Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

The late Texan writer Molly Ivins famously quipped, “Good thing we’ve still got politics in Texas—finest form of free entertainment ever invented.” In these grim and angry days, “entertainment” is perhaps not the first word to come to mind. Insurrection, violence, Ted Cruz’s podcast—none of these brings the warm fuzzies. Current events have assumed a surreal, almost hallucinatory nature: Did Greg Abbott really seem to lament that shooting unarmed immigrants was off-limits? Did a state representative really propose a duel to big-hatted agriculture commissioner Sid Miller? Did actual neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes really meet with some of the most powerful Republican operatives in Texas?Still, we must muster the courage to stare into the abyss, to find levity in the madness. Even if We the People aren’t…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Diego Zamora was 12 years old when he opened his first business, a torta stand next to the entrance of the Coca-Cola plant in Celaya, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. Soon, Zamora moved on to selling sushi to-go, explaining, “When you’re young, sometimes you get bored and try more businesses.” At 21, Zamora opened a full-service Spanish eatery, followed by some rotisserie chicken and carnitas spots. He was insatiable, and his family supported his endeavors. “My father always tried to instill a belief in vision and confidence in [the] entrepreneurial spirit,” Zamora says. “He always told us, ‘You can do it, you can do it, you can do it.’ ”A friend convinced Zamora, who was born in Orange County, California, to operate his import-export…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Is Ken Paxton in trouble? It’s a question that anyone aware of the Texas attorney general has been asking for a full decade now. Thus far, the answer has always been, “Not yet; we’ll have to see what happens with the various crimes he’s been accused of.” For a long while, resolution has seemed far away—particularly on the matter of the first crime Paxton stood formally charged with. A refresher: In 2014, the Texas State Securities Board disciplined Paxton, then an elected member of the state Senate, for violating the Texas Securities Act by soliciting clients for investment advisers without registering as a representative of those advisers. Then, in 2015, federal charges followed, and he was arrested and indicted with two counts of securities fraud. (He…

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Amanda Edwards, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for Texas’s deep-blue Eighteenth Congressional District, rarely mentions incumbent Sheila Jackson Lee on the campaign trail. On a recent evening spent criss-crossing the sprawling district that encircles Houston like a lumpy donut, Edwards, a 42-year-old municipal-finance lawyer, delivered her stump speech at three neighborhood meetings. At the first two, held in majority-Black neighborhoods, she made no reference to her opponent beyond calling for “new leadership.” At the third, before a mostly white audience in Houston’s Rice Military neighborhood, she was a bit more direct.“This race is not about me or Congresswoman Jackson Lee,” Edwards told the several dozen Houstonians who had gathered at Messiah Lutheran Church. “It’s about you getting the results that you deserve.” She predicted…

The post Sheila Jackson Lee Has Been in Congress for Three Decades. Challenger Amanda Edwards Thinks That’s Long Enough. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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About fifty folding chairs are lined up in front of the Border Theater in downtown Mission, a town of 86,000 just west of McAllen. The row of onlookers is composed mostly of multigenerational families, from toddlers to grandparents. They all gaze north toward the parade coming down North Conway Avenue, and many hold up their hands to block the sun that pierces through this breezy January morning. R. J. Gonzalez and his wife, Eva, are waiting for the float carrying their sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Natalia Flores. Today she’s the Princess of Emerald Dove, a dignitary of the White Wing Royal Court, representing the neighboring city of Peñitas. Over the din of police sirens and tejano music pumping from speakers on the parade floats, Flores shows me a…

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