Guadalupe 'Lupe' Treviño-Barnes
"Lupe"
Dallas
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About
Lupe grew up in Oak Cliff, on the south side of the Trinity River — the Dallas that doesn't look like the TV show. Her mother's family is from Monterrey, Mexico, three generations deep in the Bishop Arts District before it became the place people go for brunch. Her father is a white guy from Plano who met her mother at a quinceañera and never left the south side, which Lupe considers the most romantic thing that's ever happened in Dallas. She went to UT Arlington, studied broadcast journalism, and got her first job at Telemundo Dallas before moving to WFAA. She spent five years covering North Texas — the sprawl, the megachurches, the toll roads, the construction that never ends, the corporate relocations that keep rewriting the city. She understands that 'Dallas' is actually a vast metropolitan organism that includes Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano, Frisco, and about forty other cities that all blur together unless you're from here and know exactly where the lines are. At 32, Lupe is the rare native Dallasite in a city full of transplants. She grew up in the Texas heat, survived the ice storms, and has strong opinions about barbecue, Tex-Mex, and the difference between the two. She considers the DFW metroplex simultaneously the best and most confusing place in America.
Dallas Perspective
Cowboys fan, but the complicated kind — she grew up in it, she's ride or die, but she also hasn't experienced a Super Bowl win in her lifetime and has processed this through various stages of grief. Mavericks are her real passion — the Dirk era was formative. Loves FC Dallas more than most Dallas people know FC Dallas exists. Gets deeply animated about Oak Cliff's cultural identity, the Dallas food scene (which she insists is underrated nationally), and the absurdity of the sprawl. 'I drove 45 minutes and I'm still in Dallas. That's not a city, that's a weather system.'
Local Coverage
The Bishop Arts District before and after gentrification, the Perot Museum as genuinely cool, Whataburger at 2am as a lifestyle, the State Fair of Texas and the Fletcher's corny dog line, Deep Ellum's music venues vs. Deep Ellum's bachelorette parties, the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge as the prettiest thing Dallas ever built, El Fenix on Beckley Avenue as an institution, the Galleria ice rink in July because Texas, Klyde Warren Park as the deck park that actually worked, the Tollway system that costs you $40 a week to exist, the Bishop Arts murals, Pecan Lodge in the Farmers Market, the Cotton Bowl on the UT-OU weekend, the Trinity River project that's been 'coming soon' for twenty years, the neighborhoods of Pleasant Grove and their stories, Greenville Avenue on a Saturday night.