Early last November, as Alvaro Luna Hernandez, age 73, awoke from uneasy sleep, numbness radiated from his hands and feet, and he realized he could no longer walk. He tried hoisting himself up within the confines of his six-by-eight-foot solitary prison cell, and fell to the ground. This was neither his first nor his last fall; the worst occurred in the shower, on November 17. There was nothing to hold onto—no “handicapped elder-accessible shower,” if you prefer lawyer-speak—even though 16 percent of Texas’s prison population is 55 or older. And so, when he fell, he hit his head.

The accident capped off roughly two years of creeping bodily deterioration. Hernandez—better known as Xinachtli (pronounced Shin-atch-tlee), Nahuatl for “germinating seed”—is a renowned Chicano activist who has been held in solitary confinement for 23 years, most of which he has spent in the notorious William G. McConnell Unit in South Texas. The facility isn’t fully air-conditioned, even though summer temperatures can reach upward of 100 degrees. When it rains, Xinachtli recently told a Texas court, his cell floods. He stores his important belongings—paper documents, snacks—in peanut butter jars to keep the rats from chewing through them.

These conditions, especially for a man in the twilight of his life, have only compounded his health problems, Xinachtli and his supporters have argued. Despite multiple requests for care throughout 2025, court records show, “These requests have been ignored, delayed, or obfuscated by [McConnell Unit] officials.” By early January 2026, Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials had still yet to communicate a complete diagnosis, leaving Xinachtli and those who care for him entirely in the dark about his health—and how long he has to live.

Xinachtli’s case dates back to the doldrums of left-wing politics in Texas, when the hegemony of the Texas Democratic Party reached a screeching dead end and far-right politics began its rapid ascent. From the late 1960s onward, Black and Chicano groups sought new forms of political protagonism, challenging the white Democratic establishment and combating the system of racist policing that defined Texas from its frontier days to its transition to petrostate-within-a-state.

By 1994, three years before Xinachtli was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the alleged aggravated assault of a sheriff (Xinachtli and his supporters maintain he merely disarmed the officer, fearing for his life), Texas liberalism was in free fall. The state’s Democratic Party was unable to maintain its winning coalition of white liberals, organized labor, Black and brown activists, and “Jeffersonian” conservatives who had dominated local politics since Reconstruction. Its institutional heavyweights mutated into Republicans proper or the “tough-on-crime” blue dogs we know today.

Now, a coterie of activists has rallied behind Xinachtli’s cause, citing his history of advocacy against........

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