when the cows come home

the cows gather in the pasture behind my house. there are five of them, slightly lean — i can see their ribs from my window. winter is a difficult time here in the texas panhandle. the weather is unpredictable, and it's extremely windy. just last week i witnessed a wind so strong tumbleweeds shot across the swathes of grass with force and mini dust tornados swirled around the fields across the street. the land I grew up on — the land my grandparents migrated to — is Comanche land. many of us that live in texas now, including the cows, are not native to this land. this land and Indigenous people have witnessed — and been the recipient of — much violence since the explorers and settlers first arrived.

my abuelito (who passed June of 2021) came to texas in the late 1940s, allegedly as a bracero, from mexico. i have been interviewing my aunt, who has most of the records and knowledge of his journey here. once he secured a job on a farm, in a rural area between amarillo and lubbock, he brought my mom, my abuelita, and my two other aunts, to a small farmhouse where they eventually would be joined by four more children. my grandfather was lucky, because his employer helped them all obtain green cards, and though nearly all of my mother’s family became US citizens, my abuelito always refused, and died a mexican national. he wanted to return to mexico, to chihuahua, to the desert from where he came. instead, he remained in lubbock, his body slowed down by the rough life of a cowboy, watching rodeos and animal documentaries in the room where my abuelita died 4 years before.

these are the beginning of notes, the sketching of evidence adjacent to the land that has raised me. after being here nearly 18 years of my life, i returned in 2020, almost 40 years old, and have been trying to understand the complicated relationship between capital and environment, hoping to untangle their tight web. since the mid-90s, after NAFTA, after the violence of US-led invasions and wars abroad, many migrants from many places have found their way to the texas panhandle. the reasons vary, but i suspect displacement, climate, violence, and economic collapse play integral roles in a shifting of locations.

in my small town of 2000, for example, a family from Laos came here in the early 2000s, opened a drive-thru restaurant in the ruins of an old boarded-up dairy queen, and thrived. however, these notes are not about the “american” dream. the “american” dream is a scam, after all. rather, this will be a live document collected from both memory and research, as well as experiential knowledge, of a place that is among the most conservative areas of the US, and how the largest industries in the country affect the daily lives of its locals and the climate, in an attempt to build an archive about the insidious reach of capitalism and colonialism. i want to think through the effects we are experiencing under climate disaster, not simply as artists, but as communities. i am focusing more on the relationship between art and violence, and navigating a different relationship to land and water.

i was raised in a rural community in texas, between oklahoma and new mexico, where agriculture, manufacturing plants, and feed yards supply most of the income to people. our water source is the ogallala aquifer, one of the largest aquifers in the US. and because of its multipurpose use for irrigation as well as providing drinking water, it is depleting quickly. but the water wars are not just limited to running out of water. it is also about access to clean water, as in the case of flint, michigan, where the drinking water was contaminated with lead, beginning in 2014, when the city switched the water source from lake huron and the detroit river to the flint river, because of “budget cuts.” lead from the old pipes leaked into the water supply, poisoning thousands of residents, the majority of whom were Black. a similar issue has been happening in Gaza, where 95% of water is undrinkable, and 60% of homes do not have potable water access. these are just a few instances of the ways that capitalism and extraction have affected communities access to clean drinking water.

i cannot help but think of the word colombian artist doris salcedo invented, “unland” to name the conditions which create displacement and dispossession. unland was the name of an exhibit, unland: audible in the mouth (Tate 1998), which suggests that “rather than simply being landless, having no-land or being without-land, un-land implies loss (Tate.org). what are the conditions (and who are the players) that produce exile and disappearances? and what are the industries that produce financial and environmental instability, creating uncertainty for many of us not named bezos or musk?

so here i am, your narrator, writing to no one and everyone on a sunday morning. i hope you will join me in this practice of relations.