Texas Cannot Survive on Culture Wars Alone: What Should Haunt All Texans of Good Conscience, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Texas Cannot Survive on Culture Wars Alone: What Should Haunt All Texans of Good Conscience

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 8, 2026

Jorge Meave’s powerful Substack essay in The Credential, “Hitza Hitz: A Humanist Sermon,” does something urgently needed in Texas politics: it connects the dots.

He begins with the New World screwworm, confirmed in Texas on June 3, 2026—the first U.S. animal case in the current outbreak, according to the CDC. The USDA has described the screwworm as a serious pest of livestock and wildlife, and Texas officials have imposed movement restrictions across affected counties. This is not metaphor. It is living tissue, animal suffering, ranching vulnerability, and state capacity all converging in real time (see Center for Disease Control).

But Meave’s deeper point is that the screwworm is not alone. It is part of a larger story of abandonment—and Mother Earth herself is reflecting it back to us. Across Texas, the signs are everywhere: water disappearing, farmers leaving, schools closing, aquifers threatened, and the ground itself shaking under the pressures of extractive industries. Research from UT Austin and SMU has linked significant seismic activity in the Permian Basin to wastewater injection associated with oil and gas production (UT Austin News). 

Meave is right: the ground is telling us what is happening.

And now, to this already stressed landscape, we must add the rapid expansion of data centers.

Texans across the state are beginning to ask urgent questions about who benefits and who pays when massive data centers arrive requiring enormous amounts of electricity, water, land, and infrastructure. The Texas Tribune reports that Texas is experiencing an AI-driven data center boom, with at least 248 projects planned statewide. Experts warn that these facilities could intensify pressure on Texas’ already fragile water supplies, especially in arid regions and communities already facing drought, population growth, and climate stress.

A 2026 UT Austin report similarly warns that data center growth could significantly increase water demand in Texas by 2040 and calls for greater transparency, shared standards, and integrated planning. HARC Research estimates that Texas data centers already consume roughly 25 billion gallons of water per year and that this figure could rise dramatically by 2030. Meanwhile, ERCOT and energy analysts are grappling with the electricity demand created by data centers, AI technologies, fossil fuel production, and other energy-intensive industries.

This is where Meave’s essay becomes even more important. The issues facing ranchers, farmers, schoolchildren, rural communities, Black and Brown communities, immigrant families, LGBTQ+ Texans, women, teachers, and working people are not separate. They are connected by the same politics of extraction, deregulation, privatization, and neglect.

For too long, Texans have been told to see the culture wars as separate from material survival. But they are not separate. The same political forces that scapegoat immigrants, attack LGBTQ+ communities, restrict women’s autonomy, dismantle DEI, and censor honest teaching about race and history are also too often the forces that look away when aquifers are drained, schools are underfunded, rural hospitals disappear, ranchers lack veterinary access, and communities are asked to absorb the costs of corporate expansion.

This means that “regular Texans” and Black and Brown communities are increasingly in the same boat. The culture wars may target Black, Brown, immigrant, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and women’s communities first and most visibly. But the broader policy regime harms far more people than it claims to represent. It leaves rural Texans without infrastructure. It leaves working families with higher costs. It leaves communities fighting over water. It leaves schools struggling. It leaves the land exhausted.

That is the heart of Meave’s piece.

Immigrant families, LGBTQ+ Texans, women, students, teachers, ranchers, farmers, rural communities, and working families are not competing constituencies. They are all living inside the same state policy regime—one that protects wealth, extraction, and ideological theater while ordinary people are left to absorb the damage.

This is what is at stake in the coming election. Not simply party control. Not simply personalities. Not even simply corruption, though that matters, too. The deeper question is whether Texas will continue to be governed through distraction, scapegoating, deregulation, privatization, and neglect—or whether candidates for public office will be expected to see the whole state and tell the truth about what is happening.

Meave’s invocation of the Basque phrase Hitza Hitz—when you give your word, it is what you are—lands with particular force. In politics, words are cheap unless they become policy, budgets, protections, regulation, and repair.

If leaders give their word on rural Texas, they must show up for ranchers facing animal disease and veterinary deserts.

If they give their word on water, they must protect aquifers and communities before private interests drain them.

If they give their word on data centers, they must demand transparency about water use, electricity demand, tax abatements, environmental impacts, and who ultimately pays.

If they give their word on schools, they must fund them and oppose privatization efforts—urban, suburban, and rural alike.

If they give their word on Black and Brown communities, they must defend truthful curriculum, Ethnic Studies, voting rights, language rights, and the public institutions that make democracy possible.

If they give their word on the land itself, they must listen when the ground shakes.

Meave’s essay is a sermon and a warning. Texas cannot survive on culture war politics while its water disappears, its schools are weakened, its communities are divided, and its land is treated as disposable.

The ground is telling us what is happening.

So are the ranchers. So are the teachers. So are the students. So are the farmers. So are the communities watching data centers, pipelines, private water deals, and extractive industries arrive without adequate public accountability.

The question now is whether Texas politics will listen.

Cases of the New World screwworm fly infecting animals are on the rise, with the U.S. 

Department of Agriculture documenting 32 cases since June 3. More than 93% of those are 

based in Texas. U.S. Department of Agriculture

Hitza Hitz: A Humanist Sermon

Saturday, July 4, 2026

Friends,

On June 3, 2026, the New World screwworm was confirmed in a calf in Zavala County, Texas. The first case in sixty years. By now, twenty-five confirmed cases. Twenty-one Texas counties under quarantine. The animal lies infested with larvae burrowing through living flesh. A rancher has to move that animal 50 miles to find a veterinarian. Maybe. If there is one.

This is not drought. This is not abstract. This is a living animal, dying.

And I need to tell you something else about this moment. Because the screwworm is not alone.

It happens across Texas.

South Texas: a calf is infested. A rancher cannot move the animal without breaking quarantine. A veterinarian is 50 miles away, or does not exist.

West Texas: The Pecos Valley melon farmers are gone. A state agriculture official said it plainly: "There's no water. They had to leave." That is a brand. That is a name people know. It is gone.

North Texas: In the Permian Basin, nineteen earthquakes recorded in 2009. Sixteen hundred by 2017. Southern Methodist University and UT Austin confirmed this year what was happening: wastewater injection from oil production reactivates pre-existing faults. The ground fractures. Magnitudes as high as 5.4. When the state reduced injection rates in late 2021, the earthquakes declined. The science is clear. The ground is telling you what is happening.

Central Texas: Schools are closing. Local control is being stripped. Families are watching groceries climb. Traffic clogs the cities and the country roads both. This is survival.

East Texas: A hedge fund manager wants 15 billion gallons of water from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer. The property rights doctrine that says "what you pump is yours" — that rule — is being used to drain the wells of people who have lived on that land for generations. Look it up. The details will astound you.

So we have a living animal infested with larvae. We have farmers gone. We have the ground shaking. We have schools closing. We have property rights being stripped. We have water vanishing.

That is Texas. All of it. Right now.

And I want to ask you something.

There is a woman named Gina Hinojosa who was born in McAllen, Texas. She is running to be governor. The crowds chant in Spanish: No te dejes. Don't let them. Hold your ground. Fight back.

I know that the people fighting the culture wars — the ones defending immigrant families being scapegoated, defending LGBTQ+ people being attacked, defending women being stripped of bodily autonomy — I know those are survival fights. They are real. Those are real people trying to live with dignity and safety. That fight matters.

But here is what haunts me.

While that fight has been happening, other survival issues have been put on hold. And the people affected by those issues — rural Texans, working people in suburbs and small towns — have watched that happen and moved away. Thirty-two years ago, Democrats won rural and suburban Texas. Then they stopped. Not because they got lazy. But because they focused on one fight and put another one on hold.

Democrats have not won a statewide office in Texas since Ann Richards in 1994. Thirty-two years. No Democrat has cleared 45 percent in a governor's race since Richards lost to George W. Bush. They have not cracked 46 percent once in thirty-two years.

The research is clear on why. Rural Texas and suburban Texas realigned to the Republican Party starting in 1994. They did not move left. They moved right. And once they moved, they stayed.

But here is what the research also shows.

Democrats could hold both fights at once. They could defend the people being attacked in the culture wars AND address the screwworm, the water, the schools, the property rights, the ground itself.

If Hinojosa ran on this. If she said: I see you. The people you're defending in the culture wars — I see them. But I also see the rancher in South Texas who cannot move livestock because the state was not prepared. I see the farmer in Pecos who is gone because water policy failed him. I see the family in North Texas living above fracturing ground because wastewater injection was not regulated. I see Central Texas closing schools instead of funding them. I see East Texas property rights being stripped in the name of profit.

If Democrats made that their case. If they said: we will fight the culture wars and we will fight for survival. We will not pick one and abandon the other.

The research says that would work. That would move votes. That would change things.

But it would require one thing.

It would require Democrats to stop choosing between the fights. And start leading on all of them.



Quisiera escribir con amor y la pluma se me torna látigo.

I would like to write with love, but the pen turns into a whip.

An ancestor wrote that in exile, more than a century ago. Because he saw the machine crushing people and could not stay silent.

I am not in exile. But I see the same machine. The same extraction. The same silence from the people who might fight it.

I want to speak two words this morning. From the Basque Country.

Hitza Hitz.

When you give your word, it is what you are.

Not what you say. Not what you promise. What you do. What you actually do. What you fight for when the cameras are gone and the money is cut and the polls move against you.

If you give your word on screwworm ranchers, you act. You deploy. You show up.

If you give your word on water, you regulate. You mandate transparency. You protect property rights before they are stolen.

If you give your word on schools, you fund them. All of them. Even in rural Texas. Even in the Panhandle. Even in the counties that vote for the other party.

If you give your word on the ground itself, you tell the truth about what is happening to it. You do not look away.

A hitza hitz is not noise. It is substance.

Go see the ground. All of it. From Zavala County to the Pecos Valley. From the Permian Basin to Central Texas to East Texas.

See what is there. See what is not there.

Tell what you see.

And if you are a politician — if you are running to serve these people — give them your word on this: that you will see them. That you will see their screwworm ranchers, their water, their schools, their ground. That you will not look away.

Because the ground is telling you what is happening.

The only question is whether you are listening.

Quisiera escribir con amor y la pluma se me torna látigo.



“Ann Richards, Texas Governor 1991-1995. The last Democrat to win statewide.”

Public Schools Are on the Ballot: Why Gina Hinojosa’s Campaign Matters, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 8, 2026

Public Schools Are on the Ballot: Why Gina Hinojosa’s Campaign Matters

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 8, 2026

Today’s news about Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa’s
launch of “Team Texas Public Schools” could not come at a more urgent moment. Across Texas, school communities are being forc
ed to confront an unthinkable reality: neighborhood schools—beloved places where generations of children have learned, played, been fed, been loved, and been known—are being closed, consolidated, and destabilized.

Emilio, Gina, & me

It was an honor to stand with Gina today at the press conference she held at Pease Elementary this morning. CBS Austin below recorded the event so that you can view it, at least in part.

Here in Austin, the pain is immediate. Ten schools are closing. Families are grieving not simply the loss of buildings, but the loss of community, continuity, trust, and belonging. Anyone who has ever walked the halls of a neighborhood public school knows that a school is never just a school. It is where children learn their own worth. It is where teachers become lifelines. It is where parents build relationships. It is where democracy begins, one classroom, one child, one family at a time.

That is why Hinojosa’s words today matter: “It is not just you.” Austin families are not alone. This is happening across Texas. It is happening in communities large and small, urban and rural, Black, Brown, white, immigrant, working-class, and middle-class. It is happening because our public schools have been pushed to the brink by policy choices—choices that have starved districts, demoralized educators, politicized curriculum, over-tested children, and opened the door to privatization.

Let us be clear: school closures are not natural disasters. They are political outcomes.

For years, Texas leaders have told us that there is no money for public schools while finding money for vouchers, border militarization, tax giveaways, political theater, and the steady expansion of private interests into the public sphere. They have manufactured crisis and then offered privatization as the cure. 

They have treated our children’s schools as though they were expendable, especially when those schools serve communities of color, working families, emergent bilingual students, students with disabilities, and children whose parents lack the political power of wealthy donors.

This is why the fight for public education is inseparable from the fight for democracy.

Public schools are one of the last great public institutions where we still gather across difference. They belong to all of us. They are funded by all of us. They serve the common good. When they are weakened, the entire civic fabric weakens. When they are closed, communities lose anchors. When public dollars are diverted to private schools, the children left behind are our children, our neighbors, our students, our future.

Gina Hinojosa’s campaign speaks directly to this crisis because her own public life began in the struggle to save a neighborhood school. As a former Austin ISD trustee, a state legislator, a mother, and a longtime defender of public education, she understands that schools are not line items on a spreadsheet. They are living institutions. They carry history, memory, culture, language, and hope.

Her critique of vouchers as a scam resonates because vouchers do not create real choice for most families. They subsidize private options for some while draining resources from the public schools that educate the overwhelming majority of Texas children. 

They do not guarantee transportation. 

They do not guarantee admission. 

They do not guarantee services for children with disabilities. 

They do not guarantee accountability. 

What they do guarantee is that public money will flow away from public institutions at the very moment those institutions are being told to do more with less.

And the A–F accountability system, as Hinojosa rightly notes, has become part of this machinery. A state agency can design the test, control the rating system, shift the rules, and then declare schools “failing”—often without acknowledging the structural underfunding, poverty, language inequities, and policy instability that shape school outcomes. This is not accountability in any meaningful democratic sense. It is a system that too often punishes the very communities that deserve the most investment.

This is why voting matters.

We cannot mourn school closures and then stay home on Election Day. We cannot say we love teachers and then fail to defend them at the ballot box. We cannot lament what is happening to our children’s schools while allowing the same political leadership to continue dismantling them.

Getting out the vote is not a slogan. It is a responsibility. It means checking our registration, having a voting plan. It means helping our students, families, neighbors, elders, and young people understand what is at stake. It means offering rides, making calls, knocking on doors, sharing information, and refusing cynicism. It means remembering that democracy is not something we possess once and for all; it is something we practice, protect, and renew.

Texas is not a lost cause. Texas is a living struggle. And we are worthy foes against the oligarchs.

Every school closure meeting, every parent testimony, every teacher who stays late, every student who speaks up, every community member who refuses to accept austerity as destiny—these are signs that people still believe in the public good. They still believe that our children deserve better. They still believe that a multiracial, multilingual, working-family Texas has the right to govern itself.

This election must be about more than personalities. It must be about whether Texas will continue down the road of privatization, underfunding, censorship, and manufactured crisis—or whether we will choose a future rooted in public schools, public accountability, and public care.

Our children are watching. Our teachers are exhausted. Our families are hurting. Our communities are organizing.

Now we must vote like our schools depend on it—because they do.

Hinojosa launches program to fight Texas school closures, citing public school crisis

by Jahmal Kennedy | Mon, June 8, 2026 at 5:08 PM CBS Austin



Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa in Austin Monday, June 8, 2026.

As school districts across Texas, including Austin ISD, face budget crises and the threat of campus closures, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa is launching a new effort she says is aimed at helping communities fight back.

Hinojosa said Texas public schools are in dire condition.

“I will tell you that our public schools are on life support right now,” she said.

ALSO "It hurts": Austin ISD families look to keep community alive on final day for 10 campuses

Hinojosa announced a nonpartisan organizing program called Team Texas Public Schools. The program is designed to train parents, teachers and administrators to fight school closures in communities “getting hit the hardest.”

“Ten schools in this city alone in the school district are shutting down, but it is happening all over this state,” Hinojosa said.

Asked about Austin ISD’s budget process and closures, Hinojosa said, “WhatI think is important for the people of Austin to understand as they are in the trenches fighting this fight is that it is not just you.”

She also blamed Gov. Greg Abbott for the situation, saying, “And it is important for supporters of our public schools for parents and teachers to understand that Greg Abbott meant for this to happen.”

Abbott, Hinojosa’s November opponent, has focused his K-12 agenda on school vouchers in recent years. In February, Abbott celebrated what his office called “record-breaking school choice demand” after more than 100,000 families applied for vouchers.

Abbott said of vouchers: “Through this program, families will receive funds to send their children to a school that is the best fit for them.”

However, University of Texas at Austin professor Jennifer Keys Adair studies elementary and early childhood education, and says, "vouchers are definitely diverting funds from public neighborhood elementary schools."

She also added, "it seems like in this voucher conversation, oh, it will allow all families to be able to choose where they go to school. But we know that that's not what's happening," said Adair. She added more affluent families are more likely to get a voucher and said, "So in that case, you're furthering the kind of pressure on teachers and we're furthering the like lack of resources that we're offering to children who need it most."

Hinojosa said she opposes that approach.

“I don't believe in public school vouchers,” she said. Hinojosa even called it a "scam."

Austin ISD parent and former district principal Claudia Kramer Santamaria said she believes Hinojosa is the right advocate for Texas public schools.

“We understand as former principal and teacher that we needed to really have an advocate and I think that's what failed,” Santamaria said.

Hinojosa also criticized Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath for what she called a “rigged” A-F report card system, saying Morath gets to "make the [STAAR] test, rate the test, look at results, and then decide who fails and who passes," and added "And he rigs it to make it show what he wants it to show. And he wants it to show that our Texas public schools aren't strong. And he wants it to show that privatization is a better option."

Hinojosa said that if she becomes governor she would replace Morath.