My Hometown: A New Frontier of the Old West in Dell City
October 31, 2019 | By Joe Nick Patoski
Andrew Stuart is the poster boy for the “next best place.” Raised in Austin, Stuart lived on both coasts before falling in love with West Texas. He spent two years as a reporter for the now-defunct Desert-Mountain Times in Alpine and three years as the news director at Marfa Public Radio. In 2009, he moved to Dell City, a Chihuahuan Desert farming community with little but a mercantile, a gas station, and two cafés. It’s a place once described by The New York Times as a “borderline ghost town.” But factor in the Guadalupe Mountains—the area’s primary tourist attraction, rising 20 miles to the east—and the feeling that you’re out in the middle of nowhere, and it’s easy to see Stuart, 44, has found his place. “I knew I wanted to live in the desert by myself, a go-west-and-reinvent-yourself kind of thing,” he explains one morning over breakfast tacos at Spanish Angels Café. “The writer Marilynne Robinson said, ‘Out west, lonesome is a positive.’”
