Business

UT Beach Volleyball Hosts First Home Matches

byTori Garcia

AUSTIN, Texas – The new University of Texas volleyball team made history this month, under the sun on sand. Texas Beach Volleyball played a few away games last season but finally hosted home matches March 20 at the Wright-Whitaker Sports Complex. The Longhorns first defeated Houston Christian University, 3-2, but then lost 4-1 to No. […]

AfroTech Conference Reveals Black Women’s Paths to Tech Are Legion

byKatrina L. Spencer

Deejay Jasmine Solano is spinning hip-hop, R&B, soul and funk at the front of ACL Live in Austin. The floor has been cleared of dozens of chairs from serious panel talks from earlier in the week, and now Black people, mostly aged 25 to 45, are two-stepping and doing throwback dances from their teenage years.  […]

All Black Made Pop-Up Provides Alternative Selling Opportunity for Vendors

byKatrina L. Spencer

About 20 canopy tents lined a parking lot adjacent to Black Pearl Books on Saturday afternoon. Underneath each was a business owner displaying their wares: body oil, customized cups, paintings, lemonade, hair bonnets, apparel, candles, jewelry and more. While the sun beat down, 94 degrees and counting, the entrepreneurs offered smiles to shoppers at All […]

From the Military to the Kitchen, These Veterans Are Choosing a Career That Brings Out Their Passion for Food

byAna Paola Davila Chalita 

The smell of spices and chicken had people lining up at an Austin food festival to get Shirley Newell’s Dominican food. The U.S. Army veteran was rapidly taking orders, flipping her marinated chicken and packing food to-go. “Food is my comfort, my passion and how I express myself,” Newell said. “When I was in the military is when I actually started cooking.”
Now, cooking is her livelihood. She started Phatty Boy food truck nine years after she left the Army as an automated logistics specialist. For some Texas veterans, opening food-service businesses feels like a natural step after their military career.

‘I Can’t Let You Down’: How Mexican Truckers Are Easing U.S. Driver Shortage While Helping Their Families Back Home

byAna Paola Davila Chalita 

For Juan Martinez and his truck, a trip usually lasts from Monday to Saturday, starting in Mexico and going north into the United States before returning home. He is one of thousands of truck drivers from Mexico, taking jobs to haul freight across the border under a 1991 commercial trucking agreement between the United States and Mexico.
The opportunity of a higher salary is driving more Mexicans with a B1 visitor visa to a profession that is constantly struggling with a worker shortage.
But the industry still needs 78,000 drivers, “The price of everything we buy is going to go up,” said a manager for trucking company, “because it’s going to cost more to move it, because we have less drivers that want to move it.”

Diversity in Tattooing Opens Up Art Form to People with Different Identities

byTaryn Courville

In the years she’s been a tattoo shop owner and artist, Tina Poe has witnessed more body art studios opening, increased diversity in artists and more creative work being put out. It’s exciting to see more demographics being represented in the industry, she said. One demographic Poe noted was women. The majority of Moon Tattoo’s clients are female now, she said.

Diversify or Die: Texas Olive Oil Industry on its Knees after 2021 Freeze

byPaula Levihn-Coon

Since the first olive orchards were planted in Texas in the 1990s, they have been damaged by hurricanes, drought and cold weather. Confused by mad temperature swings, trees have not set fruit. These events have compelled some olive growers to leave the business.

Most growers, however, are reevaluating their business models with an eye toward reducing the negative impact of Texas weather. They are embracing diversification — selling oil imported from other states or countries or finding new ways to use and market their orchards.

Protesters Rally Against Oil Company’s Gulf Coast Expansion on Karankawa Site

byCristela Jones

 Chanting “respect our existence or expect our resistance,” nearly 400 people protested outside an Austin bank Saturday to try to stop construction of an oil terminal on ancient Indigenous land near Corpus Christi.

“We are still here, and we are still fighting,” said protest organizer Chiara Sunshine Beaumont, a descendant of the Karankawa people who once lived on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Saturday’s protest followed months of efforts by Indigenous groups in support of the Karankawa’s objections to expansion of oil export terminals owned by Enbridge, a Canadian petrochemical pipeline company. Beaumont said her group chose to protest Saturday outside a Bank of America on South Congress Avenue because the bank is a large underwriter of Enbridge’s projects.

Santa and the Supply Chain: How Austin Toy Stores Are Coping with Christmas

byEniola Longe

With global supply chain disruptions affecting industry, independently owned toy stores have had an increasingly hard time stocking their shelves. 

Climate Change Impacting Austin Real Estate Not So Hard to Fathom

byBrendan Long

After graduating from the University of Texas in May 2021, Sami Sparber ran into the same issue many Austin residents are facing – too few places available for rent or sale. “If you found a place to live, you had to apply right away because within hours or days that unit could be gone,” Sparber […]

Despite Higher Prices and Short Supply, Texas Heritage Turkey Farms Are Thriving 

byEniola Longe

Across the country, the demand for heritage turkeys — a variety of domestic turkeys retaining historic characteristics from the mid-20th Century — has been on the rise since 2005 with the popularity of the slow food movement.

Natural Wine Staking Claim in Texas

byHarrison Young

Natural wine is made with organically farmed grapes and fermented with yeast that grows naturally on the grapes. The fruit is also picked by hand, without the aid of machinery. Winemakers call the process “non-intervention” or “zero-zero,” meaning nothing is added and nothing is taken away during production.