(crickets chirping) (soft music) To try to write about things that are often overlooked.

It does not match with what you're hearing in the media.

Those are the kinds of people I like to do stories on.

JOSE: It's hopes and dreams on four wheels.

INTERVIEWEE: She understood who we were losing and who this town was losing.

OWNER: We will have to close this place.

I was like, I have to write about this.

NARRATOR: Major funding for this program was provided by ANNOUNCER: At HEB, we're proud to offer over 6,000 products grown, harvested, or made by our fellow Texans.

♪ I saw miles, miles ANNOUNCER: It's all part of our commitment to preserving the future of Texas and supporting our Texas Neighbors.

(bright music) ANNOUNCER 2: Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation is dedicated to conserving the wild things and wild places in Texas.

Learn more at tpwf.org.

There are places where really there's a kind of spirit and a life of its own inside made up of all the different people who are a part of it.

But if places like these vanish, I think humanity really loses something.

It just makes the world a little poorer.

(soft music) My name is Lea Konczal.

I'm a writer for Texas Monthly and I wrote Inside America's Last Ninepin Bowling Enclave.

When I was in college, I took a sociology class and we read an excerpt of Robert Putnam's book, "Bowling Alone".

It's about kind of the decline of American community.

I got the idea like, what if I write a journalism article looking at an actual bowling league and like see what kind of community there is there.

One day I came across the existence of nine pin bowling, this old German sport, and I just thought it was fascinating.

I was like, I have to write about this.

It was like this step back in time.

Half the alleys still allow smoking.

A lot of them still take score on chalkboards.

I mean, there's human pin setters.

INSTRUCTOR: And if you don't pay attention, you can very well be hit with the ball and it will hurt a lot.

It is totally a team sport because as you can see, there is no individual scoring kept.

Everybody's added together and it comes up to one cumulative score.

Point of the game is to knock everything down, kind of like 10 pin, but with nine pin, if you get just the red one standing, you get three extra points with it.

It's just this totally different species of bowling that has survived for so long.

Nine pin bowling has roots in Germany.

Germans started moving here in the 1830s and they brought nine pin with them.

At its height, nine pin was in pretty much every major city in Texas.

It came to the point where we are today where there are only 18 nine pin alleys that I know of left in the whole US, and they're all clustered in the rural areas around the city of San Antonio.

I spent like half a year at least, just going to League Nights, going to tournaments, and the more I learned, the more fascinating it got because I started learning about some of the challenges that were not obvious on the face and some of the biggest threats that nine pin is currently facing.

There just hasn't been any money, so.

LEA: A lot of bowling alleys are really losing that bridge to the next generation.

They still have pool nights there, but the bowling hasn't happened since 2012.

It was family.

They got close, they got close.

It was like a family gathering.

Now it's what it is, I guess.

Some of our problems with trying to keep this place open is we the property taxes keep going up.

LEA: The areas around San Antonio, many of them are growing astronomically, and with that the local property taxes are going up.

If taxes get too high where we cannot keep our head above water, we will have to close this place.

There is a real danger that some of these clubs may close and nine pin may go extinct if they're not able to adapt fast enough.

Sorry, our cooler went out.

I left town for about a year and came back and that is one of my key things about not leaving the state is I'm gonna not have nine pin bowling.

I'm not gonna have the group of friends, even from this bowling alley along with all the other nine pin bowling alleys, I've been competing against them since I was seven.

When something has been around for so long, there's just not really a way to replace that.

It's just really the loss of a community and people can find community in other ways, but it's harder and it's not always gonna be the same.

In order to stay afloat, nine pin clubs have to innovate.

In my reporting, there was really one club that stood out because it has done probably the most to try and appeal to a new demographic.

When I joined Turner Club said, what's going on?

Hey, this building's about to fall down.

They said, I know we've been trying to move it.

Well, why haven't you?

And they said, well, we haven't been able to on it.

We can't find a spot and we don't have the funds for it.

I said, well, I'll tell you what.

Let's get going.

I'll move this club.

I'll move it.

If it takes me my entire life, I'll move it.

LEA: The club today has many Hispanic members.

It was by the riverwalk for many years in downtown San Antonio and successfully recruited the people living in that city.

My name is Louis Cabrera.

I've been bowling nine pin for about a year now.

I got invited just by a friend here and fell in love with it.

Also, the president took a big gamble by building 16 separate automated 10 pin lanes, and the 10 pin side really acts as pipeline for interest to the nine pin side, Turner has successfully transitioned into the next stage of evolution.

A lot of members are basically new people who have discovered the sport.

(soft music) I definitely think one reason I may be interested in exploring community is that I am an introvert and by nature a loner.

Before the story, I didn't really understand the full depth of community that these places had.

I felt incredibly welcomed into the nine pin community, which is why I ended up joining a league.

Our team name is the Lords of the Ringers because in nine pin, if you knock down all the pins at once, or all the pins except the red pin, that's called a ringer.

Sorry, I have to explain them team name.

Our team is in last place, but it's a lot of fun.

Places like these, they're more than just buildings.

They're history, family, and community.

(soft music) I like writing about food because it's really not about the food.

You know, food is great, we all need to eat it, but what makes the food even better are the stories.

My name is Jose Ralat and I am the Texas Monthly Taco Editor.

I profiled Rosa's Kitchen, a taco truck in San Antonio for Texas Monthly.

I wanted to write about Rosa's Kitchen after following them on Instagram, seeing this beautifully hand painted pink truck and watching this drama unfold.

What's going on here?

Rosa's is the kind of person I wish was my grandmother.

Sweet, warm, nothing like my grandmother.

(laughs) I went for the story, sure, but I also went for the food.

So Rosa's Kitchen, we're mostly known for our breakfast tacos and our specialty tacos, especially our works.

It's cheese, potato, egg, guisada, and bacon on a flour tortilla.

We try not to bring the heart of San Antonio, but the heart of Mexico here as well.

(soft music) In 2004, Rosa's and her family fled Monclova which is in the border, Mexican state of Coahuila, took on a family vacation and they never went back.

When you are an immigrant family fleeing violence like Rosa's family did, that's a bunch of tough calls.

Trying to make it right after that can take years if not decades.

So they ended up in San Antonio.

They did what they knew, which was cooking.

They saw a 1971 Chevy step van.

A 1971 Chevy step van or any step van is not a taco truck, so they had to put in a whole kitchen.

(speaking in Spanish) So they scrape up money, they had to put in the flat top wash station, fridges, everything.

(Speaking in Spanish) They decided we need a paint job.

We need something that'll help us stand out.

Painted the truck pink, did all the flowers by hand.

I love that.

The truck might be named for the matriarch, but when you go to the truck, it's a family project.

In February, 2022, they finally opened the truck to the public, but there's a dark cloud over the whole operation.

Rosa's had a stroke.

Turns out that the stroke was minor and the doctor said she could go back to work.

Several months later, a bigger stroke.

BANY: We had to shut down.

Having to close their truck was it terrifying move.

Immigrant families with their own businesses know there is no safety net.

There is only hard work and opportunity.

You know, we were hoping and we were praying a lot that her recovery would be great, that she would be better.

Luckily, she was able to overcome it and we're here now.

(bright music) Nothing was gonna get in the way of providing for her family.

I think one of the main things that keeps my mom going is definitely her faith.

You know, which I know that's something that holds true for a lot of Hispanics.

Their hope, hope for something bigger and better for her family.

They've moved to the wrong spots.

Immigration statuses have changed for the better.

They are being Northern Mexican breakfast tacos.

There are distinct tacos to each region.

So this is the (Spanish word) which is a (Spanish word).

It's a family style slow cooked dish.

Here it's got red chili and what looks to be pork chops.

It wasn't too hot, it was rich, it caught my mouth.

I wanted more.

In a way this makes them at the forefront of this new movement to cross the river, to tie it all together.

Rosa's Kitchen is not just a food truck, it is the hope of a family.

I like to think of myself as a curious and passionate person.

Those are kind of prerequisites for the job.

So when I find other people out in the world who are also curious and passionate people who are doing something really interesting, those are the kinds of people I like to do stories on.

There's a lot of work that goes into research of freedom colonies.

Here's a starting point for me every morning at about 6:30.

(bright music) Gloria Smith is a person who is very enthusiastic about everything.

Gloria grew up in Fort Worth and during the summer when she was a kid, a lot of her friends would go away for summer vacation and they would go down home.

I asked my mother one year when I was in elementary, hey, can I go down home for the summer?

And she said, well, we don't really have a down home to go to.

So I was always curious as to who are my mother's family, who are the Duffies?

And so Gloria started doing research, ancestry.com, going to the library and she eventually found that her great great grandfather, George Duffy, had been a former slave in Burleson County, Texas.

She'd never even heard of Burleson County.

She spent the day with her husband searching through the archives there, and she found this affidavit and it blew her mind.

Mam, there is my mother's name, Dorothy Lache.

There's her brother, there's her sister, you know, there's her son, Hayward Duffy Jr.

So I knew then I had, finally in the spring of 2016, I found my roots.

I discovered my roots.

I'm Michael Hall, a staff writer at Texas Monthly, and I wrote a story for the magazine called Gloria Smith Goes Down Home.

(soft music) So this letter to a tiny town called Tunis in Burleson County, it's a town that used to be known as Old Bethlehem, but there was really no one there.

There was little evidence of George Duffy.

The only thing that was really around there of any kind of consequence was this old church.

It was this beautiful old clapboard white church.

It was clearly an African American church.

It was in an African American neighborhood and there had been a recently a really big storm that had blown through and it caved in the roof onto the church.

Gloria started to notice this pattern.

There were all these old communities like Old Bethlehem and Dabney Hill.

So I was googling and I can't remember what keyword I googled, but I found out about Dr. Andrea Roberts at the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, and that's when my eyes were open.

She made it clear and plain to me that Dabney Hill is a freedom colony.

(bright music) How's that?

Check, check, check, check.

I talked to Dr. Roberts and she is amazing.

What are freedom colonies?

They're one of many names given to intentionally created free black communities.

Generally between 1865 and 1930, they were anchored by a school or a church.

There were hundreds of thousands of African Americans in Texas after the Civil War, and all of a sudden they were free.

They created intentional communities to protect themselves, to give them places where they could raise their families, educate their children, and build up communities in ways that white folks had always taken for granted they could do.

GLORIA: I live in the city, I never went down home, so I didn't know what a down home was.

The down home is a freedom colony.

That's what a down home is.

For a building to be able to stand that long and to still be standing up there is purpose for it.

And so Gloria became determined to help save this church.

Gloria didn't know anything about writing up grants or going to preservation groups.

She's learning as she goes.

She's research, she's traveling, she's making phone calls, she's writing, she's doing all of this on the fly and she knows if she doesn't do it right, Dabney Hill's gonna disappear.

So we're talking about one of the fastest growing states in the union, right?

And more people keep coming.

So with growth comes development.

There's the church, which is caved in, but it's still there.

There is this sense of community there, but there is also developments that are on the way to Dabney Hill.

They could cover over this freedom colony if she doesn't get to work.

It is kind of like these guys are telling you, hey, can you kind of keep going what we started, you know, and so you just feel that connection.

So Gloria working with Texas A&M wrote a grant application from the Texas Historical Commission to save the church, and they got it.

But then another storm hit Burleson County and this time took the whole church down.

Because the church had lost its structural integrity, they were no longer eligible for the grant.

Every year they come back every year and celebrate.

That's what happens in the Freedom Colony.

They come back, they reminisce, they tell stories, they eat, they have church and worship.

But when you don't have the church there, you know, that is kind of the unifying element there.

When the church fell, the population in Dabney Hill fell as well.

I just feel like the community is slowly dying.

As you can see down the road there's no one living back this way.

It's just like the community is slowly dying along with the church and we like to bring it back, bring the community back.

MICHAEL: Freedom Colonies had a hard enough time just existing in the modern world, but when the last structures were gone, there's not much to keep people there.

This was going to be the end of Dabney Hill.

There will be many instances where you wanna stop, but you can't let that define who you are.

You have to have that goal in your gut when you start and you gotta complete it.

I've had those points in my life where I've been doubtful or is this what I should do?

Are there better things to do?

But I always find myself back in this chair in front of this laptop, doing exactly what I set out to do.

During this whole time, there had been another structure, another building hidden back behind the church.

It was covered up by brush and ivy and had wasps nests in it.

But this other building wasn't just any building, it was actually a Masonic lodge.

Historically, the men that were members of the church were also members of the lodge.

Once we lost funding on the church, Texas Historical Commission recommended that we focus on rehabilitating the lodge.

MICHAEL: So she applied for a new grant from Preservation Texas.

It would be $75,000 and it would help preserve the lodge.

Gloria's optimistic she's gonna get the funds and knowing Gloria, she's gonna make this happen.

I'm Donna Carter, I am the owner of Carter Design Associates.

I've been working on providing architectural restoration information about the Dabney Hill Masonic Lodge.

GLORIA: A community center, a museum, some type of income producing institution.

They can also definitely have church.

It looks like lodge might serve as an actual community center for the people who live in the area.

So one of the really great parts of this story is that Gloria Smith from Fort Worth, Texas, who'd never even heard of Burleson County before, now through her searching for her roots, she not only found her roots, she's helping preserve this freedom colony in a way that she never could have anticipated.

Structures tell stories.

A place is more than the wood and the nail and the flooring.

LEA: There are places where really there's a kind of spirit and a life of its own inside.

MICHAEL: A place holds the memories, a place holds the sense of community, the sense of love that brought people together and kept them together in a sometimes aggressive world.

No food truck is just a food truck.

It's hopes and dreams on four wheels.

LEA: It is just been a real privilege to be allowed into that world and allowed to see the deep bonds that these people have with each other.

(soft music) INTERVIEWEE: My mom and I had never talked about her being on a drill team.

There's a larger history that you're connected to.

The food can only be inspired by family.

I mean, that's where I learned it.

This is a way for him to honor his best friend.

She had this like adventurous streak to her.

All of this is incredibly fleeting.

I needed to give my children that other story.

♪ I love it We're on the precipice of a great discovery.

(upbeat music) ♪ I love it Fasten your seatbelt.

(soft music) CHARLOTTE: As long as we're together, it's perfect.

Love is not as simple as you seem to think.

We're so close to cracking the case.

Dreams do come true.

NARRATOR: Major funding for this program was provided by ANNOUNCER: At HEB, we're proud to offer over 6,000 products grown, harvested, or made by our fellow Texans.

♪ I saw miles, miles ANNOUNCER: It's all part of our commitment to preserving the future of Texas and supporting our Texas Neighbors.

(bright music) ANNOUNCER 2: Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation is dedicated to conserving the wild things and wild places in Texas.

Learn more at tpwf.org.