(birds chirping) In a place that's changing as rapidly as Texas is, it's really important for us to remember where we came from.

Fresh nixtamalized masa challenges the stereotype that Mexican food is cheap.

We had to get away and get space and it's just made us a thousand times stronger, I think.

JACKIE: We have very strong ancestry and seek to be able to honor that.

J.B.: Knowing where we come from allows us to be more of ourselves.

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

(bright 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.

(bright dramatic music) (bright music) Whenever there's trauma, you can come out of it and learn something from it.

It was very messy.

It was very destructive.

And at the end of it, people emerged with a new mission to strengthen their culture and strengthen their ties to their ancestral roots.

My name is Cynthia Drake.

I wrote a story about the Caddo Mounds for Texas Monthly.

(gentle music) In April, 2019, they were celebrating Caddo Culture Day at Caddo Mounds state historic site and a freak tornado came up kind of out of the middle of nowhere.

REPORTER: Widespread damage and multiple injuries have been reported after storms hammered down on East Texas.

The day quickly turned from a celebration to a site of trauma.

REPORTER: Cars tossed, trees uprooted, and debris scattered everywhere.

That's how it looks right now around Caddo Mounds state park.

CYNTHIA: The visitor's center was really the area where the tornado hit the hardest.

RACHEL: Like the window shattered.

The lights went out.

The walls came down.

I mean, it was scary because, I mean it could have wiped out all the Caddo artists, all the Caddo drummers, all the Caddo singers and the elders all at the same time so.

Yeah, it was something, and I think most people were in shock and it didn't register for a long time.

(gentle music) Five years after the tornado, I knew that they were reopening their visitor center.

I went to the site thinking that I was gonna kind of write about the visitor's center and the irony is, the visitor's center was maybe the least important part of that whole story.

So that was the really interesting thing, right?

These mounds are ancient and they were fine.

The garden, Snake Woman's Garden, the fence came down, but the garden was fine.

And so all of those sacred things on the site were okay.

And it gave us this really unique opportunity to think about rebuilding what that looks like out here and how to do it better and how to do it in deeper partnership with Caddo.

Rachel had started the journey of rethinking her mission and her purpose before the tornado, but I feel like the tornado, it just cemented that direction for her.

I'm an employee of the state of Texas at a cultural heritage site whose mission is to bring people in and educate.

And at the same time, I'm an employee of the state working on Sacred Caddo Land, which is a sacred burial site.

(bright music) These mounds are not a site that Caddo would look at as a tourist destination.

Rachel's goal is to create a space where Caddo people feel, how do I wanna say it, not that they're welcome 'cause it is their site, it's that they're welcomed back.

The Caddo people were among the first inhabitants of Texas.

They created some of the roots that colonial settlers would later use or trade, essentially creating what we now know as Texas.

It's hard for people to understand how influential the Caddo tribe was to this area.

A lot of people don't know that Texas is a Caddo word, but our tribe, which used to be so huge, got dwindled down to four or 500, and the Caddo mounds, you know, most of which have been plowed down through agriculture and stuff like that.

I learned the plants and the wildlife at Caddo Mounds is equally, if not more important than the manmade structures there.

The Caddo people even today see the site as not so much a historical site, but a living, breathing site.

Since the tornado, Rachel solicited grants and other funding to bring native plants back to Caddo Mounds.

So river cane is one of our precious materials that we're really thriving to reestablish and revitalize.

We used it for weaving mats and baskets and making the arrows and blow guns and I mean we used it a lot.

When we were removed to Oklahoma, that ecosystem is really different than what is here in Arkansas and Louisiana for that river cane.

So that's one of those significant things that it's really good to have here.

Last winter, we actually propagated our first river cane.

You know, that was the first time Caddo had been caring, propagating, conserving things on this space for decades.

You know, it gives a space to just be on the land, which is pretty incredible.

'Cause, you know, when you think of agencies, there's always rules and regulations, and sometimes they forget people.

And she's very firm on trying to be respectful for us.

I mean, we're just people and we have very strong ancestry and seek to share that and be able to honor that.

There's a lot of worry about whether Caddos would come back out here, how they would perceive a tornado almost wiping out half the tribe.

I was actually part of the crew that helped rebuild Koo Hoot Kiwat, the grass house.

and for me it's very special.

It took a whole community and it was highly emotional, but healing at the same time.

I actually went to a school that told me that our tribe was extinct and that was when I was in third grade and I was right there.

So any type of way that is sharing our ancestry and skills, it's important to me.

What we're doing here today is Caddo Culture Day, which is we're in the process of sort of changing that up.

And so today is neat because it's joyful and it's kind of on our terms as far as how we share and what we're showing.

As a Caddo native, this is, you know, important to you being here.

This is like a reconnection to our ancestors really.

At Caddo Mounds, the mission has changed.

It's less about the visitor.

It's more about bringing back Caddo people to strengthen their culture and strengthen their ties to their ancestral roots.

It's a different approach and a different perspective.

Instead of let me tell you this, it's let me learn from you.

You know, may I learn from you, instead of being extractive.

The Caddo stories are the stories of Texas.

Their input on this land, which is sacred land for them, is vital.

(bright music) Convenience has taken so much from us.

We want everything quickly.

But when you dig into the past, you can become parts of this ancient tradition that makes us who we are.

I'm Jose Ralat, Texas Monthly's taco editor, and I wrote the story, "Meet the Masa Masters of Texas."

Olivia Lopez is a chef and co-owner of Molino Oloyo, which is in Dallas.

She and her partner, Jonathan Percival, focus on nixtamalized corn tortillas.

As the saying goes in Spanish, (speaks in Spanish) Without corn, there is no civilization.

It's all about the corn, which is what masa is made of.

Masa is the foundation of not only Mexican food, but Mexican culture.

The base of Mexican diet, it's masa.

And then from masa, many, many, many products come by.

To get great masa, you need to nixtamalize corn kernels.

Nixtamalization is the process by which dried corn is cooked and steeped in an alkaline solution releasing nutrients.

The process itself originated about 4,000 years ago in Mesoamerica.

You can't learn it overnight.

Sometimes it takes years.

It's as much a science as it is an art.

Two minutes more.

I can tell you that it's a labor of love.

JOSE: A lot of people don't have time for that.

So nixtamalized corn fell out of favor during the 80's.

With the advent of rehydrated corn, prepackaged corn tortillas threatened the tradition's life.

Thankfully, we had Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans who wanted to reconnect with their roots, and they went all in.

Having a taste of a nixtamalized tortilla or anything like that is, you know, like closing your eyes and going home.

JOSE: For the story, I went to their commercial kitchen.

It's no frills, it's pots, it's pans, but then you also have boxes of corn of all different colors.

Blue, white, yellow, red, purple.

So it's a treat for the eyes first and then a treat for your stomach.

Olivia is from Colima, which is a small state in Mexico.

She was a fine dining chef when she came to the States.

That's where she learned to cook.

I worked in a fine dining restaurant, French-inspired food, but I was not happy at all.

I quit my job there and I was already reading about heirloom corn and the movement.

So when I went back home, it was important for me to find out what was available where I'm from, in the region that I grew up.

Olivia went back to Mexico and studied at a corn cooperative.

That's when I said I know what I'm doing.

I'm grinding corn.

First, I was grinding by hand because I wanted to have a feeling and understanding the masa, doing my own nixtamalization, just for me to have a better understanding of the things that I grew up eating.

But it was also like a mystery for me to understand how the process of each thing was done.

It's important to learn about nixtamalization and masa because it's at the roots of the culture, but also without nixtamalization, the nutritional value of these tortillas is lost.

Through the nixtamalization process, the composition of the corn gets alter and bring up basically all the nutrients.

Corn is not a bad grain.

Corn has a lot of benefits.

It's just the way that it's been sold to us.

(speaks in foreign language) Fresh nixtamalized masa challenges the stereotype that Mexican food is cheap, that it's bad for you.

And so now, masa is seeing new light within Texas, and Oloyo is not the only operation focusing on nixtamalization.

It's very labor intensive, it's not very cheap, but there's definitely a passion behind it and a flavor that you're not gonna get from any other style of tortilla.

OLIVIA: The taste will take you home.

This is something that like, makes me want to cry when I taste it.

The renewed focus on nixtamalized corn is a reconnection to heritage, to memories, and this idea that Mexican food is actually healthy for you.

Knowing where we come from allows us to be more of ourselves.

It feels natural to do it to me and that's what makes me very happy.

JOSE: Food traditions of all sorts reconnect us with our roots.

(bright music) Some people look at returning to your roots as a regression or a step back.

But I think in this case, it's a second chance.

They're becoming that band again and returning to their passion and music that started it all for them.

My name is J.B. Sauceda.

I'm the host of the Viva Tejano podcast and this is a story about Girl in a Coma.

(gentle music) Girl in a Coma is a band from San Antonio, two sisters and a close friend that was started back in the mid-2000's, like 2000's, and grew to a lot of fame and success, but they broke up in the late teens.

When I was working on a podcast called Viva Tejano, which was exploring the kind of Mexican-American Tejano identity in Texas, I interviewed Phanie Diaz and Jenn Alva and they started to reference all of the learnings that they had about themselves and what led ultimately to them breaking up.

(gentle music) There was, you know, something there to this idea that, you know, your band mates are really your colleagues and your coworkers and if you don't take the time to kind of work stuff out, it can be kind of explosive.

Given some time, 2020 hindsight, I thought that they'd make for a good interview.

JENN: In 1995, we went to Suni Gardens to see Babes in Toyland.

Yeah, empowering.

Changed everything.

The control of the stage just being three women, we're like, "We have to strike a man."

Like her mom picked us up, we're in the backseat like already making plans like, okay.

Phanie's little sister, Nina, had an incredible knack for songwriting and they pulled her in to round out this trio.

Nina came up to us, we're sitting on the porch and she's like, "I wanna show you guys a song."

And when she was done, I thought she was showing us a cover and I was like, "Whose song is that?"

She's like, "It's mine."

And we were blown away with her voice.

She was 12, we were 20.

(upbeat music) J.B.: One of their first big breaks was catching Joan Jett's ear and getting signed to Blackheart Records.

And Joan told us to enjoy it 'cause it's gonna happen really fast.

Yeah.

And it did.

Their debut album, Both Before I'm Gone, exploded in 2007, and actually peaked at number 21 on the iTunes sales list, which was a big deal back then.

That was really the primary way to buy music digitally back in those days.

And it was around this time that Morrissey discovered their music and asked them to go on tour with him.

He came down the hall once.

I was with Phanie and he was walking down the hall and it went just to the wall.

I think I did too.

I saw her do that and I'm like, "Okay, we're doing this.

We're not gonna look at him."

I don't know.

I can't make eye contact.

I don't know.

Just kept going from there.

It was like Tegan and Sara, social distortion, see us.

The biggest show we did was to half a million people.

That was probably one of the top, like where we realized, Jesus.

Very rapidly, they punched through being this indie band from San Antonio to a nationally known group.

There was immense pressure everywhere in this sort of meteoric growth in success, and a lot of that pressure actually came from within the band.

I lost my voice once and I was like I can't, like I cannot sing.

I literally cannot sing, and I was like 14 years old.

And they were just mad at me, like, because I had to cancel.

And I remember, I could still remember, like feeling the pain in my stomach and like falling of like, "I'm doing bad."

Like I don't think they understood at the time of the amount of pressure, like I couldn't even be sick, you know?

So that kinda stayed in my brain.

I started doing drugs at one point and I'm 12 years sober now.

It's gonna be 12 years.

But that was my way to kind of disassociate.

I didn't have the tools yet to understand how to navigate it, like emotions and expectations, and communication, number one.

I can understand that a lot of that was a lot for her, you know.

It's like she didn't really have, like the teenage years that we had.

Nina one day just called a band meeting and told the other two, "I'm out, I'm over it.

We're done."

What was their reaction?

Anger and resentment.

We were upset, we were crying.

We were like, "What do we do?"

We were like, "Why?"

Like our momentum was...

I chose my mental health over anything else, over finances, over relationships.

In so many ways, it was more than a band breaking up.

It was putting best friends and siblings at odds with one another.

For several years, it strained Nina and Phanie's relationship to the point where they didn't actually communicate.

Phanie and Jenn turned around and started another band called Fea.

Meanwhile, Nina spent the next few years out in LA working on a bunch of different creative endeavors, including working as a solo musician.

But there was something inside saying you're not done yet.

Through a series of life events, including COVID, Nina and Phanie end up living back together at their mom's house.

And in a discussion about different ways that they could make money, they ultimately agree that Girl in a Coma should play at least one last concert.

Which, of course, sells out.

Audience is incredibly energetic and excited about them being back together.

It was good to reconnect with the fans to give them that show they didn't really get.

That's when we saw, "Oh, we could do this again."

Like it's possible to do this again.

And that's part of the thing of all three of us remembering, why did we start to do this is because we love to create and help people, like make people feel something.

J.B.: They decide that maybe playing together isn't so bad after all, and they should give being a band another shot.

And now we have another chance.

(drums beating) J.B.: That space actually gave them some time to reflect on how they individually contributed to the breakup.

Along with that, it gave Nina a lot of opportunities to just learn how to produce music from scratch herself.

She built a vocal booth in a closet and has the mixing board just a few feet away from where she sleeps every night.

This is my cave, so I'm just researching constantly and troubleshooting and trial and error.

J.B.: They're now working together to produce a new album.

Yeah, just do a couple of that for me and then we're okay.

I'm just gonna hold it.

Okay, go for it.

Yeah.

Okay, one second.

It's very relaxed and I want them to know that's what it's gonna be like.

We'd always put this pressure on ourselves every time we went into the studio.

I wanna show them that we could do it ourselves.

That's perfect, man.

You're a good drummer.

I'm excited that I'm not gonna have to do a lot of editing, so thank you.

PHANIE: You're welcome.

They all seem really hopeful and optimistic that things can be better this go around.

They've all set really clear boundaries.

Jenn talked a lot about the balance that she wants to strike with her wife and having kids at home and Nina is pushing and pulling in the ways that she wants to creatively.

(bright music) ♪ Have you been awake yet in a trance ♪ ♪ Have you told a lie in just a glance ♪ ♪ Have you been the one looking about ♪ We had to get away and get space and come back like this.

It's just made us a thousand times stronger, I think.

I think people will see how much we've grown individually as writers and with our powers combined.

Think its gonna be a pretty good album.

♪ Give yourself a break in another world ♪ ♪ Give yourself ♪ J.B.: It was so clear as I watched them work, they were defaulting to trust.

♪ Give yourself some time to figure it out ♪ I think what we needed to do was remember we were sisters because as soon as we started the band, she became a band mate first and the time apart made me realize the roots of us being sisters most of all.

(bright music) Taking a break from the story that we're living long enough to actually be able to retell it is really valuable, and more importantly, being able to share those lessons with other people, improving ourselves and the people that we love.

(bright music) In a place that's changing as rapidly as Texas is, it's really important for us to remember where it all started, that we have a sense of who we are, how far we've come, and how much further we can go.

Texas is filled with so many different people, but we risk losing some of those stories and that history if we don't return back to our roots.

Knowing where we come from allows us to be more of ourselves.

You learn how you fit into that narrative.

We wanna hold on to those things.

They make us who we are.

Returning to your roots is all about revisiting and exploring the things that make you who you are.

And as a result, being given an opportunity to create more and build on the foundation that those roots set.

CYNTHIA: I think that's really special and it it makes for a really good story.

So good.

Very few people get to see the fruition of their dreams.

He found a horrible problem.

He was passionate about trying to find a solution.

I just threw it out there to the universe.

It just hit him like a bolt outta the blue.

I wish that would happen to me with wording of a story.

The quail were decimated by the diseases.

It's like a holy grail of medicine.

This changed the restaurant industry forever.

♪ I love it.

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

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

Actress 1] As long as we're together, it's perfect.

ACTRESS 2: Love is not as simple as you seem to think.

ACTRESS 1: We're so close to cracking the case.

ACTOR: Dreams do come through, Elliot.

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

(bright 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.