Every time Ricardo Pepi goes home to Prosper, Texas, the place has changed.
In 1990, the city just north of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex counted 1,018 citizens; three decades later, there were a tad more than 30,000. Prosper grows and grows, bigger and richer, the leading edge of a suburban oil slick creeping from Dallas toward the Oklahoma border.
To get to Prosper, you set out from the north side of Dallas, from Plano and Frisco, where the large houses in the developments look so similar — brick facade, elaborate stonework, wrought iron fence — that you wonder how people manage to distinguish their own homes from those of their neighbors. A bumper sticker on the back of a large SUV has a message for other drivers: “WELCOME TO AMERICA, NOW SPEAK ENGLISH.” Next to that is a sticker of a smiley face. Navigate the jumble of overpasses and ramps and elevated highways, and then cut through the flat, empty scrublands due north. And there, suddenly, is Prosper, plopped right into the middle of the nothing, all of it brand-new…