It's no secret that "The Great Hollowing Out" is happening, or rather, accelerating, in the High Plains of all Plains states. This includes Texas, and it includes the escarpment areas to the east of the 100th meridian, where, to use biological descriptors, the mixed-grass prairie starts giving way to shortgrass. In Texas, think everything west of Abilene, in every county of less than 10,000 population, and some bigger than that.
But hold on to that thought.
In many cases, it's not totally a hollowing out, especially at the southern end. It's "The Great (Hispanic) Replacement." Or, it's "The Great (Hispanic) Replacement" keeping a "Great Hollowing Out" from being a "Humongous Implosion."
Take Crockett County. After a spike in the 1940s, has been fairly flat (a smaller surge in the 1970s) until the turn of the century. Then, it started declining more.
Counties similar in size that haven't imploded as much is due just to oil. But, just as farms kept getting bigger, especially out on the High Plains, after the most recent oil bust due to overpumping shale, big oil companies vowed to automate more and this time, they're at least halfway holding on to that.
A few counties, like Fort Davis, have bucked the trend. That said, Wiki notes that its average age is over 60 (just one of six counties in the US; two of the others are New Mexico counties with old fart Anglos), meaning the Anglo White folks there are old indeed. In another decade, let alone 20 years, it too will be Hispanic majority, and younger. (For the non-Texans, that's not an oil area.) Or Presidio, where Alpine, especially, has become a retirement area.
But, in the "cis-Pecos" (take that, wingnuts) High Plains of southern Texas, The Great (Hispanic) Replacement" is the thing.
Why did I focus on Crockett County?
A story in the TPA Messenger this summer about the Ozona Stockman fixing to go belly-up before being acquired by Rambler Media.
I don't see that paper as the hub of a seven-county area, though. Of the nine counties it borders, five have papers. Of the four that don't, one is closer to Midland and the other to San Angelo than to Ozona. (And, that county is smaller in size than Crockett, and has been without a paper 15 years or more.) The third, Terrell, home of Sanderson, has less than 1,000 in the county.
The fourth, Val Verde? Southern Newspapers, referred to here in years past as the "southern front" or similar, owned the Times-News until killing it in late 2020. (Del Rio.)
Nobody's tried to restart it, right?
Not totally. A paper out of Eagle Pass, website and weekly print, purports to cover Del Rio and to deliver the paper there. Yeah, Eagle Pass is 55 miles away, but Ozona is more than 100.
And? The Eagle Pass paper bills itself as bilingual and Val Verde County is more than 90 percent Hispanic (of any race). There's also the web-only (and monolingual, I venture) 830 Times.
And, that Eagle Pass paper, despite including a print product, is NOT a TPA member.
Folks, IMO, that's where West Texas, and especially Southwest Texas, newspapering is headed in the longer-term future. Yeah, it's nice for a Rambler Media, or other nonprofit corporation or whatever, to step in. (That said, sometimes noblesse oblige is more "nice" than nice.) But, Anglo White folks will likely have limited success.
Plus, if you're acquiring papers like that for the legals? Well, most those counties will likely have two, tiny, incorporated towns max. (Terrell has none.) They'll likely have no more than two school districts. And, the county government.
So, outside of budget and tax stuff, very few other legals. Not in oil country in some of these cases, so no legals there. No other environmental or industrial legals.
And, if the only display advertising you're getting in a monolingual paper is the old White folks stores that will soon close, you're in trouble. The dollar store that's the only "grocery" if your county is less than 5,000 will likely lowball you on insert rates or even stiff you outright, because it has a captive audience.
Finally, no matter the ethnicity of the inhabitants, this area will surely continue to become ever more despoblado due to climate change. Del Rio at nearly 115 and the crappy Texas electric grid doesn't help.
So, as I see it, on the High Plains and in the upper Valley above Laredo and the gateway to the actual valley, the TPA faces a combination of more papers closing, or, if they're being replaced, replaced by bilingual ones that just don't see much value in the TPA. It's going to have to do recruiting and selling.
Flip side? If the Hispanic-oriented press, outside of East Texas' metroplexes, grows a lot more, could we see a Texas Hispanic Press Association, and not as part of TPA, but as its own entity?
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