Welcome back! I’m Olivia, the editor in chief of The Barbed Wire. In case you hadn’t heard, a West Texas measles outbreak has exposed Texans from Lubbock to San Antonio. We declared the preventable respiratory disease “eliminated” from our country in 2000. Tragically, now an unvaccinated Texas child has died from measles, marking the first such death in the U.S. since 2015.
February 27, 2025
Welcome back! I’m Olivia, the editor in chief of The Barbed Wire.
In case you hadn’t heard, a West Texas measles outbreak has exposed more than 124 Texans from Lubbock to San Antonio and Rockwall County in North Texas. We declared the preventable respiratory disease “eliminated” from our country in 2000. Tragically, 18 people have been hospitalized in the state, and now an unvaccinated Texas child has died from measles, marking the first such death in the U.S. since 2015.
In the face of measles making a most-unwelcome comeback, we plan to make you laugh and cry with us. Leslie Rangel wrote this beautiful profile of a businesswoman in the Rio Grande Valley whose love for her daughter inspired her creatively. KB Brookins wrote a tear-jerking piece about how love endures through grief and loss; H. Drew Blackburn extolled the legacy of the Black cowboy; Cristina Montemayor took a quick survey of how Texans are spending their cash on beauty and Eric Webb penned a hilarious, raunchy essay about how, if you think about it, cowboys are all kinda gay (OK. Really gay).
Weeks after their daughter was born, Melissa Rojas’ husband told her: “I'm not in love with you anymore.” Moving back to the Rio Grande Valley felt like defeat at first, but raising her daughter and reconnecting with her Mexican roots inspired a whole new dream.
She moved from Dallas to California to pursue a dream career in fashion.
At first, she worked as an unpaid intern, then she landed jobs styling for celebrities like Lindsey Lohan and Heidi Klum. One year later, she was employed by fashion house Thomas Wylde, where she lived out what felt like a fantasy, traveling to New York and Paris Fashion Weeks.
As her career was taking off, she was falling in love. Then, just before she got married in 2014, she was laid off. Other job applications didn’t pan out. Eventually, she and her fiancée moved out of the city, and she found out she was pregnant with a baby girl.
“I thought that I couldn't fulfill my dreams if I was pregnant. In my mind, I felt like my life was going to have to stop and raise a child,” Rojas recalled in a recent interview with The Barbed Wire.
Her daughter Camilla was born in 2015.
“It completely shifted my way of thinking. I felt like, ‘Okay, well, it's my reason to keep going’,” Rojas said. “She had the dark hair, she had lighter skin. She was just a precious little girl with her little button nose, and she was a good baby.”
There was a glimmer of hope, but it wasn’t easy. “I was responsible for another human being, that's what kept me going,” Rojas recalled. Still, she felt emotionally off.
In those early months, she noticed a decline in her mental health. She felt sadness and a constant need to cry, and she lost interest in her own life. According to the Mayo Clinic, these are classic symptoms of postpartum depression, which affects about 13% of mothers in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Like 20% of other mothers experiencing those symptoms, Rojas never got an official diagnosis. At the time, she didn’t feel like she could talk to anyone about her mental health.
Her husband wasn’t helpful.
“He just blew it off,” she said, “‘You’re fine, you're going to be fine.’”
“I feel like sometimes men can't relate to us and in the Latino community, your mental health and depression is not really talked about and so women have to put on a strong face and just go on and do what you're supposed to do,” Rojas told The Barbed Wire.
