(horse feet thudding) The landscape in Texas is changing all over the state.

MEGHA: It felt like we were back in India.

It is just so special.

I went on Airbnb and somebody's renting piece of dirt.

Whoohoo!

(Bill laughing) Every dish, every bite was like this new experience to push the horizons of what barbecue can be.

I can't tell you how special telling this story was for me.

Thank you.

(dramatic music) ANNOUNCER 1: Major funding for this program was provided by: ANNOUNCER 2: At H-E-B, we're proud to offer over 6,000 products grown, harvested, or made by our fellow Texans.

♪ I saw miles and miles ♪ ANNOUNCER 2: It's all part of our commitment to preserving the future of Texas and supporting our Texas neighbors.

(gentle music) ANNOUNCER 3: Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation is dedicated to conserving the wild things and wild places in Texas.

Learn more at tpwf.org.

(majestic music) (gentle dramatic music) He created it in Houston for everyone who wanted it.

This comforting place that immigrants could go and not feel like a fish out of water.

Other than seeing it in a magazine or on TV, I don't know how much I would've experienced that if I didn't have Little India to go to.

My name is Megha McSwain.

I wrote a story on Raja Sweets, the oldest Indian restaurant in Houston for "Texas Monthly".

Houston has a really large South Asian community.

There was a big wave in the '70s of people wanting to go to medical school, engineering school, and get jobs here.

The Mahatma Gandhi District is this cultural sort of focal point in Houston.

It's basically our Little India, and Raja Sweets has just always been a part of it.

It opened in 1986.

It's the same year that my parents and I moved from Mumbai to Houston.

I was three, my parents were in their 20's, and I just remember it being a regular part of our life.

It became a fast favorite.

It felt like we were back in India.

Yogi Gahunia was an Indian immigrant.

When he moved to Houston in the early '80s, he noticed that Houston was lacking in fresh Indian food, especially scratch-made mithai, which is those little confections that you can find in the sweet shops from back home.

Yogi realized quickly there were so many people who wanted that food from India.

And it's not like you could just drive to another city to get it.

It was lacking all over Texas.

(bright music) So Yogi opened Raja Sweets in 1986.

It was a really casual counter service restaurant, but it also had such a bounty of mithai.

Two of his friends operated businesses as well in the same area.

And when I say same area, I mean like same retail strip.

So if you parked at one, you could visit all three.

They are considered the founding fathers of Little India.

It inspired other people to open their businesses there because South Asians all over Houston were already kind of flocking to that area for that reason.

And now it's one of the biggest South Asian shopping and dining districts in Texas, home to more than 300 South Asian owned businesses, and it just spanned so many blocks.

It was officially named the Mahatma Gandhi District in 2010.

It's like when you're here, it's special.

That's the truth, you know?

So it's like you wanna document it.

I just know it from when I was a little kid.

I mean, that's where my parents took us to eat.

That's where we would buy mithai, and we still do.

Okay, got it.

The busiest time of the year for Raja Sweets is definitely Diwali.

It's the Hindu New Year.

Customers start rushing in a week or two in advance.

Yogi Gahunia passed away, but, you know, his legacy lives on and Raja Sweets is still a family run business after all these years.

Yogi's wife and his daughter managed the restaurant.

That was his last wish.

Just keep this place running as long as you can.

(Sharan speaking in foreign language) During Diwali, she's very like, "Okay, like, next."

Next, come on up.

I have been running around this place since I was six years old, so I'm like, I know how to run the business with my eyes closed.

You know, she probably talks to more people than a lot of us do in one day.

In Indian culture, we call all of our parents friends, aunties and uncles.

Everyone's auntie, everyone's uncle, which makes it really easy 'cause you don't have to remember anyone's names.

So she probably talks to a lot of aunties and uncles on a daily basis, and Sharan just has that perfect personality to keep up with that.

Gobi curry.

Oh my God, this is too hard to decide.

Yes.

I was a curry fiend when I was growing up, and I always remember like just how good it was here.

One of the traditions of Diwali is to gift boxes of mithai.

They have these beautiful decorative boxes that they import from India.

Whenever my parents would get a box from someone and it was from Raja Sweets, it was a big deal, because you knew that person went over to Raja Sweets, and waited in the line.

One three pound box please.

All right.

When you walk in, it's those cases of mithai that you're drawn to.

You just see all the beautiful colors and the shapes.

There's approximately 30 different types of mithai at Raja Sweets.

Okay, let's start with ladoos.

A lot of people have heard of ladoos.

Ladoos are small, rounds.

They're, you know, shaped by hand and they're made from Graham flour.

Bite-sized, delicious, and just the right amount of sweetness.

Okay, let's do burfi.

Burfi is another type of mithai, and there's so many different kinds as well.

Made with milk powder, ghee, and whole milk.

Soft, moist texture that's decadent, but just subtly sweet.

One of the most fun type of mithai is jalebi.

Made with all-purpose flour and corn flour, and it's deep fried into this kind of pretzel sort of look.

And it's bright orange, and then it's soaked in the sticky syrup.

So it's just like sticky and messy and sweet.

And there's also gulab jamun, which some people might know from Indian restaurants.

It's a very common dessert.

They're sort of reminiscent of a donut hole.

And then throw in a russula that I might eat on the way home.

(Megha laughing) Okay.

Raja Sweets does a really good job of sticking to the basics.

They make these types of mithai really, really well.

Sharan and her mother and her relatives keep Raja Sweets this force that we all can still depend on.

They have powered through hurricanes in Houston, the power outages, you know, of course, COVID, so many supply chain issues, but everything has remained consistent.

And I think it's because they have a very loyal following.

From 2003 to 2023, every day I had lunch here.

Actually, all these seats, they were all with my money.

(laughs) Raja Sweets has become a destination for South Asians all over Texas.

Sharan tells me, you know, every year around Diwali time, buses will come in from San Antonio of people who wanna stock up on their mithai and their gift boxes.

As hard as that probably is for Raja Sweets to kind of cater to the masses in Texas, they're doing a good job of it.

They're a blessing to Houston.

Otherwise, the Indian community wouldn't have had a good decent place to go.

I think places like this are crucial to Texas and I think they're the reason why Texas is such a melting pot where people feel like they want to build a home.

To be able to take your kids somewhere and say, "Okay, pick what mithai you want," like that's something that kids in India get to experience.

It is just so special.

I got two of them.

Little India is kind of an illustration of how Texas culture continues to evolve.

Yogi Gahunia wanted to create a place for people like them, for their friends, for their relatives, for their children.

And I think with more and more generations being born here, this is the best way that we can keep our culture alive.

(gentle music) This is a story about one of the most unique places in America and certainly in Texas.

A place that was full of eccentrics and artists and desert rats and people living in caves and people living according to their own lifestyle.

And the reason I was drawn to it was because if Terlingua was changing, this most remote and difficult place for people to live, then all of Texas was changing.

My name is Peter Holley and I wrote "Farewell To The Last Frontier" for Texas Monthly.

Around the first or second year of the pandemic, we began hearing about small towns being hit with an influx of outsiders.

I think I got a tip that something similar was happening in Terlingua, and that struck me as bizarre.

Like how could people be flooding in to one of the most inhospitable places in Texas?

(dramatic music) The first thing that I experienced when I drove into Terlingua was actually anxiety.

As you get closer and closer, you feel yourself pulling away from civilization.

Let's look at it right here.

In deep West Texas.

It's been lost to history.

It's hot, there's no water.

It looks like a martian landscape.

Kind of feels prehistoric at times.

There's no infrastructure, there's no police officers, there's no one looking over your back.

That's always been part of Terlingua's magic sauce.

You feel free to do whatever you want.

There's just something about getting out here in the middle of nowhere.

You know, it just clear your soul, your head.

99% of the people that live here solely because they fell in love with it.

And that makes a really special community.

(bright music) Our local population has grown tremendously.

♪ Hold on to your rosary beads ♪ ♪ And they made my ♪ There is a new generation coming in.

In 2010, the census records indicated that there was around 300 people living in Southern Brewster County.

When I was reporting my story, that number had reportedly ballooned to over a thousand.

That's three to four times the size that it was 10 years ago.

And that doesn't include tourists and kind of the day-to-day traffic.

As the pandemic hit and people had this rush to get outside of cities, more and more people were flooding into Terlingua and building these haphazard structures typically for Airbnb or for themselves.

Terlingua became this place to experiment with temporary shelter.

It's so bittersweet, the lack of regulations here.

I just wish the people took advantage of that in a more beautiful way, rather than plopping a bunch of sheds everywhere.

My uncle who used to come down here in the '70s, he was like, "Man, there was nothing.

Now all you see is little white dots."

TVs, the little campers that people buy and then abandoned, there's a lot of that out there.

There are also luxury mansions built into the rock side.

And I remember crawling up to one that probably wasn't supposed to be there, but I went anyway, and there was a Tesla charger and this infinity pool overlooking the mountains.

It blew my mind.

The power goes out all the time.

Maybe 'cause they installed a hundred AC units on this one line that weren't here before, you know?

The place was transforming from this remote haven to a vacation town.

Woohoo.

I think this is like a Disney world that needs to be built.

It's a diamond in the rough.

The transplants have been accused of treating Terlingua like a western theme park as opposed to a real community.

Moving to Terlingua, it's always been the case that locals were resistant to you arriving there.

They're staunchly independent, very outspoken, the kind of person who will come up and actually poke you in the back and say, "You need to leave town," which is actually what happened to me when I was there.

Terlingua was initially a mining community in the early 20th century.

The mining community disappeared, and for a long time, there was a ghost town there.

And then around 1983, a man named Bill Ivey, who was from the area, decided to revitalize the ghost town and create a community.

Terlingua is its own spirit.

It has its own spirit.

I hear that from folks all the time.

PETER: Bill refers to Terlingua as the last frontier.

We're not on the way to anywhere and we're on the edge of nowhere.

I grew up out here and it was one of the last places to get electricity and telephones.

We all remember Terlingua as a ghost town.

And I think it's important.

That's why my father and I bought it, was to preserve that so that it wouldn't change.

We left as much original as we could, and then over the years, it's been restored little by little.

I mean the building that we're in right now didn't have a roof, and that's how it got its name, the Starlight Theatre, 'cause we still had dances and parties and stuff.

In fact, Jerry Jeff Walker played the dance in here one night.

We had to pour concrete up against the walls to fortify 'em.

And then when we took it away, it kind of looked like a silhouette of some mountains.

And so I hired a local artist to come in and turned it into a mountain scene.

When he started doing that in the early '80s, people thought he was crazy, but he saw a vision for a community that nobody else did, and he's now known as the godfather of Terlingua.

Bill has been very aware of the change for years.

There's nowhere for anybody to live 'cause they've all been turned into Airbnbs or whatever.

I went on Airbnb the other day just to see what was there.

And somebody's renting a piece of dirt.

Nothing there except a sign that said no smoking.

(Bill laughing) PETER: As the cost of living has skyrocketed, long time locals have been forced out and there's less and less of them who arrived in the '70s and '80s.

I am a little scared.

The people that have helped build Terlingua or make Terlingua what it is, hell, they're getting old like me.

PETER: Even since I was out there reporting, the changes have continued and the most recent one is this fight over a plan to build a Dollar General.

There's this Dollar General moving in next door to my liquor store.

I'm terrified.

You get big business coming in and it's a scary thought.

We all need to make money, but it's different when you live somewhere and make money and you infuse that capital back into the community as opposed to using Terlingua as another investment vehicle.

Do I want a Dollar store down here?

No.

I mean, they're not gonna sponsor a little league team.

The fear is that Terlingua is gonna turn into any other small town, a place with big box retail chains, RV parks, and a whole bunch of tourists who don't care about the history or the culture.

My personal opinion is that we're all drifting through like a monoculture in the United States.

Places are becoming less distinctive.

And Terlingua was always the most distinct place.

A place that was most independent.

And losing that means losing an example of another way to live.

This was a very close knit community because your neighbor was your entertainment.

Now you walk in Starlight, you can sit out on the porch and everybody's on their phone or they've got an iPad out.

And that's the world we live in.

(somber music) No, I don't wanna see it change, but change is inevitable, and being on the last frontier makes it more noticeable and change doesn't have to be bad.

I think a lot of people moved here because they wanted change.

It was such a small town in the beginning and it slowly grew over time by people who wanted something different.

I hope the people that do move here embrace the artistic creativity that can happen here.

I hope that the dark skies stayed dark.

Used to I could step out on the porch and see about five lights between here and studio view.

Now, they're everywhere.

It's a sea of little lights, so it's changed.

But I can still look past those lights at the mountains.

Mountains didn't change.

(laughs) (dramatic music) Traditionally, Texas barbecue has been thought of really as meat centric.

Simple meats on butcher paper, on a platter.

But there are some places out there that are shattering that notion, adding in their own flavors to change what Texas barbecue can be.

(dramatic music) I am Daniel Vaughn, I'm the barbecue editor at Texas Monthly, and I wrote a feature about Smoke 'N Ash barbecue in Arlington.

I like to go to as many barbecue places as I can.

So back in 2018 when I first went to Smoke 'N Ash, it was really just another spot on that checklist.

Nothing there overwhelmed me.

It was really a basic barbecue menu.

Didn't even find it really worthy to write about.

Since 2018, things have really changed at Smoke 'N Ash.

(gentle music) Run by Patrick and Fasicka Hicks, it's really known for combining Texas barbecue and Ethiopian cooking all in one menu.

There's no other place like it.

Patrick is from Texas, Fasicka is from Ethiopia.

We met a few months after I arrived here in the States.

DANIEL: Fasicka was working at a gas station in Arlington.

And Patrick would come in and buy stuff in the morning.

She was working behind the counter.

And he would someone of my customer.

After he saw her, he would come in a little more often.

We became best friends and then started dating.

And just grown from there, you know?

It's been wonderful.

And when they first opened the restaurant, it was really just Texas barbecue.

Fasicka kind of got bored with serving Texas barbecue, and she was a good cook in her own right.

Her family were great cooks as well.

Growing up, my mother, we always cooked together.

That was her way of teaching me and telling me stories.

She wanted to introduce Arlington to some of her Ethiopian dishes.

You could order from her Ethiopian menu or you could order from the barbecue menu.

And they were really kept separate.

You really had these two separate customer bases that were coming in.

Some for barbecue, some for Ethiopian food.

Neither of them were really gaining the traction they needed to be a viable restaurant.

A customer or two started suggesting that maybe they can combine the two, bring 'em together.

I was not all that keen on going back just 'cause I didn't have a great experience the first time, but one of their customers urged me to try this new menu.

You wouldn't even be able to guess how different it is.

Every dish, every bite was like this new experience, this new discovery.

We tried just about everything they offered.

This massive platter that brought Ethiopian flavors into the barbecue.

It was a cross-cultural meal like I've never had before.

Chicken Doro Wat is a staple of Ethiopian cuisine.

Doro is Amharic for chicken.

Wat is Amharic for stew.

And it's really chicken on the bone in a really heavy sauce.

In this case, it's a smoked chicken, so really bringing that barbecue flavor into it.

There are the Rib Tip Tibs.

Tibs is actually an Ethiopian dish that can be made with different chunks of meat, chunks of vegetables as well.

In this case, they make tibs with rib tips.

So they take a rack of spare ribs and then keep those tips to make their smoked Rib Tib, Rib Tip Tibs.

(laughs) And then the ribs themselves get smoked just like you would at any Texas barbecue joint.

But the sauce, it's unlike any barbecue sauce.

They call it awaze.

Really, it's this clarified butter, and they take a homemade Berbere spice that they import from Ethiopia.

If salt and pepper is the spice for Texas barbecue, Berbere is the spice for Ethiopian food.

FASICKA: Berbere is something we still use my mother's recipe on.

This Berbere spice comes from Fasicka's family in Ethiopia.

It's their particular blend.

That spice then is bloomed in the butter to really create the sauce, and then the smoked meat is coated in that Just make a whole lot of difference once you apply it to the meat.

So you not only get the juicy rib meat, but you also get this completely different flavor from the butter.

And then not so much a spiciness, but this warmth from the Berbere.

Cardamom and caraway, garlic, ginger.

This is a different spice blend than you're gonna find anywhere else in barbecue.

And it's all gonna come served with this massive round piece of injera, which is like a spongy sourdough.

In a way, that is our Texas toast in Ethiopia.

It's meant to be torn off in pieces and eaten really with every bite in place of utensils.

Fasicka is there to show people how to use the injera.

Traditionally, you have to feed a person you eat with, so.

Oh.

Do not make an airplane sound.

All right.

Here's an airplane.

There you go.

See how clean my hand is?

Uh-huh.

My favorite part of it is the people part of it.

Hello.

How are you?

You know, you can win anyone with a welcoming personality and also good food.

So my favorite part of it is just offering both and leaving customers with a good experience.

It tastes like homemade, from scratch cookies.

So this is not restaurant type.

This is great.

Ooh, it's got kick too.

That, and jalapenos.

Jalapenos.

I've eaten at nearly 2,500 barbecue joints.

This is the only one of these that exists.

It's the only Ethiopian Texas smokehouse in existence.

It sort of reshaped my idea of what barbecue can be.

Rarely do you actually find something that is truly one of a kind.

And I think that is what has helped make Smoke 'N Ash successful.

They've been able to move into a larger building.

They've gotten covered by New York Times.

Our story is the story of American Dream.

Foreigner coming from another country, bringing their own culture, and to kind of merge it with the culture that's already existed here.

DANIEL: I think Texas is a place where tradition is valued, but innovation is also really rewarded.

We're not afraid to change things up.

We're not afraid to ask the question of "What is barbecue?"

Push the horizons of what barbecue can be.

PETER: The landscape in Texas is changing all over the state, but it's also a mentality that's changing.

MEGHA: Houston has become so much in the last 30 years, and I think it's because we've nurtured places like this.

DANIEL: Change is gonna happen.

If you're trying to stop it, it's a losing battle.

There's great things about change, but the things that have made a place special aren't just gonna endure on their own.

(dramatic music) I can't tell you how special telling this story was for me.

It has a special place in my heart.

(dramatic music) There are people throughout history who have looked around, seen the way things are, decided that they aren't right and decided to do something about that.

Once development comes on this island, the habitat is gone.

It looks as if it were a scene from a world war.

Something needed to be done.

Whatever you do, stand out for your rights.

I think that's what makes them an inspiration to all of us.

(dramatic music) ♪ I love it ♪ We're on the precipice of a great discovery.

(upbeat music) ♪ I will be ♪ Fasten your seatbelt.

(dramatic music) 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 keys.

Dreams do come through, Alead.

ANNOUNCER 1: Major funding for this program was provided by: ANNOUNCER 2: At H-E-B, we're proud to offer over 6,000 products grown, harvested, or made by our fellow Texans.

♪ I saw miles and miles ♪ ANNOUNCER 2: It's all part of our commitment to preserving the future of Texas and supporting our Texas neighbors.

(gentle music) ANNOUNCER 3: Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation is dedicated to conserving the wild things and wild places in Texas.

Learn more at tpwf.org.