt that “Texas novelists and Texas critics were stuck on the range,” despite the fact that “the people and the stories were in the cities.” The essay, modeled somewhat on a section of Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, “is a plea for taking Texas books seriously, even if the ultimate judgment on nearly all of them is negative,” Streitfeld says.

McMurtry was already known at the time for criticizing the work of famed folklorist J. Frank Dobie, who was for many the summit of Texas literary culture, in an essay provocatively called “Southwestern Literature?,” wherein he disregarded the bulk of Lone Star lit by concluding that “The material is here, and it has barely been touched.” 


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The juiciest parts of McMurtry’s willfully literary life—his trips to Boystown, the notorious red-light district in Nuevo Laredo; his collection of erotica; his penchant for emotional three-ways; his long friendship with Diane Keaton and short affair with Cybill Shepherd—all take a back seat in the new biography to the truest theme in McMurtry’s life: his unyielding faith in the truth of fiction.

In Western Star, all moments of comedy, terror, and romance are tied to aspects of the literary world.

Unrequited love takes the form of fruitless pining over his literary agent, Dorothea Oppenheimer. Adventure comes in the form of book-scouting road trips. And an absolute identity crisis arises in 1991 when McMurtry realizes, post-heart surgery, that he cannot concentrate enough to read or write.

This all works well enough, for while McMurtry’s artful articulation of small-town stagnation in The Last Picture Show as well as the sociopathic sensibilities of ranch life in Horseman, Pass By were easily usurped into cinema, where nuance was blunted, the complicated compromise McMurtry suffered in selling Texans what they wanted was always addressed in his fiction.

In his picaresque 1970 masterpiece Moving On, a character named Charlie Rawlins, who sells much-sought-after relics from a Texas now passed, confesses to dealing in fraud: “You know there’s six thousand antique stores in Texas alone, not to mention Arkansas and Louisiana? Where you gonna find that many kerosene lamps and wagon wheels? I tried to buy some rusty old branding irons from a man the other day and the son of a bitch wanted five dollars a piece. … I can make ’em for two and a half, already rusted.”

The in-joke regarding the manufacturing of myth is as postmodern as anything Pynchon might have penned in V. or the Crying of Lot 49. 

An unimpeachable stylist, McMurtry ventured further into mythmaking himself when he tried his hand at nonfiction. According to Streitfeld, all the quotes in a 1964 Texas travel piece for Holiday magazine were invented, and it’s unclear if McMurtry even made the drive he describes. 

“I have this compulsion to fictionalize,” McMurtry confessed in a 1976 Dallas Morning News article. “And I don’t make a good journalist, either. I just can’t stick to the facts. By necessity, I invent.” 

Corralling a talent that was extraordinary to the point of coming off as casual, refusing to be reined in by the rude reality of its surroundings, is a feat. The character of Larry McMurtry as depicted in Western Star sets a stylish standard for serious Texas writers while offering an aspirational example of how all artists can aesthetically observe their surroundings without ever being bound by the strictures of their state.

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5 May 2026

‘McCarthyism with a Texas Accent’

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Three years ago, at the outset of the 88th session of the Texas Legislature, Salman Bhojani placed his hand atop a 19th-century Quran in the state House chamber and became one of the first two Muslims ever sworn in to craft Texas laws.

The then-42-year-old lawyer, who was raised in Pakistan and Canada before coming to Texas at 19, entered as one of 64 Democrats in a shrinking minority. His barrier-breaking election had been a thin silver lining. In his first session, he saw plenty of red meat seared into sizzlingly reactionary statute, including a Constitution-testing anti-immigrant assault. But he also saw a coalition of rural Republicans and Democrats hold the line against Governor Greg Abbott’s private school voucher offensive.

Well, that would prove the last time. The next year, Abbott ran those rural rebels out of office, replacing them with more compliant creatures of our Christian nationalist moment. Come the 89th session, vouchers passed, and the stubbornly independent Texas House submitted to Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s machine across the rotunda. 

Bhojani and co. also bought time with a quorum break to Chicago, but Republicans muscled through a Trump-mandated gerrymander.

In the meantime, as border crossings plummeted under an asylum crackdown, the Texas GOP found itself in need of another bogeyman. As in a game of racist roulette, that Anglo-colored ball came to rest in the pocket labeled Sharia Law, likely in scare quotes and all-caps.

When he first won elected office in 2018, as a city councilman in Euless—the 60,000-person suburb sandwiched between Dallas and Fort Worth that he still calls home—Bhojani faced Islamophobia from then-state Representative Jonathan Stickland, who went out of his way in a social media post to say, “He is a Muslim.” 

Today, that looks tame compared to a GOP that has wildly fearmongered about a housing development alongside a mosque in North Texas, known as EPIC City; designated the civil rights group CAIR a terrorist organization; attempted to block Islamic schools from the voucher program; and, in the case of Railroad Commission runoff candidate Bo French, called for Bhojani—and indeed all Muslims—to be denaturalized and deported.

The Observer spoke with Bhojani in early April about rising hate, French, and jungle primaries.

TO: You’ve said that Islam is misunderstood in much of Texas. What’s the main misunderstanding you encounter?

There’s this one word that very little do people take the time to understand it, which is Sharia. This word literally means a path, a righteous path. It’s basically a moral and behavioral framework drawn from the Islamic scriptures, which guides how Muslims pray, how they fast, how they give to the poor, how they conduct their daily lives. It’s a personal religious guidance; it’s not a legal system seeking to replace U.S. Law or the court system. 

[Last legislative session,] Abbott said “I’m banning Sharia law.” Well, the bill that we’re talking about to ban Sharia law, HB 4211, has nothing to do with Sharia. All it says is you cannot buy a membership interest in a company to buy a residential real estate home. … They’re trying to target the EPIC City project, now known as The Meadow. Abbott had to waste state taxpayer dollars by launching a multi-agency campaign against this Muslim-led housing development. But I have known so many developments in North Texas that exactly mimic EPIC city, where they’re saying, here’s this 50 acres, we’ll give five acres to the mosque, and we will build homes. They’re not saying that this is only for Muslims; all they’re saying is, if you have parents that are old, that want to walk to the mosque, if you have kids that want to walk to the mosque, if you want to live close to the mosque, you can do that because Texas is a free space.

I feel that Republicans, like Bo French, have gotten much more extreme in terms of Islamophobia since you started in politics. Do you feel that?

The playbook is the same, scapegoating one community and fear-mongering to be able to get the votes that you need, especially in the Republican primary, [but] the volume has amplified significantly, you’re right. Bo French has been, like, he loves me; he just wants to post about me constantly, I mean multiple targeted social media attacks on me. And then last summer, you know, the rhetoric translated into direct real world threats against me and my family. I was doxxed by extremists, my home was doxxed, my children’s social media accounts were doxxed and exposed online, there were unmarked cars following them, and I’m not even here—I’m in Chicago, breaking quorum, fighting for the democracy that we all believe in. … It just makes me feel that the America that I immigrated to is not the America I live in today. 

If you’ll just engage me for a minute, you know McCarthyism, right? What Abbott is doing is McCarthyism with a Texas accent. So if you think about McCarthy, he didn’t need to prove that someone was a communist. The accusation itself became the evidence. Now from there, you can destroy careers, you can revoke passports, you can blacklist entire organizations. And so here Abbott starts by saying, I’m gonna designate CAIR as a terrorist organization without any evidence, without any due process, without any federal government’s agreement. But now that self-invented label is being treated as if it was a court finding. So then he builds upon the next step. He says he’ll use his designation to ban CAIR or anyone associated with it to buy land in Texas. The second step or third step is that Kelly Hancock cites Abbott’s designation to block Islamic schools from the private school voucher program. And so it’s sort of a pattern that’s happening and every brick in this wall is built on the same invented foundation.

Just to be clear about your position, do you want to see the voucher program expand going forward? 

Absolutely not. I voted against it. Republicans came to me last session and said, you’re Muslim, you should want this private school voucher program for your Muslim schools. I said, absolutely not, these are private schools. Our job as state representatives is to fully fund our public schools. We haven’t done that, so let’s not talk about adding some more. So I’m still against the private school voucher program, but once you open that floodgate, you have to treat everybody equally. 

I think it’s not just Muslims but a number of different groups that are now seeing increased hostilities. What’s the way forward? Is it just simply we’ve got to elect Democrats and beat the Republicans?

What will help is if we improve our political structure. 

I filed a bill last session that says, let’s have a jungle [nonpartisan] primary, where two Republicans can come out, maybe the center Republicans, maybe two Democrats that come out, again center Democrats. … They’re not looking at the fringe. Because then more independents are voting in those primaries, and then the two that come out go off to the general election. So we’ll stay in the middle. The pendulum needs to stay in the middle because 80 percent in the middle do not get involved in primaries. 

Another thing is, let’s have an independent commission draw districts. My district is like a Pac-Man-style district with a cutout of the entertainment district in Arlington and then tentacles going north, south, east, west, all over the place to catch more Democrats. Let’s end this gerrymandering; both sides do it, it doesn’t make it right. And then trying to have ranked-choice voting as well, so that we don’t have to spend money on runoffs. So I think these three structural changes will help our state get more in the middle and help the business owner, help the worker, help get a good education, good healthcare. We won’t be talking about the fringe.

For next session, it could be something smaller or more hyper-local, but is there anything in particular that you’re hopeful about?

I’m hopeful that the religious freedom caucus that I started gets momentum next session. And as we elect more Democrats, where it’s not my way or the highway, it’s more like, let’s come together. Because that was my first session. My first session, there was a lot of Republicans that helped me pass legislation. … And those very Republicans were unseated. My friends, my colleagues, they were unseated last time because of the private school voucher thing. And there was nobody that came to us and said we need private school vouchers except the West Texas oil giants. That’s what they funded Abbott and Republicans for, and my good friends lost. 

That’s what I feel will bring back the energy, if we get five to 12 seats in the House, we may or may not get a majority, but that will make the Republicans come to the table.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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