As Texas goes, so goes the nation – that’s the message from journalist Lawrence Wright in his 2018 book God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State. Wright, a New Yorker writer and nearly lifelong Texan, posited that Texas, not California or New York or any other state with an outsized role in the national imagination, would be the model of the future. Whether or not you agree – the state has a reputation for pride, for better and for worse – Texas is as good as any mirror to the national condition, to American fantasies and realities. Vast, diverse and frequently contradictory, it’s a state wrangling with the urban/rural divide, increasingly polarized politics, energy dependence and the fractious practice of a national border.
Wright, a longtime resident of Austin, pronounced the future of America back in 2018, when the El Paso son Beto O’Rourke’s close run for US Senate prompted a wave of analyses on just how long it would take Texas to turn blue, and the Trump administration detention of migrant children in cages prompted national outrage. Six years on, Texas remains in the vanguard of national conversations, from Beyoncé to the border. And a new HBO docuseries picks up where the book left off, with three portraits of Texas in three distinct home towns.
In the first episode, Richard Linklater, arguably the most prominent Texas film-maker, returns to Huntsville – his east Texas home town that inspired his breakout Dazed and Confused as well as subsequent films Bernie and Everybody Wants Some!! – to grapple with its sprawling prison-industrial complex. Huntsville is home to Sam Houston State University, an African immigrant community and a handful of environmental conservationists. It also supports seven prisons and is the Texas capital for state-sanctioned executions; over a quarter of the town’s residents are incarcerated.
The episode is part personal history – Linklater’s mother became an anti-death penalty activist; one stepfather was incarcerated and another worked as a prison guard; several of his high school classmates either ended up behind bars or worked for the correctional system, or both. “These are my people,” he told the Guardian. “Southerners are very leery of outsiders coming in and stereotyping them and painting them with a broad brush, making them look like hicks. I’m very sensitive to that.”
And it’s part continuation of a documentary he began filming in 2003, on the day of the scheduled execution of an inmate named Delma Banks. The 44-year-old was, like many death row inmates, a Black man convicted on flimsy evidence, whose family banked on a last-minute legal hail Mary. Banks would have been the 300th inmate executed in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment in 1976, if not for a last-minute stay issued by the supreme court. Linklater was outside the prison in Huntsville, filming his family and contemplating the level of outrage if Texas executed an innocent man.
Twenty-one years later, the answer is clear: not much. Texas has executed innocent people to little fanfare; DNA evidence has exonerated more. Linklater and I spoke on the eve of the scheduled execution of Ivan Cantu, whose murder conviction is riddled with inconsistencies and recanted testimony. “Our governor, the DA in this town, the prosecutor – they’re just making a really cruel, murderous choice,” said Linklater. “It’s just so horrific in its implications. The cruelty is the point, you know? We’re going to do it anyway. It’s kind of like lynching – we just want to put a little fear, break all norms.”
Linklater’s 89-minute episode explores not just the death penalty but the people it implicates – families of the inmates and the victims, wardens, civil rights attorneys, activists. The prism of perspectives only underscores his argument against the death penalty, as a circle of unnecessary pain in the name of toughness. “The closer you get to it, the more you see how much it costs, the toll it takes – I’m more against it than ever,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’m connected to my government right now,” he added of Cantu’s scheduled death. “This isn’t us. This can’t be.”
In his book, Wright, who appears in each episode as an interlocutor of sorts, puts the model of the American city not on Austin, the nation’s fastest-growing metro area, but Houston, the country’s third largest and most diverse city, its sprawl of largely immigrant communities owing, in part, to its infamous lack of zoning laws. The show’s second episode, The Price of Oil, interrogates the energy capital of America’s spectacular growth, its myths of unregulated industry, and the erasure of Black Texas. “Black Texans, we have been here since the beginning,” said director Alex Stapleton, who returned to her home town of Houston after years away during filming. And yet their role is largely underplayed in Texas’s official, school-taught history.
Stapleton’s family goes back over 150 years in Texas – back to its founding stories of renegade independence, so favored in cries of “remember the Alamo!” and to Juneteenth, when enslaved people in Texas were informed of their emancipation, two years after the fact. Less noted is the fact that Texas fought for independence over slavery, which had been abolished in Mexico. “It’s disturbing that there’s just generations of children that are growing up and not understanding that,” said Stapleton. “We don’t have to live in the pain every day, but we have to understand our history in order to have real community and real conversation about how to deal with the problems we have today.”
Stapleton’s episode, like Linklater’s, weaves family history with the story of Texas at large – in her case, family living in Pleasantville, one of the first master-planned, middle-class communities for Black homeowners in the US, with the tolls of environmental pollution right nextdoor. “How can we even talk about solutions without having representatives from these communities sitting at the table in a major way?” said Stapleton. Energy in Texas, from oil and gas to renewables to chemical production, is “so intertwined with politics”, she added. “We say separation of church and state, but where’s our separation of industry and state? That doesn’t really exist here.”
The final episode, La Frontera, shifts to El Paso, a US border city that’s really two – it’s sister city, Juárez, sits just over the Rio Grande; from some viewpoints, as captured by Iliana Sosa, you can’t tell where one city ends and another begins. The border is “a very misunderstood region of Texas”, said Sosa, raised in El Paso by Mexican immigrants. “It’s a feeling, it’s a region, it’s a community,” she said. “Above all, it’s a very special community that’s been able to be really resilient in spite of the stereotypes that have been imposed on it.”
The border is often framed as a specter of violence – heralded by Trump and others as a crisis, as destruction to come. Sosa understands a real crisis of violence in Mexico – “I don’t want to at all diminish the importance of what’s happened in terms of femicides and just the cartels. It’s been horrific, and it’s marked that region terribly,” she said. But she also sought to explore “in-betweenness” – “of being from here but not being from there, of growing up first-generation”. And to capture a different meaning of crisis – of fear, after the El Paso Walmart shooting targeting Latino immigrants that killed 23 people in 2019, and of identity, as families remain separated by legal status.
In one heartbreaking scene, Sosa observes #HugsNotWalls, a once-a-year, border patrol-sanctioned event in which separated families can hug their loved ones for five minutes on a float in the Rio Grande canal. “I don’t understand why we’re at the point, in this country, where an event like that needs to exist,” said Sosa of what she calls a “spectacle of human pain in lieu of any real solution”.
Any reasonable, humane solution to these crises seems, for now, politically unviable. “What continues to be true with immigration and border policy is that instead of focusing on the humanity of these families, the politics, the rhetoric, it’s very black and white,” said Sosa. “It’s very, ‘This is the way, or this is not.’ Or, ‘Let’s close down the border.’ It’s a very hard line that I think a lot of people, especially our governor, are taking, that we forget they’re also humans.”
As Texas goes, so goes the nation – for better or for worse, as the series suggests. “Whether anyone likes it or not, they should be paying attention to Texas,” said Linklater who, like Sosa and Stapleton, notes the resistance to state Republican politics in each of their towns. “There are blueprints that are being designed by people here that are fighting back,” said Stapleton. “How can you learn from us, but also how can you help us?”
God Save Texas is now available on Max in the US and will be out in the UK at a later date
