Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Valparaíso, Chile.Since 2000, Alvaro has worked as Art Director in design projects and as Film Editor and Post-producer in audiovisual projects.Since 2011, he has been working as a full-time illustrator. His illustration work uses a combination of traditional techniques and digital image processing. 



Recent work by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo, an amazing illustrator and graphic designer from Chile. “Since 2011, he has been working as a full-time illustrator. His illustration work uses a combination of traditional techniques and digital image processing. He has collaborated with print media such as The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Wired, Rolling Stone, New Republic, Forbes, Harper’s Bazaar, etc.” Solomon Sobande, X’s manager, says his client recorded enough material for at least two albums -- but outside of rumored collaborations with Lil Pump and Lil Peep (and the artist’s own penchant for experimentation), what it might sound like remains a mystery. Sobande describes the songs as “iconic, chilling, brilliant and mature,” and says that while the estate (led by the late artist’s mother) will pick the tracklist, “X left a blueprint for us.”



Of the many concession speeches on November 6, Beto O’Rourke’s was probably the only one to feature a fog machine. It almost would have been weirder if it hadn’t. The Democratic congressman’s long-shot bid to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was defined at every step by an almost relentless opposition to orthodoxy. He swore off pollsters and money from political action committees, stumped in all 254 Texas counties, and livestreamed everything—a town hall with asylum-­seekers, road trips with members of Congress, early morning jogs.

Hoarse, sweaty, and still wearing his “I Voted” sticker, O’Rourke addressed supporters from a stage at a Triple-A baseball stadium in downtown El Paso, attempting to distill what the last 20 months of their lives might mean for what comes next.

Though his own plans remained unclear, he spoke eagerly about where the movement he led could go from here. “It may be in individual races, in individual communities; it may have nothing to do with politics,” he said. But “there are so many great candidates who are going to come out of this campaign whose work I look forward to supporting and following and cheering on.”

Hopeful is not how Democrats usually end election night in Texas. But if O’Rourke didn’t sound much like a losing candidate, it was because in some ways he wasn’t one. Buoyed by his campaign, and by a deep bench of down-ballot candidates, Texas Democrats had their best election in decades. They solidified control of the state’s largest cities, ended the Republican stranglehold on the suburbs, and flipped more than 100 local offices. O’Rourke may have lost, but he helped foment a Democratic awakening that could have a long-term impact on the state’s political makeup.



O’Rourke and his allies broke through the invisible barriers that were supposed to keep Democrats in check—undemocratic voting laws, gerrymandering, and a disengaged electorate. In the days leading up to the election, Republicans speculated that 6 million people might vote; turnout exceeded 8.3 million, nearly double the number of people who cast ballots in 2014. Those voters turned the state Democratic Party’s unofficial mantra—“It’s not a red state, it’s a nonvoting state”—on its head. Democrats didn’t take back Texas in 2018, but they showed how they could.

The first signs of a significant shift within Texas politics came two years earlier, when Donald Trump delivered the weakest showing for a Republican presidential candidate in the state in nearly two decades and Democrats made huge gains in diverse and highly educated suburban neighborhoods. The results were unexpected; Democrats hadn’t even bothered to field candidates in some districts that Hillary Clinton carried or made competitive. On Election Day in 2016, Democratic Party volunteers in Austin were making phone calls to voters in Iowa.

Trump’s victory, coupled with a series of legislative overreaches by the Republican­-dominated state government, sparked a wave of activism that set off a Democratic resurgence over the next two years. Some of that organizing was layered on top of painstaking work that had already been in motion, but some of it took place on turf that had been all but surrendered.

Activists met in small groups to plan voter registration drives and health care rallies. They held empty-chair town halls to shame MIA members of Congress. They filled the state Capitol to protest. And they worked to bring in new voters—predominantly immigrants and people of color—whom Democrats had long touted as their future but perpetually failed to engage.

The result felt like the kind of whupping that Republicans have previously administered to Democrats. In the suburbs of Houston and Dallas, Republican Reps. John Culberson and Pete Sessions—with 40 years in Congress between them—lost to political neophytes Lizzie Fletcher and Colin Allred. Nine other US House seats were decided by single-digit margins; six came down to 5 points or less. Kenny Marchant, a Republican incumbent who was on no one’s preelection target list, won by just 3 points against an underfunded and little-­known Democratic challenger. Democrats picked up 12 seats in the state House and two in the state Senate. Cruz had described Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, as “the biggest, reddest county in the biggest, reddest state.” It, too, turned blue.

The shift was more pronounced further down the ballot. Republicans were purged en masse from positions of power in the state’s largest counties. In Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, Democrats picked up 24 county positions. In Fort Bend, they flipped 11 county races, including for county attorney.

O’Rourke, and the massive turnout he drove, accelerated a process of local organizing that progressive groups like the Texas Organizing Project had been developing in the state’s largest cities for about a decade. TOP’s focus on hyper­local issues among communities of color, such as bail reform, had helped Democrats turn the tide in places like Harris County, which includes Houston and has a larger population than 25 states. Democrats won 63 county offices there—59 of them judicial posts. According to Crystal Zermeno, TOP’s director of electoral strategy, Democrats won state House districts in Houston they hadn’t even expected to contest until 2020 or even 2022.