I am excited to announce that the Dallas Morning News just published my profile of a South Texas hero: Lionel Lopez. Here is an excerpt:

CORPUS CHRISTI – Depending on whom you ask, Lionel Lopez is either Jiminy Cricket – the “conscience of South Texas” – or else the region’s most unrelenting pest. A sienna-skinned man with broad-rimmed glasses, he wears his hair slicked back and razors his moustache straight. Sixty-six years of sun lines burrow deep into his face. When I climb into his Ford F-150 one morning, he flicks off the norteño music jangling on the radio before grinning. “Are you ready to go to Mexico, mija?”

We won’t be traveling within 145 miles of the border today, but Lionel Lopez is speaking metaphorically. He means that, in less than 20 minutes, we’ll be witnessing poverty so desperate, it will seem we had departed the United States long ago.

With Corpus Christi Bay glittering behind our backs, we ride Cesar Chávez Memorial Highway out of town. Along the way, we pass half a dozen oil and gas refineries, a futuristic forest of metal trees belching blue-gray smoke into an otherwise cloudless sky. The landscape grows increasingly rural, which – in this swath of Texas – means cotton fields, oil wells, and very little else. A retired firefighter, Lopez knows the region intimately.

“We used to ride around in the ambulances a lot, and I saw the conditions people were living in out here. I saw their shacks. I saw their dirt roads. I saw their suffering.”

Upon investigation, he learned they were residents of colonias, the unincorporated communities that began cropping up in the borderlands in the 1950s, when developers foisted off cheap plots of land with no running water, sewage systems, electricity hookups, fire hydrants or paved roads to low-income families. Such communities have not only proliferated in the 60 years since,

they’ve migrated north – to areas surrounding Corpus Christi, Austin and Houston. Some even consider Sandbranch, the historically African-American neighborhood 14 miles southeast of downtown Dallas, to be a colonia, as it lacks so many basic services. The secretary of state’s office has counted nearly 2,300 colonias housing more than 400,000 Texans….

For more, please see the Dallas Morning News Sunday, September 12 edition. You might need to sign in first, but it will just take a second. Gracias!