This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
I recently heard a presentation by the beloved Adán Medrano from San Antonio, a chef extraordinaire, who talks about the Indigenous roots of our food here in Texas in a presentation titled, "Food is Memory, Identity, and Community." He begins by sharing that our ancestors have been in Texas for over 15,000 years.
It is not "Tex-Mex," he insists, rather it is "Texas Mexican" cuisine. Adán has been steadfast in pushing us to recognize this truth. On April 22, 2019, his essay appeared on the front page of The New York Times: “Don’t Call It Tex-Mex.” In it, he makes clear that to call our food “Tex-Mex” is to erase the thousands of years of history and the communities that kept these traditions alive. By calling it Texas Mexican, we honor the memory and the dignity of those who came before us.
It is humbling to think about how every tortilla, every pot of beans, every roasted chile carries forward knowledge passed down through the hands and hearts of our Texas Mexican people. I remember during the pandemic an immigrant parent telling me in Spanish:
"No hay problema. Mientras haya arroz y frijoles, nadie en mi familia pasará hambre." ("No probem. As long as there's rice and beans, no one in my family will go hungry.")
"Survival skills," I thought, but also a kind of inherited wisdom—knowing that even in scarcity, there’s enough if we re-think abundance as something rooted in community rather than accumulation. It also reminded me of home when among my most favorite meals were rice, beans, a corn tortilla, and some salsa.
What stays with me most is how Mr. Medrano frames food as resistance. Every time we prepare traditional dishes, we are doing more than nourishing bodies—we are keeping alive memory, identity, and community. In a time when our histories are too often erased or misrepresented, cooking and eating together become acts of survival and affirmation.
To eat Texas Mexican food is to say: we are still here. "Aquí estamos y no nos vamos." ("Here we are and we're not going anywhere.") In fact, there is actually nowhere "to go back to" as we Texas Mexicans are always on our land.
If you’d like to dive deeper, I recommend Adán’s beautiful documentary, Truly Texas Mexican. Check out his book, too: Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes (2014).
It is a heartfelt exploration of how our food reflects our history, our Indigenous roots, and our ongoing story. It reminds us that food is never just food—it is culture, memory, and love made tangible.
This film, The Walkout, is phenomenal. It provides a quick, consumable history on inequality and school finance in Texas, while centering the courage of young Mexican American students who refused to accept an unjust status quo. It's just under 32 minutes such that it's great from community conversations and the school and college classroom.
It's awesome to see a good number of friends and familiar faces in the film.
The Walkout shines a light on a pivotal but often overlooked chapter in Texas history: the 1968 student walkout at Edgewood High School in San Antonio’s Westside. Faced with underfunded classrooms, uncertified teachers, and crumbling facilities, these students—many still in their teens—organized alongside their families and community leaders to demand better.
What they sparked was more than a one-day protest; it became a catalyst for a statewide conversation on school funding and equity that still echoes today.
Told through the voices of the original students, community elders, and historians, the film blends personal testimony, archival footage, and present-day reflections into a deeply moving narrative. We hear directly from those who lived it—about the indignities they endured, the risks they took, and the pride they felt in standing up for their education. It’s not just a history lesson—it’s a reminder of the transformative power of youth-led resistance and community solidarity.
What makes The Walkout so timely is its unflinching connection between past and present. The funding inequities the Edgewood students fought against remain a pressing issue in Texas today. Watching their story unfold, you can’t help but draw the line between 1968 and our current struggles over fair funding, equitable access, and the right to a quality education for every child.
This, despite Greg Abbott's recent passage of school vouchers (Senate Bill 2) that will siphon off dollars from public schools that will get directed toward wealthy families to cover their children's private school education.
It's shocking to learn, for example, that while Texas is the 8th largest economy in the world, it ranks 46th in the nation in per pupil funding. This is our future workforce, my friends. We need to invest in them—especially in this economy and this moment where so many of our institutions and safety nets are getting dismantled.
If you care about education, justice, or the untold stories of Mexican American activism, The Walkout is essential viewing. It is a testament to how local action can reverberate far beyond its place and time. I do like how it ends on a hopeful note that doubles as a rallying cry to keep on keepin' on in the struggle for equity in our schools—and by extension, the broader society.
Sí se puede! Yes we can!
In fact, we must!
-Angela Valenzuela
A visual on property redlining that gets to the heart of school funding inequities.
Oh my goodness! This is BIG! Congratulations to Gina Ortiz Jones, who won the race for Mayor in San Antonio. Great write-up in today's Texas Tribune. So glad to see Rosie Castro, former Mayor and Rosie's son Julian Castro and the Democratic party weighing in, beating back conservative PAC dollars. San Antonio remains a progressive, compassionate city!
Jones, who served in the Biden administration, defeated Rolando Pablos, a former Texas secretary of state, in a high-profile, bitterly partisan contest. By Andrea Drusch, San Antonio Report June 8, 202511 hours ago
San Antonio’s next mayor will be Gina Ortiz Jones, a 44-year-old West Side native who rose from John Jay High School to the top ranks of the U.S. military on an ROTC scholarship.
Jones defeated Rolando Pablos, a close ally of Texas GOP leaders, with 54% of the vote on Saturday night in a high-profile, bitterly partisan runoff.
Thanks to new, longer terms that voters approved in November, this year’s mayor and City Council winners will be the first to serve four-year terms before they must seek reelection.
The closely watched runoff came after Jones took a commanding 10-percentage-point lead in last month’s 27-candidate mayoral election, but weathered nearly $1 million in attacks from Pablos and his Republican allies.
At the Dakota East Side Ice House, a beaming Jones said she was proud of a campaign that treated people with dignity and respect.
She also said she was excited that San Antonio politics could deliver some positivity in an otherwise tumultuous news cycle.
“With everything happening around us at the federal level and at the state level, some of the most un-American things we have seen in a very, very long time, it’s very heartening to see where we are right now,” she said shortly after the early results came in.
When it became clear the results would hold, Jones returned to remark that “deep in the heart of Texas,” San Antonio voters had reminded the world that it’s a city built on “compassion.”
Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” blared over the speakers to the roughly 250 supporters celebrating with drinks on a hot evening.
At Pablos’ watch party, he said Jones’ overwhelming victory surprised him. The conservative Northside votes he was counting on to carry him didn’t wind up materializing.
“The fact is that San Antonio continues to be a blue city,” Pablos told reporters at the Drury Inn & Suites’ Old Spanish Ballroom near La Cantera. “This [race] became highly partisan, and today it showed.” An unusual race
After an overwhelmingly long ticket discouraged much voter interest in the first round, San Antonio’s mayoral race suddenly took on new significance when it came down to a runoff between Jones, a two-time Democratic congressional candidate, and Pablos, a close ally of Texas’ GOP leaders.
The two City Hall outsiders boxed out a host of candidates with more local government experience, including four sitting council members, and sent local politicos scrambling into their partisan camps for an otherwise nonpartisan race.
It also drew major interest from state and national political interests, with Republican and Democratic PACs each targeting a position that could be a springboard for a future politician from either party.
Between the candidates and their supporting outside groups, the runoff had already drawn roughly $1.7 million in spending as of May 28 — the last date covered by campaign finance reports before the election.
Both 2025 mayoral runoff campaigns and their supporting outside groups spent big on mailers, text messages and TV ads.
At a recent Jones rally on the West Side, new Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said Republicans’ willingness to sink unheard-of money into symbolic victories was enough to spur the Democratic state party to spend money on Jones’ behalf near the end of the runoff — in a city where Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans.
“These races are supposed to be nonpartisan, they are the ones making them not nonpartisan,” Scudder said of Texas Republicans. “They are the ones that are coming in and flooding money into these races … and we have to stand on the front lines of that.” Third time’s a charm
For Jones, who most recently served as Air Force Under Secretary in the Biden administration, this is the third high-profile race Democratic interests have expected her to win.
She came close in 2018 in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, losing by roughly 1,000 votes to Republican Will Hurd, then lost by a larger margin in the same district two years later to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio.
Both were multimillion-dollar, top-tier races in the battle for the U.S. House, and the losses stung so much that Jones chose to watch last month’s election results in private — even though she’d led every public poll leading up to it.
At her watch party on Saturday night, Jones was joined by the iconic local activist Rosie Castro and former Mayor Julián Castro, as well as representatives from an array of outside groups that helped her in the race: Texas Organizing Project, Vote Vets, and labor unions, to name a few.
Underscoring the growing progressive influence at City Hall, Councilmembers Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), Phyllis Viagran (D3), Edward Mungia (D4) and Teri Castillo (D5) also attended.
Another new progressive, 24-year-old Ric Galvan, was celebrating a narrow victory for District 6 on the city’s West Side.
The Democratic National Committee, Texas Democratic Party and Democratic Mayors Association all put out statements congratulating Jones.
“With her win in a heavily-Latino city, Mayor-elect Jones will continue the legacy of Mayor Nirenberg and move San Antonio forward,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. “From school boards to city councils to mayoral offices across the state, Texas voters are making their voice heard loud and clear: They want strong Democratic leaders who will fight for them.” Bucking rightward shifts
Going into the night, conservatives controlled just one seat on San Antonio’s City Council, while Republican elected officials on the whole have been nearing extinction in Bexar County.
Nevertheless, Republicans saw a big opportunity in the nonpartisan city election.
Mayors of Texas’ major urban centers have steadily become less progressive as longtime incumbents termed out, and in the November election, President Donald Trump flipped two historically blue counties in South Texas — fueling greater intrigue about Hispanic voters becoming more Republican.
Pablos and his allies sought to cast Jones as a progressive zealot, with a PAC supporting him dubbing her the “AOC of Texas” in recent days and the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association threatening that she would defund the police (something Jones has said she doesn’t plan to do).
San Antonio mayoral candidate Rolando Pablos concedes to Gina Ortiz Jones
Pablos purposefully dropped the “Ortiz” from her name nearly every time he was in front of a microphone, and ran ads accusing Jones, who is Filipina, of pretending to be Hispanic.
It was an unexpected approach from a well-known business attorney with good relationships on both sides of the aisle, and deviation from the “unity candidate” he set out to be more than a year ago when describing plans for his first political venture in San Antonio.
Pablos said Saturday that he was proud of the race he ran, even when it got ugly. The crowd at his watch party even booed Jones when her face came on the TV screen after early results were announced.
“I think that my team did a great job. I think we ran an excellent campaign,” said Pablos, who vowed to continue looking for ways to serve the community. “What we did is we just laid everything out for everybody to look at and consider.” A vision built from personal experience
Jones, whose family grew up leaning on housing vouchers and other forms of government support, crafted a campaign around protecting San Antonio’s most vulnerable residents — particularly in times of political uncertainty at the state and federal levels.
She was one of the most vocal critics of the city’s plans for a roughly $4 billion downtown development project and NBA arena for the San Antonio Spurs known as Project Marvel early in the race, saying she instead wanted to focus city resources on expanded Pre-K programs, workforce development and affordable housing.
It was a major contrast to Pablos, a former San Antonio Hispanic Chamber chair, who vowed to focus on bringing major corporations to San Antonio, and led even some left-leaning members of the business community to view her with uncertainty.
A surprising number of progressive elected officials either stayed out of the runoff entirely or publicly backed Pablos.
Jones seemed undeterred by that dynamic, saying often on the campaign trail that her own approach was rooted in personal experience with leaders who only listen to the privileged few.
She joined the military under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell more than two decades ago at Boston University, and will now be the city’s first mayor from the LGBTQ community.
“That experience [of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell] showed me the importance of when you are in leadership, always having the humility to ask, ‘Who am I not hearing from? And why am I not hearing from them?” Jones said at a recent San Antonio Report debate.
Jones pointed to San Antonio’s ongoing struggle with poverty — despite major investments over many years to try to change that reputation.
“We’ve had, I think, too many leaders listening to too small a part of our community.”
I really like what my friend and colleague, Dr. Blandina "Bambi" Cardenas said about this piece on Facebook who expresses perfectly what I think IS the most important takeaway from this piece:
"As I read this article, I am reminded that Porfirio Diaz, the 30 plus year Mexican Dictator would cover his face with cream and powder to appear less brown and more European. At the peak of his power, he could not conquer the self hate that too often comes from living in a society dependent on racial discrimination to function. Michael Jackson, at the peak of artistic adulation, still had to fight the demons that made the color of his skin a cross to bear. The horror of racial, gender or sexuality oppression is that too often the victim accepts the verdict and internalizes the distortion of all that he/she is. The only way to free oneself from that tyranny is to know your roots and thus gain strength from them. Valuing yourself does not require devaluing somebody else."
In short, we should not only love ourselves but pay attention to that rejected self, the "I" behind the "I," which is ultimately that bond that we have with Creator. This is ourselves in our fullness of which our heritage, ancestors, and bloodlines are acknowledged and reconciled into a deep, loving sense of beingness that guides our doingness, imbuing life with deep purpose to create a new and better world that is our destiny as peoples who "are still here," and always have been.
On March 5, 1731, Spanish friars essentially handed the keys to San Antonio’s missions to the Native American families who lived there. Just four days later, 56 residents from the Spanish archipelago of the Canary Islands landed in San Antonio, sent by Spain’s King Felipe the Fifth to establish the first official government in the province of Texas. And with that, thousands of years of Native American history in San Antonio began to disappear.
It was called the Acto de Posesión. The Act of Possession. It was a key moment in San Antonio’s history. Three of San Antonio missions — Espada, Concepción, and San Juan Capistrano — would be owned by the native populations who lived, loved, worked, and died on the land.
It’s a piece of history American Indians in San Antonio are trying to recover.
Though the city celebrated its tricentennial in 2018, thousands of years of history existed before Spanish soldiers and friars stepped foot in Yanaguana — the Land of Spirit Waters, as San Antonio was known to the natives.
On March 9, the Mission San Juan commemorated the Acto de Posesión with a Founder’s Day celebration, featuring cultural entertainment, traditional foods, and native vendors. But the event was more than just a commemoration. It was an effort to re-write a narrative.
The event was hosted by American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions (AIT). Karla Aguilar, the group’s development coordinator, said Native Americans have been living in the region for millennia. “San Antonio grew around these Indian pueblos which were the missions,” said Aguilar. “These Indian pueblos were comprised of nomadic tribes that had been in the region for 10,000 years.”
Aguilar, who’s also a member of the Auteca Paguame tribe of the Tāp Pīlam Coahiltecan nation, said generations of San Antonians have been shamed out of their heritage. “To this day, people would rather identify their ancestral lineage as Canary Islander rather than Native American because there’s this underlying prejudice against being Indian, or la indiada,” she said. “Everything’s been taught to us from a settler’s perspective.”
State Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla embraces her mixed background — the mestizaje — which goes back centuries in San Antonio. “The intermingling of the races was very present in my family’s narrative of who we were and why we had the high Indian cheekbones, and why our families were — as my grandmother used to say it — como los frijoles pintos. Algunos güeros, algunos morenos, algunos con pecas. Like a bunch of pinto beans. Some of us were light, some of us were dark, and some of us had freckles.”
Tafolla said the Eurocentrism present in much of Texas and San Antonio history must be shaken off in view of a larger picture, as it is a place “seeped in history, where there are bodies in this ground that were buried a thousand years ago, and there are structures in this ground that are millennia old.”
Those bodies in the ground? At the Mission San Juan, there have been two reburials of human remains, which were unearthed during a 1967 utilities dig.
Ramón Juan Vasquez is AIT’s executive director. AIT was founded to recover those Native American remains, which had been scattered in laboratories across the U.S. It took over 30 years to get most of the remains back home. Vasquez thought the struggle to recover the remains ended in 1999, when they were reburied at Mission San Juan. But it wasn’t. “(L)ast year I had to travel to UC Davis pick up 26 human remains, bring them home, reunite them with the remains that are at the Center for Archaeological Research (at the University of Texas at San Antonio),” said Vasquez. “The Texas Archaeological Research laboratory (at the University of Texas at) Austin has 11 human remains that were taken from Mission San Juan in the 1930s. SMU sent three that they had in their closets.”
The reburials at Mission San Juan are just part of the battle to rewrite a narrative. Vasquez says a larger cemetery exists where over 2 million tourists tread each year - on the grounds of the Cradle of Texas Liberty, the Alamo. 1,377 people are buried there. Their identities are recorded in the Alamo Book of Burials, which covered the years 1703 to 1885.
Vasquez asserts there needs to be a concentrated effort to acknowledge the burial ground — the campo santo — at the Alamo. He suggested arguments against the recognition comes down to racism. “(T)he reason is, as ugly as it sounds, because it’s nothing but dead Mexicans and Indians buried there,” said Vasquez. “And if it was a Catholic cemetery of Irish and German Catholics, they would have protected that cemetery a long time ago. If they thought that Davy Crockett was buried there, there would have been a fence around it a long time ago. But because it’s nothing but dead Indians and Mexicans, what else can I say? I mean, prove me wrong.”
The San Antonio Missions Cemetery Association and the Tāp Pīlam Coahiltecan nation are asking the Texas Historical Commission to designate that portion of the Alamo as a historic Texas cemetery. But it’s not a designation the Alamo Trust, a nonprofit that manages the day-to-day operations at the Alamo, wants to recognize. In a letter to the Texas Historical Commission dated January 18th of this year, the organization’s CEO Doug McDonald, writes that in the group’s opinion, “...a ‘historic cemetery,’ as defined by Texas law, does not exist on Alamo property.”
Ultimately, Vasquez wants the story of San Antonio to expand beyond that of Spanish soldiers and friars and Canary Islanders, which he acknowledges are beautiful narratives. “But I still believe that our story as a Coahuiltecan people is the greatest American story when it comes to perseverance. We’re still here.”
This is a wonderful report on how San Antonio—including great leadership like Texas SBOE Member Marisa Perez-Diaz and many others including UTSA Professor Dr. Liliana Saldaña, former Alamo College arts professor Juan Tejeda—are investing in the development of Ethnic Studies curricula that have been adopted in districts across our state.
Locally, here in Austin, we are very pleased that our Academia Cuauhtli, elementary-level, Spanish-English curriculum was useful to the development of online curriculum throughout the pandemic by our bilingual and dual language elementary school teachers throughout AISD. This is a movement, indeed!
My only amendment here is to clarify that state curriculum standards termed, "Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills" or "TEKS standards" are not a curriculum. They instead provide baseline standards upon which educators build. There's also the pedagogical or teaching component that might, for example, accord emphasis to authentic caring, being asset-based, project-based learning, teaching from a social justice lens, teaching in Spanish, translanguaging, as the case may be—that must simultaneously be addressed alongside curriculum, but which do not find their way into a statement of standards—despite our struggle and advocacy for these novel standards.
So there's always more to this craft of teaching Ethnic Studies than meets the eye, but thrilled to read about our colleagues' efforts and how they are giving fruit. Do click on the link to the story to listen to the live reporting from the Fox 29 news report.
Our legislature is in session and Rep. Christina Morales, as you can read from an earlier post (click here), filed House Bill 1504 that allows Ethnic Studies to count toward High School Graduation. Please reach out to whoever represents you to let them know that you support this bill.
Like I always say, someday, this will just be called a "good education."
SAN ANTONIO (KABB/WOAI) - Inclusive education, that's the goal of two educators from San Antonio who have pushed for the development of African American and Mexican American courses in schools across the state.
San Antonio students like Jaylea Sullivan say there's not much mention of people who look like her in school history textbooks, a topic that often comes up in class.
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"I’d be like, 'Why we don’t talk about African-Americans in this process?' All the things we probably learn about in February. We learn about Harriet Tubman and stuff because of Black History Month, but that’s about it," says the Sam Houston sophomore.
"The problem with our current curriculum standards is that it’s very white washed," says Marisa Perez-Diaz, a member of the Texas State Board of Education.
That's exactly why Perez-Diaz worked with Texas A&M San Antonio professor Dr. Lawrence Scott to develop African American and Mexican American studies courses at area schools.
The curriculum is now being taught at San Antonio ISD, Northside ISD and Southwest ISD.
It has spread to nearly 100 school districts across the state and they're pushing for it to go national.
The goal, Perez-Diaz says, is to not only create elective courses for high school students, but to integrate the curriculum into K-12 social studies classes.
"We have a diverse set of students across Texas that deserve to see themselves and see their ancestors' contributions to this country as validated, justified, acknowledged and celebrated," says Perez-Diaz.
Because of Covid, the information on the number of districts that have adopted that curriculum is not up to date but local districts like San Antonio, Judson and Northeast ISDs have committed to taking it on.
It's something Jaylea says she hopes all students of color like herself get to experience.
"I think it’s important that we learn more about ourselves because since our parents didn’t grow up with it not everybody knows everything," she says.
If you'd like to see the curriculum for the Mexican American curriculum click here.
If you'd like to see the curriculum for the African American curriculum refer to the document below.
Perez-Diaz says plans are underway to create an indigenous peoples curriculum as well as an Asian American pacific Islander course to be taught in schools.
Those are in the preliminary stages, but we'll keep you posted on when those classes may become available to your student.
When the coronavirus pandemic forced Pinch Boil House partners Sean Wen and Andrew Ho to close their downtown restaurant for months, they decided to use the extra time to check off an item on their to-do list.
They reached out to South BBQ & Kitchen owner Andrew Samia about opening a restaurant combining Southeast Asian curry with Texas BBQ, an idea they’d been contemplating for a while.
“We just never had the time to do it because we were caught up in the everyday stress and struggle of running a restaurant,” Wen said.
The trio teamed up on pop-ups to test out their idea before opening a permanent Curry Boys BBQ location at 2334 N. St. Mary’s St. last month. The building is small and the restaurant doesn’t require much staffing — it’s a low-cost set-up, Wen said.
Customers can take their meals to go or eat at picnic tables outside. While traffic at Pinch Boil House downtown is still about half of what it was before the pandemic, Curry Boys BBQ has sold out every day since opening.
“Too early to say if we’re crazy or not,” Wen said, laughing. “I’m going to count my blessings for now when I have them.”
With COVID-19 cases rising again in San Antonio and winter approaching, the restaurant might add delivery or to-go family packs.
“We built this thing with the idea that it could scale for the future,” Wen said. “Obviously, the future for food and beverage, for better or for worse, is skewed toward … ease of take-out or contact-less ordering and delivering.”
Starting a business during the coronavirus pandemic — which is ravaging the economy, throwing employees out of work and disrupting myriad industries — may seem crazy. But plenty of people are considering striking out on their own, even as hordes of businesses fold permanently.
Census data shows business applications for employee identification numbers have risen in recent months, totaling more than 3.2 million over the first three quarters compared to about 2.6 million during the same period last year. That includes independent contractors and gig-economy workers.
The number of startups that are likely to become employers — as gauged by so-called “high-propensity business applications” to register the ventures with the government — reached a record level in the third quarter. In Texas, they are up about 19 percent across the first three quarters of 2020 compared with the same stretch in 2019, seasonally-adjusted data show.
The COVID-19 recession may be one of the biggest motivators for these entrepreneurs.
Layoffs and uncertainty about future unemployment may be pushing more people to take their working lives into their own hands, whether that’s turning a side hustle into full-time work or finally fleshing out a business idea they’d been gestating for years.
“They’d always been thinking about doing their own thing, and (the pandemic) ended up being that sort of trigger point,” said Luis Martinez, director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Trinity University.
Another factor: new opportunities created by COVID-19. The virus has reshaped how people work, attend school, shop and spend their free time, and there’s money to be made with each change.
Just think of face masks, said Thomas Tunstall, research director at the Institute for Economic Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio. For many wearers, they’ve become small fashion, or personal, statements. Somebody has to meet the demand for face coverings that tell something about us to passersby.
There’s also the fact that entrepreneurs may also be able to borrow at lower rates than before — through Small Business Administration programs or micro-lenders such as San Antonio-based LiftFund — or lease space more affordably.
“We live differently than we did before the pandemic started,” Tunstall said. “The economy is essentially restructuring in response to different demand patterns.”
Test market
COVID-19 is the reason Meghan Garza and Juan Cano launched BexarAid. Their startup provides testing for the virus for individuals and businesses.
It began as a website they set up this spring to connect essential workers with people wanting to donate masks and other protective gear. But conversations with friends in health care prompted them to shift to COVID-19 testing. They wanted to provide a quick, efficient way to get tested in South Texas.
BexarAid offers drive-thru testing at a facility near the Pearl for $150, an at-home test for $200 and mass testing for businesses and organizations. Customers can set up appointments online for the polymerase chain reaction tests, which are administered by medical assistants hired by BexarAid.
The company partners with several laboratories. Results currently are delivered the next day, though they’re guaranteed within 48 hours, Cano said.
BexarAid was providing about 2,000 tests a week on average in July — one of the peaks in San Antonio’s COVID-19 cases — and has worked with “dozens” of employers, Cano said.
Garza and Cano aren’t strangers to starting a business: the pair launched companies together and individually before the pandemic. With BexarAid, they hope to help flatten the curve and “get us out of this pandemic as fast as possible,” Cano said.
“We’re extremely blessed that it’s now an actual business,” he added. “We were not intending for it to be. I think entrepreneurship can many times be accidental, but it doesn’t make it any less rewarding.”
The pace of U.S. business applications is starting to drop back to pre-pandemic levels, but still remains elevated compared to last year, according to an analysis of census data by the Economic Innovation Group.
Many of the new startups are non-store retailers; personal and laundry services; professional, scientific and technical services; administrative and support services; truck transportation; and restaurants and bars.
There are caveats. Applications in some of those sectors are automatically marked as businesses with a higher likelihood of hiring workers even if that’s not necessarily happening, and the data includes some acquisitions of existing companies, the public policy organization noted.
It’s hard to tell “how much of the increase is attributable to entrepreneurs finding opportunity in the crisis to form businesses likely to hire employees as opposed to newly unemployed individuals starting their own businesses,” EIG said in the census report. “The latter are more likely to be non-employer firms (opting for self-employment) that are not well-positioned to fuel a rapid jobs recovery.”
“Nevertheless, the sustained and unprecedentedly high rate of new business applications hints that the current crisis could be part of an accelerating restructuring of the economy, as entrepreneurs and everyday workers adapt to a new economic reality,” the organization said.
San Antonio Startup Week, a conference for startups and entrepreneurs, was held online in October due to the pandemic. As part of the event, attorney David Jones participated in a free legal clinic to help aspiring entrepreneurs in under-served communities set up their own businesses.
More than 50 people signed up in one day. Legal clinics typically draw decent turnouts but “everybody who was involved in it was frankly kind of blown away that the interest came as fast as it did,” Jones said.
Attendees consulted with attorneys and filled out paperwork for limited liability corporations, which costs about $300 to register. The clinic helped form about two dozen startups, a number of them launched by Black, Latino, LGBTQ and women entrepreneurs, Jones said.
“It’s just an absolutely joyful experience to see people get as excited as they get when they realize ... ‘I’m a real live business owner,’” Jones said, adding that he hopes to organize another clinic before the end of the year.
Anastasia Calhoun was already launching her own business when the pandemic began.
The kernel of an idea started materializing about two years ago. After benefiting from massage treatments, Calhoun started researching spa kits with upscale organic products to use at home but couldn’t find what she was looking for.
She decided to start her own venture, selling handcrafted skin and body care products through a subscription model. She set up a limited liability corporation for the business, dubbed Godtliv, and targeted an April launch date.
Cue the pandemic. When it disrupted the supply chain for the materials and ingredients she needed, Calhoun switched to selling items she already had in stock through an e-commerce website and launched just a few weeks later than planned.
Another COVID-19-related upheaval followed. Calhoun, an architectural researcher, was furloughed and later laid off from her job in architecture. After her apartment lease ended, she headed to Oklahoma, where some of her family members live.
“In one sense, it does suck, but on the other hand, I was already so invested in it both emotionally and financially that to stop it I think would’ve been worse,” Calhoun said of starting a business during the pandemic. “If I had been at a different spot in the business development process, no, I probably would not have opened it.”
With people stuck indoors and grappling with pandemic-induced stress, it’s also a good time to be selling self-care items. And an e-commerce concept fits the current business conditions, Calhoun said.
Aside from working on Godtliv, she’s part of a team that received a grant to research the intersections of climate change, racial justice and pandemics in the built environment.
“Even though everything’s so uncertain, I’m really loving my day-to-day right now,” Calhoun said, laughing. “My office smells amazing ... I’m not opposed to taking something in architecture again, but if I can build this, I’m pretty happy here too.”
