man dressed in 1780s costume stands in bed of a new pickup truck holding an american flag

How has Texas changed in 20 years? She went home to find out.

After decades as a photojournalist in the Middle East, Tanya Habjouqa turns her lens to the place of her youth, where she says, “If you weren’t part of the privileged few, you were forgotten.”

Captain Tom Hicks, 53, a former U.S. Army pilot, stands in the back of his pickup truck dressed in a George Washington costume in Fort Worth, Texas, in July 2022. A father to three children, he comes from a close-knit family connected with his community. His family had joined their neighborhood’s Independence Day parade days earlier, installing a swimming pool in the back of the truck from which the children spritzed onlookers with water guns.

Serving in the Army for 20 years, Hicks deployed to Iraq twice and Afghanistan three times where he says he flew Blackhawk helicopters, reconnaissance airplanes, and drones. When his second son was born in 2003, he was stationed in Iraq. “I spent most of my adult life defending our country. I love our country.…. We just need to make it a better place. Whether we take a right or left turn, let’s just be adults and be respectful.”

I’ve known Tom since I was a teenager; he’s married to my best friend’s sister. We lost touch, though we were in Iraq at same time experiencing two very different realities.

Published July 18, 2023

9 min read

This is one of eight stories from The Past Is Present project, a collaboration between National Geographic and For Freedoms.

Tanya Habjouqa experienced one of the first great ruptures of her life when she was four years old. While the family was living in Jordan, her parents divorced—and in the wake of the breach, her American mother brought Tanya and her brother back home to live in Fort Worth, Texas.

It wasn’t easy for a young multicultural girl to grow up in the heart of Texas in the 1980s and 1990s. She witnessed systemic racism against her Black classmates, and she couldn’t participate in activities like yearbook and photography that seemed to be the sole domain of blonde cheerleaders with wealthy PTA moms.

“If you weren’t part of the privileged few, you were forgotten,” she says.

Tanya left Texas in 2002 and returned to the Middle East, where she spent the next 20 years living in Jordan and Palestine as a photojournalist. While documenting the violence dividing that region, she watched in horror as hierarchies of class and race seemed to become even more entrenched in the U.S. Would she even be able to recognize the Texas of her youth?

She would soon find out: In this photo essay, Tanya reflects on the two months that she spent reconnecting with old friends in Fort Worth and examining the racial and economic fault lines of a place that she had once called home.

Emma Barberena, a junior at Arlington Heights High School, was given a choice for her 15th birthday: Her family could buy her a car or she could have a quinceañera, a traditional party that celebrates a girl’s transition to adulthood.

Barberena chose an elaborate quince—replete with costume changes and group dancing that she choreographed herself with friends from school. Led by a high-energy DJ, her party was attended by a wide variety of students from various ethnicities and cliques dancing together to everything from country and Latin music to reggaeton.

A fan of musical theatre, Barberena dreams of studying forensic psychology at Columbia University. She said she cares deeply about social justice issues—including the rise in threats to the rights of LGBTQ people and communities of color in Texas. “Our main issue is ignorance causing a huge division in our society,” she says. “My goal is to little by little share the spark in speaking out to my fellow youth community.”

I, too, attended Arlington Heights High School. As a rebellious teenager, I did not find my place at that school—save for Ms. Marion, the speech teacher who lovingly called me her “quasi-militant feminist.” She was the only person who took an interest and nurtured me in what was not at the time a political environment.

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Left: Vivian Hicks, right, and her best friend, Georgia Brown, stand for a portrait on the “pipe.” Tucked away behind the most prominent mansions in Fort Worth along the Trinity River, the pipe was the spot for drinking, kissing, and sometimes just being in nature in my youth. To most locals, it remains a mysterious entity.

Vivian and Georgia both graduated a few months ago and are headed off to college. Georgia will be attending Stephen F. Austin State University to study wildlife management, while Vivian will attend Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

I was seeking hints of my old self while photographing these high school settings. But I found no angry quasi-militant feminist. Things were subverted—in a good way. I found Black cheerleaders, a Black prom queen, blonde cheerleaders who questioned their privilege, and female students who were worried about their rights being taken away with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Children of all economic classes could access dance, photography, art—things had improved.

Right: A couple dances in the Basement Bar in the Fort Worth Stockyards. My mother, raised in Fort Worth, met my Jordanian father when he came to the U.S. to study aviation. They married and moved to Jordan, where I was born. We lived there together until my parents divorced and my mother uprooted us from Jordan to Texas. I was four.

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Left: One of the topics discussed at this Fort Worth school board meeting on July 26, 2022, was the possibility of dismantling the Independent School District’s racial equity committee. People with conservative viewpoints held the most signs—and were the loudest—arguing that the commitment to equity was akin to indoctrination.

However, another parent shared why she was passionately in favor of keeping the committee in place. As she had explained to her five-year-old before the meeting, she said, “An equity committee is a group of people that try to make sure every child has what they need to learn.”

Right: Ghazaleh Moayedi is an OB-GYN and abortion provider based in Dallas. She is a founder of Pegasus Health Justice Center. Here, she is sitting at her desk in her bedroom providing expert witness testimony to a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee on the subject of reproductive health and readiness in the military on July 29, 2022.

“We all have the right to an abortion,” she told the committee. “We all have the right to healthy pregnancies, and we all have the right to parent our children safely. But we cannot talk about just access to contraception; we need to be talking about the whole spectrum. People with the means are going to be able to travel to get an abortion, but that does not mean that it is not going to be without risk or stress. I am about 40 years old. If I were trying to have a baby, I could be at a higher risk of needing an abortion—and just by having my husband drive me, he is at the risk of being a criminal.”

Twins Raylee, left, and Lauren Strong, center, stand for a portrait with friend and fellow cheer team member Lola Carter. Lauren and Lola were best friends while attending Arlington Heights High School, despite their differing political beliefs. “She’s red and I’m blue,” Lola says, adding, “I am actually more green.”

But they both acknowledge the complexity of certain issues—and talk openly about them. While discussing the Black Lives Matter movement, Lauren told me she didn’t feel it was her place to post about Black Lives Matter on social media—and Lola jumped in to explain why she did. Here’s their exchange:

Lola: I understand her. I reposted it in support of my friends that it does affect, because I am white, I am blonde, I am a skinny cheerleader, and I try to break the stereotype. I am not Black and I do not fully understand what people of color go through, but we have people on the team and that is a big part of the reason that I posted about it. They do talk about it, comfortably and openly.

Lauren: My thought about it is that I was raised in a household where skin complexion did not matter—shitty people are going to be shitty people no matter what their skin color is.

Lola: I found it better to educate myself on the matter. I recognize that there is a problem, and I needed to show my support. A church was having a Black Lives Matter activity, and I went with my mother, my sister and my grandmother. We were the only white people in the crowd, and we felt welcomed, and every single person there was being like “Thank you for being here.”

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Left: Zion Carr, right, 11, poses for a portrait with his brother, Zayden, 6, in a family member’s home. Zion witnessed a Fort Worth police officer fatally shoot his aunt, Atatiana Jefferson, in her home in the early morning hours of October 12, 2019. A neighbor had called the city to conduct a wellness check because Atatiana’s front door was open. She and Zion had been up late playing video games and had opened the door to vent the home after burning some hamburgers.

Aaron Dean, who resigned from the police force two days after the shooting, was the first officer to face a murder charge in Tarrant County for a shooting committed while on duty. On December 19, 2022, Dean was sentenced to 11 years, 10 months, and 12 days in prison for the killing.

Right: Zion adored Atatiana, who was 28 when she was killed, and they bonded over video games. Here, he holds up the plastic bag with his aunt’s belongings, including her phones and the gaming controller she was using the night the police came. It is all he has left of her, he explains.

“We played Fortnite, Apex Legends, Rocket League. The first character she bought in the game was Travis Scott,” he said. It was heart wrenching to see this cherubic child shyly bring out this plastic bag—to see their time together reduced to plastic.

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Left: I found Spirit Atkins, 11, to be an incredibly empathic soul beyond her years. Her mother is an artist and a teacher, and her family deeply believes in God and the church.

Spirit asked me geographical and political questions about the Middle East and what it was like for my children to live there. She has been accepted this September into the sixth-grade class of the Young Women’s Leadership Academy, a high performing school in Fort Worth.

Right: Civil rights attorney Lee Merritt, photographed across the street from Hutchins State Jail in Dallas, is tackling some of the most high-profile police brutality cases in the country, including the civil case against the police officer who shot Atatiana Jefferson in front of her young nephew Zion.

Merritt also brought a lawsuit against the Fort Worth Police Department for using excessive force in the 2016 arrest of Jacqueline Craig and her teenage daughter. Craig, who is Black, had called the police to report that a neighbor had grabbed her son by the neck. The city of Fort Worth agreed to settle the lawsuit and pay $150,000. “I have called Jacqueline Craig the Rosa Parks of our time,” Merritt told me. “Her experience has changed the culture of policing in Fort Worth. She will remain a staple in the conversation for police reform.”

Merritt says that there’s tension between the African American community and the authorities in Fort Worth. “The Black community feel that they cannot trust the police, and we need to deal with those issues,” he says.

A cadet and an off-duty officer at the Fort Worth Police Department headquarters participate in “scenario-based training” on what to do when someone is evading arrest. The police department has been subject to two high-profile investigations in the last few years for the murder of 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson in her home by an officer and the brutal arrest of Jaqueline Craig and her daughter.

Beyond the standard training pictured here, the police department says it has created a training scenario similar to the circumstances of Craig’s arrest to better equip their future cadets to handle calls that are stressful while still ensuring maximum safety.

“We acknowledged what we have contributed to the community,” police chief Neil Noakes told me in an interview. He said that the department is moving away from over-policing and attempting to build peaceful relationships with communities—which he acknowledges “need a lot more resources than what they are getting.”

“My favorite James Baldwin quote is, ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it’s faced,’” he added. “I would say across the country that people point at the murder of George Floyd as the cause. It was not the cause; it was a spark, and it’s been brewing for generations… It was hard to gain that trust with the police back, and we started from scratch.”

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Left: A squad of cheerleaders at Arlington Heights High School try on uniforms for the upcoming year. I had many irreverent conversations with the people I met while reporting this project, including with subversive blonde cheerleaders and Black cheerleaders, who were unlike the cheer squad I remember from my youth.

Right: Teenagers dressed up for prom night at Arlington Heights High School in May 2022. The prom was inclusive in a way that I never witnessed in my day: Both prom king and queen were Black, and the dancefloor was full of a wide array of students from members of the LGBTQ community to fat girls dancing with confidence and agency.

Most of the students in this image have graduated and gone on to college to study everything from veterinary medicine to forensic science. Paris Walker, center in black and gold, was a leader on the cheer team at AHHS. Her aunt, Carol Brown, had been the school’s first black cheerleader in the 1970s—and faced a difficult path.

“Our time at AHHS was not fun,” Brown recalls. “We would go to dances, and we would not hear our music; it was mostly country songs and there was nothing there for us. My brother and two sisters graduated from there in the eighties, and it was still the same way. It was not until the beginning of the 2000s that I saw slight changes coming about.”

By the time her nieces were in high school, Brown says, there was almost a full squad of Black cheerleaders. “The generation grew up saying, ‘Mrs. Carol did it, so we can do it,’” she says. “To me, that was a really important step.”

Myster Alston, 7, sits in his sister’s lap. The Alston family lives in Las Vegas Trail Neighborhood, a community filled with large apartment complexes, and pools that are either empty or closed—even in the raging Texas summer heat. The economically distressed area has long been considered dangerous.

Millicent Allen says she named her son Myster knowing that he’s going to go through tough situations as a Black man. “ They have no other choice but to call him Myster. They have to respect him.”

When I was a kid, I witnessed my first incident of racism in an apartment complex down the street from where Myster lives. A small black child, just a few years older than I was at the time, was surrounded by white preteens rhythmically chanting the “N” word. I did not know what it meant, but I stood in frozen horror as I saw the way his head was downcast and the meanness on their faces.

I often felt like an awkward extra even then. I really did not know what I would feel about returning—or refocusing my journalistic lens from the Middle East to Texas. What I did not expect was that the very approach I finessed while photographing people coping with trauma in the Middle East would prove useful in Texas—a traumatized kid is a traumatized kid.

I can say now that people are talking. Really talking. And communities are forming to hold up a wide range of voices. Exploring my frayed family ties and friendships in a post-Trump America yielded a lot of dialogue. What took my breath away was the younger generation—singing, dancing, and protesting, eloquently articulating their pain and awareness of tumultuous political changes that were eroding their rights in clear distinct dialogue. Whether anyone will listen remains to be seen.

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Tanya Habjouqa is a visual journalist, artist, and educator based in East Jerusalem in the Middle East. Trained in anthropology and journalism, with an MA in Global Media and emphasis on Middle East Politics, her work focuses on gender, representations of otherness, dispossession, resettlement, and human rights. With close to 20 years experience, Habjouqa has become a leading voice in the advancement of new documentary practices which seek to reframe news and politics through a more nuanced, culturally literate lens. She lived in the Dallas-Fort Worth area between the age of four to 25. Follow her on Instagram @habjouqa.

This is one of eight stories from The Past Is Present project, a collaboration between National Geographic and For Freedoms.

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How has Texas changed in 20 years? She went home to find out.

READ THIS NEXT

Go Further

Animals

Environment

History & Culture

Science

Travel

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Why are people so dang obsessed with Mars?

How viruses shape our world

The era of greyhound racing in the U.S. is coming to an end

See how people have imagined life on Mars through history

See how NASA’s new Mars rover will explore the red planet

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How viruses shape our world

The era of greyhound racing in the U.S. is coming to an end

See how people have imagined life on Mars through history

See how NASA’s new Mars rover will explore the red planet

Why are people so dang obsessed with Mars?

How viruses shape our world

The era of greyhound racing in the U.S. is coming to an end

See how people have imagined life on Mars through history

See how NASA’s new Mars rover will explore the red planet

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