ICE shooting: What happened to de-escalation (July 10, 2026)

According to multiple reports, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not an initial target of ice. Harris County DA Sean Tier says his office is investigating the man's death at the hands of ICE agents Tuesday, but admits lacking the sort of access it has in nearly any other officer involved shooting. I'm Craig Cohen. Today on Houston Matters, how past officer-involved shootings led many law enforcement agencies to train officers to de-escalate, something that seems far less evident from ICE and CVP. Houston Matters with Craig Cohen is a production of Houston Public Media with support from Baylor College of Medicine. Also this hour, this week's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Our mean-show Jacob chats with percussionist Cahill El-Zabar. And we recall the time that Boris Yeltsin walked into a Clear Lake. grocery store. We'll start with a news update from NPR and News 887. Stay with us. This is Houston Matters. I'm Craig Cohen. Good morning. Thanks for joining us here on News 887 and on Houston Public Media's YouTube channel. Coming up this hour, percussionist Cahill El-Zabar. We recall the day Boris Yeltsin visited a Clear Lake grocery store, plus this week's the good, the bad, and the ugly. First, though, multiple reports suggest Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not an initial target of ice. Salgado Arraujo was shot and killed by an ice agent Tuesday in Magnolia Park. His family says he was a home builder with no criminal record who was pursuing legal status. A spokesperson for Houston area Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia told Houston Public Media Thursday that, quote, another passenger had an administrative warrant and was the target. The congresswoman then confirmed Salgado Arraho was not. not a target last night on MS Now. The New York Times cites information obtained from the Department of Homeland Security that none of the people in Salgado Araujo's vehicle were initial targets of the federal agents, but one may have resembled someone who was. On Hello Houston Thursday, Harris County District Attorney Sean Tier said his office is conducting its own investigation despite not being invited to participate in the federal one. He also acknowledged his office, quote, does not have the same level of access that it does. in almost any other officer involved shooting. Other police involved shootings and deaths over the years, including Houstonian George Floyd in Minneapolis, and what happened to Sandra Bland in Christopher Waller County and beyond, led to calls for, among other things, improved police training built around the notion of de-escalation that law enforcement should seek ways to help reduce the temperature in all interactions with the public. And while many law enforcement agencies, local, state, and federal have incorporated or improved such training, it seems a lot less evident. when it comes to ICE and Customs and Border Protection. While we still don't know exactly what went down Tuesday, what video we do have repeats a familiar pattern. Unidentified, masked ice agents in unmarked vehicles attempting to run down and apprehend people in other vehicles who may not know what's happening. Not exactly the model for de-escalation.

To discuss what's behind de-escalation techniques and how incidents like Tuesday's shooting might be avoided through them, we are joined now by Dr. Everett Penn, Director of the Texas Juvenile Crime Prevention Center at Prairie View A&M University. Good morning, sir. Good morning. Thank you for having me. Why is de-escalation something that seems appropriate for law enforcement across the board except when it comes to the agency's tasked with enforcing immigration? De-esculization has been around for a while, but it folds under the general topic of what we've learned with community policing, especially in the 2010 time period. Community policing comes together and certainly has been around for several years before. But during that time, we saw this important aspect of body cams coming together, the acknowledgement that there is implicit bias as well as de-escalization training, all coming out of the horrible cases that we saw in that 2010 time frame. It seems as though, indeed, that we have moved away from what we know as these. researched community policing practices. And we've gone to an earlier time frame that had us to indeed have that research in the first place. So we've got to look at all the case. We've got to look at all of the information that's around us. But we have some of the principles that we know work in order to reduce that strain that often occurs between citizens and police. Falling back on what we know from the research helps us to move forward to decline and to have less of these horrible incidents to occur. Is it fair to characterize action from ICE, like carrying out raids masked and heavily armed, often not identified as an example of escalation? We know this. You talked about Sandra Bland. 2017-2018, the Texas legislature, very smartly, came out with SB 30. SB 30 bill that said that... Citizens need to know what happens during a traffic stop. And we even had the reinstitution and training of police officers. Every police officer, every person who is obtaining a driver's license had to go through this or has to go through this training of what to do during a traffic stop. When you take that away or when you're concerned that perhaps some police agencies follow this practice and others don't, you then have a citizen who doesn't know what to do and is concerned about their safety. Indeed. We know am I being robbed or some other terrible thing is happening. The general rule that we have that at least we teach when we're teaching SB 30, the Community Safety Education Act, is that an unmarked car is not allowed to stop you and make a traffic arrest or traffic sort of incident out of that. If you're taught that and then you see this unmarked car doing actions that could be a robbery or something to hurt you, then that probably puts you on the defensive and certainly does not de-escalate. the situation. What is missing in how the federal illegal immigration crackdown is carried out that may lead to incidents like this? Big picture. We are looking at transparency. What we know about police, citizen relationship.

A, we want everyone to go home. We want safety to be number one for the citizen and for the police officer. Transparency helps us to do that. If I know what the practice is, if I know how a traffic stop should operate, I know the procedures, never giving away any secret, secret tactics of the police. But if I have an idea of how it works and the SB 30 Community Safety Education Act by law from the state of Texas says that is what we should know, that allows for less incidents to occur. The question now, Today in 2026 is what pieces are we playing with now? How is the procedure taking place, which makes for citizens to be concerned about their own personal safety because they do not know what should happen when these interactions occur? You say, first of all, everybody wants everyone to go home safe. Indeed. There are no doubt some folks listening, however, who have very hardline views about immigration policy who say... Anyone who's in the country illegally is therefore a criminal and should be held to account. And some argue anyone who runs from ICE, even though, again, we don't really know if that happened in this case, but anyone who does gets what they deserve. You can find these comments easily online. Some believe it fervently. To them, what you're talking about, the very concept of de-escalation by law enforcement is just some touchy-feely thing that's not... practical or necessary. Fine for traffic tickets, not for this. What do you say to those folks? Let's hope that that stays in the minority, that there are not people that hold that point of view as the view that is the majority. Let's just remember that what you wish or think upon someone else could happen to you. and your family members who may be perceived as something that they're not. But there's also the human dignity that we as a country see that there are certain ways things should be done. And we want safety to be on the mind of every single person. So this idea of transparency in teaching everyone what should be done should allow for the interaction of police officers, law enforcement to do their job at the federal, state or local level. But we want everyone to be safe in that process. Safety for all should be the... primary concern and any interaction with citizens and police. If you were given the opportunity to stand in front of a room of newly hired ICE agents and could train them about how to most effectively carry out their responsibilities without resorting to or at least not beginning with aggression and violence, what would you say to them? Well, the law was passed by the federal government in 2022 that said that this de-escalization training is important and it should be throughout the United States at the local and the state and the federal level. Indeed, our own senator passed it there. So it's there. What the answer is, it's already there. The de-escalization training exists with Perth, the police executive research forum. One can go on their website and see that they offer training. There's going to be training in Tyler, Texas in September. This training is available. It's research base that's already out there. We already know the answers. Let's apply them and implement them to keep everyone safe.

Dr. Everett Penn is the director of the Texas Juvenile Crime Prevention Center at Prairie View A&M University. Dr. Penn, thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Up next, from a lowered Atlantic hurricane season outlook to a call-to-block prediction market access for minors. We contemplated intrigues in the news on the good, the bad, and the ugly as Houston Matters continues on News 887 in YouTube. A lot can happen in a week. Some of it good, some of it bad, some of it downright ugly. When faced with intriguing developments in the week's news, we turn to a rotating panel of non-experts to parse the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all. On today's panel, Vivian Ho, health economist at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine, Joyce Sewing, news columnist with the Houston Chronicle, and Mary, legal consultant with Androvet Legal Media and Marketing. Vivian, Joy, Mary. Welcome to Houston Matters. Good morning. Good morning, Craig. Panel, one of the nation's top hurricane forecasters lowered its Atlantic hurricane season outlook on Wednesday. Colorado State University's Department of Atmospheric Science now calls for nine named storms. four hurricanes and just one of them major this season far below what we typically expect year to year. The department says a developing El Nino pattern and the wind shear that comes with it should limit storm formation and strength this summer leading to, quote, well below normal activity. As the Kron's Michael Josh Shapiro reported this week, the updated storm season forecast even lowers chances of a major hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast specifically. Of course, as we all know, it only takes one nasty storm, and it doesn't even need to be a tropical storm or hurricane to cause a world of hurt, so we should stay ready as ever this summer. Still, the latest thinking is less storms and less severity. Is this good, bad, or ugly? Vivian House, start us off. I think this isn't just good. It's a great news, particularly when you think about those Houstonians who have been hit by hurricanes in the past, they're still waiting to get repairs, and they just never fully recover. So that's good. And in terms of the economic consequences, Our home insurance rates have been going up dramatically like everything else, and a part of that is due to hurricanes. So hopefully this means good news, although just from reading the Houston Chronicle, unfortunately, we don't have good information on amount of coverage and price of coverage compared to other states, but I guess the state legislature is working on that. Texas Department of Insurance is working on that. Hopefully... hopefully will be able to sort of benefit from seasons when hurricanes are not as common. Okay, good, bad, or ugly joy sewing. I don't know if it's good, bad, or ugly or cautious because, you know, we know that even if it's a light hurricane, if our power goes out.

for a couple of days, then many of us are in deep, deep waters. And it's not just about whether the strength of the hurricane or the storm. It's all of the things that happen afterwards. And I don't know. Sometimes I just don't trust. what you know some of the information because I and I just want to always be prepared so okay good bad or ugly Mary flood it's good but you know you've got to be cautious I want to take some comfort in this but I've been through Alicia to barrel and it sounds like that's not much because it's A to B but it was a lot but you know I'm still going to buy the water and that I'll drink and the peanut butter and crackers that I'll eat and the canned soup that I'll throw out in two to three years but um You know, I can't really believe, probably not until November 30th. Right. And in the meantime, I'm going to pay... very close attention to Eric Berger, our former colleague at the Houston Chronicle, who does such good job, and to this guy in Florida I love. His name is Mike Boylan, and he runs Mike's Weather Page. And he does every day, he calls it the Daily Brew because there's some beer involved, but there is a lot of beer involved. But he's taught me so much about low pressure and all the different predictions and stuff. But again, you know, I want to be cautious, but. November 30th is one I'll say, oh yeah, it was a great year. Can I just say one thing? When you talked about the insurance, and I think a lot of people don't pay attention to their policies, especially when they're renewing. I went back and looked at my policy and they hadn't updated my, that had put on a new roof in 2024, which was very significant. And I sent all the information and everything. And they still had not updated it. So now I'm appealing to get, you know, a refund. Oh, it should go down. Yeah. I don't think it'll generally go down. That's not the way insurance works. Panel prediction market platforms like calcium polymarket are all the rage these days. They allow folks to bet on the outcomes of all sorts of things. Well, the Texas Medical Association is concerned they could be causing more young adults to develop gambling addictions, and the organization wants state lawmakers next session to establish restrictions on such platforms for anyone under 21. As KERA's health reporter Abigail Ruman reported this week, Texas is among 11 states where sports betting is illegal, but... prediction markets currently are regulated like commodity futures trades as event contracts that can be tied to sports.

So I can see why the Texas Medical Association is saying this is important to not have the exposure to the gambling early on. And that makes a lot of sense. I'm hopeful that the legislature will act on this simply because, you know, Texas, we have stricter alcohol laws still. There are things that sort of run in the deep beliefs of some of our legislatures, and I'm hopeful of that act. Vivian Ho is a health economist at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine. Joy Sowing is a news columnist with the Houston Chronicle. Mary Flood is a legal consultant with Androvet Legal Media and Marketing. Vivian, Joy, Mary. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Thanks, Craig. This is Houston Matters. I'm Craig Cohen. Tonight, percussionist Cahill El Zabar brings his decades-long musical partnership with saxophonist David Murray here to Houston to close out their We Be Free Tour at the Houston Museum of African American Culture. El Zabar is a four-time Jazz Journalist Association percussionist of the year, a Grammy nominee, and one of only four African-Americans honored by the French government as a knight of order of arts and letters recognized for his global impact on jazz. He tells Houston Matters, producer Meecho Jacob, he's come a long way from where and when he started. I graduated from high school in 1969. The desegregation act wasn't even enacted until 67, and it was then actually put into action in 68. So that was just... a year before I came out of high school, which meant I lived and experience separate but equal and couldn't go on the front of a bus legally, couldn't use a water fountain, couldn't go into a bathroom, couldn't go into a hotel or a restaurant that was excluded to my community. I lived that. And so I told my children, you're not going through that. What we're going through is extremely difficult, but knowing in history what people have suffered and conquered in spite of the atrocities, it gives us a vehicle of optimism, not with naivety, but hopefully with a clarity to invention, instinct, and innovation of looking at humanity to a lens counter. to the rhetoric and supreme ignorance of um you know nationalist supremacist views i have to see positive because i can't win with pessimism we have to see the art as conduit and openings to another path, if you will, the choices we make right now are essential. Yeah, it's interesting that you have this career. You played with some of the biggest names. I mean, some of my favorites.

from Nina Simone, definitely somebody whose music is life-changing. You know, is there a lot of idea back then when you're playing with them? Is that music is political, that artist political? Do you still see that in music, popular music out there today? Well, in the words of Madame Simone, there are interviews where she says, I'm not political, I'm cultural. And so, man, where are you going to run to run to? And so, yes, you know, there were, um, expressions and. I believe rituals and commitments and work ethics to counter the negative political controversies and consequences that were upon people. But to empower a different ethos and a different thought process where we're not supposed to be reacting, but more inventing. You know, when we're listening to a Love Supreme by Coltrane, he's not reacting to the darkness. He's inventing the light. He's innovating the voice.

When you listen to the art ensemble and the piece would say, get in line, get in line. And they're talking about what it was to be in the military. And they're translating it with humor and super intelligence. Or when they painted their faces before Queen and all the rock groups, it's innovation. inventing possibilities of the unseen and using the art as the transmitter of a new opportunity in learning from these great elders, whether it's... Nina or Rassan Roland Kirk who I got to play with or Donnie Halfway, you know, Cannonball Alley's intelligence and bounce and fun, but at the same time, serious compositional ethic as with Mingus, right? All of these lessons are supposed to translate into a new opportunity. And that's what I've been trying to do with my work. I was thinking when I was reading about you and listening to the music. Ned Sublette is this, as no music college, just wrote about Cuban music. And in there, in his big tomb about Cuba, he goes a lot about Africa because that's the root of the music. And how in Africa we, you know, we were playing drums before we were speaking. And as a drummer, you know, and an elder, you know, speaking to people, you know, what is that? How do you speak with the drum and compose these things in art? And how do people see that? I don't even know if I'm making a good question for you. No, I mean, I hear, see, and feel, you know, what you're saying. Oh. Life is transmitted through vibration. All life. You know, there's an audible part of that. There's a frequency part of that. There's a visual part of that. And there's a holistic transmission that happens through the voice. And the voice, not the human voice, but the metaphor of sound that translates life into being. And so rhythm represents those frequencies of vibration. articulated into form. And that's what rhythm is. It's the articulation of frequency into form. And in the traditional cultures, it adhered to nature in everything, in language, in movement, and child rearing, and all of these things. And that's part of the problem in today's world is that we are obviously out of tune with nature.

Open in your third eye. Every day when you fly in your dream. And so that first voice rhythmically and the language is as it came from. Like if you said in Yoruba, Africa Ni'Ilemi, the phonetic syllables of that can be played on the drum. So it was not just the symbolic or metaphorical. It was the actual technical articulation. You know, if I said, Africa ni'lemi. I said, what's happening? Imi Koshi Ire. That you can actually mathematically break down syntax and vocabulary through rhythm. And so when they actually were talking about... the African languages playing the music and speaking, it was a scientific technical reinterpretation of the spoken tongue being expressed directly through the drum. That's pretty sophisticated. So my time in studies in Ghana, gave me a firsthand approach to then try to translate what was in this ancient tradition. How could I create a parallel representation today? You can pray in my house, song and dance. in my house. Reach to the soul in my house. Pray to the highest mother father in my house. And so that's why my band was called the ethnic heritage ensemble because people of African descent were never able to define or to rally around tradition as their heritage. If you were German or if you were French or if you're from China, you could speak about the heritage in all elements of culture. With people of African descent in the Western world, this was legally taken away. So people don't even think about that African Americans more so than Afro-Latins. African-Americans were legally not allowed to play hand drums. So you don't really find any African-American percussionists until the 1960s because it was against the law. And African-American percussionists were looking at their Latin African-Africian brothers and sisters and African...

artists from the continent in order to figure out their relationship to that. We played trap drums because trap drums were the reinvention of the omission legally of playing drums. And so Baby Dodds, who played with Louis Armstrong, came up with the idea of taking the parade drum. uh the tom and the bass drum which were played in three parts and he invented a way to play all of those things in a contrapuntal approach uh through counterpoint so you know and and then what i tried to do was take the traditional drum kit along with hand drumming and develop a way to synthesize those things into what I have done with the ethnic heritage ensemble and other projects. And you've been playing with David Murray for decades, right? And we figured out in this tour. 51 years. Just a little bit of time. What is that like? Having that kind of musical dialogue with somebody for so long now that you're both, you know, elders in the community. You know, when you think about, you know, David Murray, right? We just lost the great Sonny Rollins, you know, an iconic figure of jazz and the tenor saxophone. And one of his favorite... saxophonist was David Murray because David, through his study, his commitments, his technical virtuosity, has done what is the most difficult thing to do, and that's to develop an original voice.

And you're coming to Houston to be performing at this BioCity Storage exhibition. And as you say, you're interpreting the past and into this new generation. What does that mean as you come here to Houston, you know, a city that likes to build itself as the future, right? We're space city, but we're also in the south. We're also in the bayous, the Gulf Coast, a long history, imperial sugar. right here in our backyard. You know, what does that like coming here to sit to Houston at this point in time to be in that kind of space? Houston is a very soulful, very deep. centered space, but at the same time, it's extremely controversial in its contradictions. So hopefully we come to bring a reaffirming of the value of soul and spirit and hopefully connect with the community during this multidisciplinary arts presentation that will share a hopeful and inventive space. Cahill El Zabar performs tonight at 8 o'clock at the Houston Museum of African American Culture as part of the museum's latest Bayou City Stewards, America from Our Perspective Exhibition. He spoke with Houston Matters producer, Meant Show Jacob. Still to come, Boris Yeltson walks into a Clear Lake grocery store. No, it's not the start of a joke. It is, though, a part of Houston history. Stay with us as Houston Matters continues on News 887 and YouTube.

35 years ago today, Boris Yeltsin assumed office as the first elected president of Russia. In light of how the country has operated over the years since under Vladimir Putin, younger Houstonians may not realize what a big deal this was, a democratically elected leader of the then very recently former Soviet Union. And not just anyone. He was the man who had stood defiantly on a tank in Moscow two years prior and called for a group of communist hardliners to give up a short-lived coup. You'd also be forgiven for thinking this moment in world politics had nothing to do with Houston. In fact, it did thanks to a food town that closed last year on El Dorado Boulevard and Highway 3. See, before Yeltsin was elected president, before he stood on that tank, he was a member of the Russian Parliament who, in September of 1989, was in town to tour Johnson Space Center. And he found himself with some unexpected free time and wanted to see... what Americans bought at the grocery store. Paul Yerga was the manager on duty that day at what was then a Randall supermarket. In 2020, he recalled that moment telling Houston Matters Michael Haggerty how it was just another Saturday at work when the phone rang at the courtesy booth. I took the call and the person identified themselves as being with NASA. They said they were touring Boris Yelsohn through the facility, and they had a 30-minute gap in their schedule. So they asked Boris Yeltsin what he wanted to do, and he said he wanted to visit an American grocery store. So we had about 10 or 15 minutes warning that he was going to be there to visit us. Okay, so he arrives. What happens? What kind of entourage was there? Tell me about that. It was a very small entourage, especially by today's standards. This is the leader of Russia, and here he is walking into my store, and it was him and about five or six other people that looked like they were from Russia, and then two or three more people that looked like they were from NASA. So it was, you know, 12 people maybe. No sign of any heavy-duty security or anything around. There were no TV vans because nobody knew it was going to happen. And no radio people. It was just kind of real spontaneous, so nobody had time to get there. Very low-key. So what do you remember about what he looked around at and what he did while he was walking to the store? Well, it was really just kind of like what you would expect when somebody goes into a shop or even like a museum maybe, a place that they've always wanted to go to, never had a chance to. Finally, here they are. And he was not disappointed. He looked at the ceilings. He looked at the floors. He looked at the products. He looked at the employees, the customers. He was just taking it all in. Do you remember what products he seemed most interested in? The perishables, you know, the fruits and vegetables and the meat department also. And he got a little publicity from the Chronicle about jello pudding pops. I don't remember that happening, but maybe it did. He was in the frozen food aisle.

What else do you remember about that day, about that visit? Well, I was impressed by how down to earth the guy was. He was very unassuming, very polite. He did not speak English with us. I don't know if he knew English or not, but he chose to speak in Russian. And he had a translator with him that stayed with him the whole time and helped him through whatever he needed to do. It was just really interesting to have this guy in the store and watch him, you know. experience an American grocery store for the first time and see the expression on his face and just also at the same time see how down to earth the guy was and courteous. What kinds of reactions do you think he was having? We hear about he seemed to be supposedly wowed by what he saw. Is that what you saw? I don't know if I'd say wowed, but he was pleased with what he saw and I think he would like to have a Randalls in Russia. Yeah. But there were some more serious things written where it seemed like he was reflecting on what we had here versus what they had there. And I'm sure it left an impression on him. That's Paul Yerga talking with our Michael Haggerty in 2020. Yerga was the manager on duty of what was then a Randall's grocery store in Clear Lake when Boris Yeltsin paid the supermarket a visit. The impression the experience left on Yeltsin became clearer years later when he wrote about it in a memoir. His comments caught the attention of Evan Mack and Joshua McGuire, who wrote a comic opera loosely based on the day's events. Yeltsin in Texas debuted in 2020 at Houston's Opera in the Heights. Ahead of those performances, the pair told Michael Haggerty how they were struck by the story's potential for comedy. That could turn into an operatic episode of South Park to just depict this guy, we as kids remember him being drunk on the nightly news all the time, you know, this sort of comic opera type character from real life, put him in a grocery store, and there's all these accounts from his memoirs and stuff, of how much he loved the fruit roll-ups and how much he loved the... Jello pudding pops. And we knew there was something there. And the more we dug, the more it presented itself as something that could kind of access rock opera gears, kind of access Broadway gears. We could really tell a fast-paced story that wasn't just opera funny, but was actually funny. Yeah, I could see, like, at the time, this story being in the news and then maybe doing like an SNL spoof of it, but... An opera, I guess that's just a different approach, different vibe? Sure, but yeah, right. I mean, I think the premise in general was that there's nothing more absurd than an American grocery store. And so, and then there's nothing more absurd than actually singing about it. You know, so it actually added to the level of absurdity that maybe spoken word wouldn't get you, you know, using little snippets of TV commercials from the 80s as a way to jar the audience.

chance. That'll ring funnier than if spoken or acted out. And then, you know, singing in a very loud voice, a list of groceries. I mean, that actually can be very funny. So the beautiful thing about opera, you could take something very mundane and turn it into something grand. And this is an example historically of really at that point Boris Yeltsin wasn't a very special part. He had no, he was just a Soviet dignitary. No one knew he was going to be to end the Soviet Union and be the first president of a free Russia. So the idea of a very mundane visit, if you will, the most mundane of mundane Soviets turns into this grand historic event that no one really knows about. Tell me what goes on in the story. Give me a little bit of a preview of the plot. Ordinary day in this grocery store, you know, the clerk is mopping the floor. He's singing about kind of the Great American Dream. He doesn't like his job. Manager keeps saying that I gotta hurry up. Customers got coupons and they never add up. Everybody talking and they never shut up.

to be chasing some kind of dream but sometimes you just gotta stand up and scream comes in, and the paranoid Rentacob comes in, and they say, you know, the Soviet is coming, the Russian is coming, and everybody's totally freaked out. And so Boris Yeltsin stumbles in, early, drunk, passes out. He wakes up and discovers Pringles. He wakes up and discovers that there are different flavors of Alka-Seltzer. Then he just kind of takes a tour of the battlefield. He does a tour of all things Americana. So think about the cosmetics aisle or the cheese section. And so we... poke fun at all these things, and he tries to relate to the characters. And so there's this cognitive dissonance happening or things get lost in translation a lot. And ultimately, Boris Yeltsin is the bull in the china. And at the moment you think, everyone thinks this is a complete disaster. He sees the produce section. And it reminds him of when Stalin took away his grandfather's farm. And he grew up as a boy hungry. And he said, you guys fed the world. And so there's our turn to realize that this wasn't a very important moment. And so the whole subtext is that the greatness lies in the ordinary because, you know, he toured New York City. He saw the Statue of Liberty, Trump Tower. He wasn't impressed. He saw NASA. Again, no big deal. But it was a grocery store that made him realize that communism is a lie. And he wanted to go back and feed his people. And so when 11 months later, well, two months later, the Berlin Wall falls, and 11 months after that, they're moving in the hardliners with the tanks in Moscow. He's on the tank shouting free markets, free markets. And we actually show that as a sort of a flash forward, and then we kind of sum up what it means to all the characters that visit. So the beautiful thing about writing comedy, and it's sort of nonstop pacing and laughter, is that when you put the drop of drama in there, it reads louder than anything if we wrote a one-hour drama about this story. And the other fun part of this you should mention is that it's like an 80s retro freak out. Because the year is 1989, so... The musical references that we had access to, the cultural references that we had access to. The opera kind of works like a giant meme, you know, or a listicle from BuzzFeed. It's the 80s, everybody, and it's a lot of fun in that regard. You take the trip to the Clare-All Benders and the Bill Cosby impression of the Jello Pudding Pops. And, you know, the buzzabon Jovey song, there's a Frank Stallone song, there's a flash dance song, there's all this stuff. kind of waiting for you as you take this tour at the grocery store for the American audience. We'll give it.

Yeah, I was curious how you handled the serious kind of nature of it, because on the surface, it seems like a very frivolous kind of absurd events or just, you know, a lighthearted, like, oh, look at this outsider, how he views our grocery store. But it seemed like with biographies that you alluded to, biographies and autobiographies seem to suggest that he got kind of despondent after this visit. comparing it to what his people back home had. Eventually, he steps down, kind of giving up on the reforms that he wanted to install in his country. So how do you balance that the absurd, kind of lighthearted, goofy nature of this outsider in a grocery store, but with that serious undertone of... the reality his people were facing. Yeah, so there was a memoir actually in Cyrillic, and we looked first at the chapter about the visit, and he wept on the plane afterwards, that there's breadlines in Moscow. There's this great abundance, and he was sold this lie that American capitalism would destroy everything, and, you know, it's ruinous and greed, and all he saw was abundance. And so you look at that, and that's sort of what springs him into the action at that moment. But if you look back, or now we do at Boris Yeltsin, he was this tragically flawed person who had flashes of greatness. And we're highlighting the one flash of greatness, at least in our eyes in the West, that this is the guy who took down the Soviet Union in the end. He was the final nail in the coffin for the Soviet Union. And, you know, we could talk about all the American policies that tried to do that, but it was Boris Yeltsin, the notorious drunk that we saw in the news in the 90s, say, no, no, no, this is wrong. Freedom is the way to go. Now, obviously, Russia is contending with that now, and we're contending with that now. But it was at a moment, really, the most optimistic point in our country and their country. We were looking at the end of communism and the end of the Cold War, and we thought, wow, what a future this could bring. Yeah, and I think that another way to hook into the seriousness of it is the sort of present quality of the story, because Boris Yeltsin... hands off power directly to Vladimir Putin. And who's on the cover of the Inquirer in the grocery store in 1989, Donald Trump. And so it's apparent, like on the surface of it, it's 30 years ago. But in reality, this is a story about the present political moment. And this just zany sense of American greatness carried to caricature levels. What do you hope that this opera communicates to people other than obviously some fun and a little bit of absurdity? Yeah, so my thing is that American greatness lies in the ordinary. You know, what makes America great? And it's the abundance that we have. It's that times may feel different or we were thinking of a different future. But our greatness lies in the common things that we do every day. It's not the stuff that you see necessarily on the news or all these world events because this is an example of a giant world event that nobody knows about. And so, and it was the grocery store in America that toppled communism. It was not perestroika or detente or the domino theory was.

Jello pudding pops. Evan Mack and Joshua McGuire talking with Houston Matters Michael Haggerty in 2020. Their opera Yeltsin in Texas chronicled the late Russian leader's real-life visit in 1989 to a Clear Lake grocery store which closed last year. Yeltsin assumed office as president of Russia two years later on this date in 1991. And that's it for today's show. The Houston Matters team includes Michael Hackerty, Joshua Zinn, Brenda Valdivia, Minko Jacob, and Laura Walker. Jared Carroll's, our technical director. On Monday's show, we will assess the Astros at the All-Star break. Despite a sub-500 record, the Stroes find themselves within spitting distance of both an American League wildcard birth and the American League West Division lead. Division's not great this year. We'll discuss what they need to do in their final 60-plus games to reach the postseason as we check in with Believe in Astros co-host, Jeff Balke. I'm Craig Cohen. Have a great weekend. Then join us Monday for that and other Houston Matters.