A day in the life of a Gator Queen
Anahuac teen finds expanding horizons is part of life’s rich pageant
ANAHUAC — Tracy Ly is hiding a secret behind her pageant-queen smile. The 16-year-old, who was named this year’s Texas Gatorfest Queen, is terrified of alligators. You’d never know it. As she weaves through the muddy fairgrounds at Texas Gatorfest, the tall, glittering crown atop her head sparkles in the bright afternoon sun, catching everyone’s eye. Tracy is constantly stopping to smile and pose for a photo or give a delicate royal wave (it’s all in the wrist). This is what it must be like for Cinderella to navigate Disney World.
In Anahuac, this phenomenon is reserved for the Texas Gatorfest Queen — a singular honor that builds a bridge between the otherwise faraway worlds of pageant queens and alligators.
Tracy likes that unexpected combination. Tiaras and muck boots make about as much sense together as Tracy and one of the long, scaly reptiles ubiquitous in her hometown. All of it defies expectations. And that’s her favorite thing to do these days.
She got the idea over the summer, when she heard that signups were open for the annual Gatorfest pageant. It was a whatif moment. What if the girl known for killing it academically tried out to be a beauty queen?
“I wanted to branch out,” she says. It’s late morning on Saturday, Sept. 15, the second of three days in her hometown’s biggest event of the year, and she’s basking in the last few minutes of air conditioning, in the royal trailer set up at the edge of the fairgrounds. The junior queen, Matti Anderson, is doing her makeup on a nearby couch while Tracy waits.
What would possess a 16-year-old girl with a big bad economics test on the horizon and an aversion to alligators — she’s never touched one — to throw her tiara in the ring at a local festival?
Well, what would you do to get into medical school?
Tracy has won district and regional titles for her talents at reading prose in front of an audience and has even competed at the state level. She also competes in math. She represents Anahuac High School as a student member of an advisory council for Anahuac’s school board. She’s a cheerleader. A frontrunner for valedictorian.
“I was thinking about, how can I show the university that I apply to that I’m very well rounded, and I’m willing to try new things? When you think about applying to colleges, they get tens of thousands of applicants every year,” she says. “And they’re all well rounded. They all have good SAT scores and grades. So it’s hard to set yourself apart.”
Sure, most admissions officers have never heard of Gatorfest, or the Gator Queen, or even Anahuac — a town of 2,100 people about an hour east of Houston and the seat of Chambers County, which is home to more alligators than anywhere else in Texas.
But if you live in this corner of East Texas, you know everything about the Gator Queen. For little girls growing up in Anahuac, being the face of the annual festival that has celebrated the opening weekend of alligator-hunting season for 28 years is one of the biggest honors you can attain. It’s a platform.
And for Tracy, it’s a platform to promote other platforms.
“One of my primary things was a platform to inspire others in this community. As you know, it’s a small town, and not everyone sees all the opportunities they could have. I have high aspirations,” she says. “I want to use the platform to be an example.”
In a couple of years, she’ll be an undergrad — hopefully at Rice University, though there are a couple of schools in California that also sound appealing — working toward a pre-med degree and, eventually, a career as a cardiologist. Another what-if. What if she doesn’t have the time to do unexpected things then?
It’s not like Tracy is flush on time now. She showed up this morning strapped into a backpack half her size, big enough to hold the plus-size economics textbook she packed in case she can find a few minutes of downtime. She needs to study for her test in the dual-credit class she takes through a local college.
But Gator Queens don’t get downtime.
Over the course of the afternoon, air horns blow through the festival grounds intermittently. Tracy and Matti know that when they hear one, they must head over to the corner of the festival where pickups pull up with a newly caught alligator to enter in the competition for biggest catch, which comes with a $4,500 award. This year, the catches are bigger than usual, after a slow season in 2017 — and a canceled Gatorfest — thanks to Hurricane Harvey.
When the first airhorn blows shortly after noon, a group of men brings in an 11-foot, 11-inch alligator to enter into the competition. An announcer calls out to the crowd over the PA system, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a good gator here!”
Tracy is timid at first as she and Matti walk over to the alligator, where they’re expected to pose for photos as part of their royal duties.
“If everyone directs their attention to this big dinosaur here, the alligator queens are about to take photo documentation of it,” the announcer says into the loudspeaker. Tracy and Matti hopscotch through the mud to stand next to the alligator, still hanging from a chain where it was measured.
Tracy may be a firsttime beauty queen, but she’s well trained in Instagram. She pops her hip and points her toe, resting one hand on her waist and the other just behind the alligator, as strangers and press alike click away at their smartphone cameras.
‘I’ve lived here my whole life, but I wasn’t born here, and neither were my parents. I’ve had to figure out a lot of these things for myself.’ Tracy Ly, Texas Gatorfest senior queen
She smiles, like this is the most normal thing in the world. But after she’s put a little distance between herself and the massive bayou monster, she whispers, “That was very, very scary” as Matti tosses the rest of the shrimp they’ve been eating for lunch in a garbage can, their appetites for seafood gone.
Beauty pageants are changing across America these days. Miss America nixed the swimsuit portion this year amid pressure to change the focus of the event from what a woman looks like to what she embodies. And even though Tracy has never sat down to watch Miss America, she is perhaps the perfect illustration of this new age of celebrating women. Yes, she’s strikingly beautiful. But ask Tracy who she is, and “pretty” doesn’t register as a character trait that matters much. Smart does. So does driven.
The Gator Queen pageant was held just a few days before the beginning of the festival. Tracy didn’t know what to expect since, unlike many of the other girls present, she had never competed before. She packed a short dress for the casual-wear portion of the pageant and borrowed her friend’s prom dress for the dressier segment. (“If I could borrow a dress, why not?”) She felt like she was holding her own the whole way through. Until the judges began asking questions.
Each contestant gets one big question and three minutes to answer.
They asked Tracy, “What is the best compliment you ever received?”
She was stumped. Tracy can remember giving out a lot of compliments, but she’s always been told not to dwell on the ones she receives. It took a moment to gather her thoughts. Then she dove in.
Tracy Ly is a hard worker, she told the judges. And when someone recognizes that aspect of her, it feels like an amazing affirmation.
“Vietnamese was my first language, and I went to school not knowing English,” she told them. “I didn’t know how to ask for water or the restroom, and that was really difficult. But being able to persevere through that, I’m better because of that.”
She went on so long, she eventually ran over her time limit.
“Her answer was perfect,” Misty DeHoyos says Saturday afternoon as she follows on a golf cart behind Tracy and other members of the royal court on the way to the stage for a public appearance. DeHoyos’ 8-year-old daughter, Addison, is the Texas Gatorfest Princess this year. It’s Addison’s third time on the court. She won Gator Tot as a toddler and Little Gator Queen when she was 4. Now she’s three for three, and hoping that someday she can be crowned Texas Gatorfest Junior Queen and eventually senior queen, like Tracy.
“Tracy went to elementary school with my nephew, and she was so shy,” DeHoyos says. “To see her now, out of her shell, it’s amazing. She was up against girls who had won before — for Junior, for Princess — but she was perfect.”
For much of the morning, Tracy follows Matti’s lead. Matti’s mom has been involved in the pageant as a volunteer for years, and though Tracy is three years older, Matti is the expert when it comes to how royalty should act.
This is a familiar pattern for Tracy, who moved to Anahuac (the self-proclaimed “Alligator Capital of Texas”) when she was a little younger than the Gator Tots.
“A lot of the kids who live in this town, they were born here. Their parents did these things. And I’ve lived here my whole life, but I wasn’t born here, and neither were my parents,” Tracy says. “I’ve had to figure out a lot of these things for myself.”
She’s not afraid of that hard work. In fact, there’s only one thing at Gatorfest that she’s truly afraid of. But as she follows Matti into a long white tent halfway through the scorching afternoon, onlookers would never know the gator queen is working so hard not to tremble in her muck boots.
They’re at the education tent, where all the little kids get a chance to touch a live, 3-foot alligator (with its jaw taped shut, naturally). The perfect spot for a photo op.
Matti’s hands are full, with the 2-year-old Gator Tot in her arms, so it’s up to Tracy to hold the alligator. She takes a deep breath.
“Don’t move,” she tells herself, as she wraps her right hand around the underside of the gator’s belly and her left under its chin. “Don’t move.”
She holds the alligator like a prop as people snap pictures, and young children ooh and ahh, hoping they get a chance to be just like the Gator Queen and hold the alligator on their own, too. She smiles at each camera. At the little kids. To them, she looks like a brave and beautiful alligator queen. They can’t see her lips quivering. Her hands trembling. Her intense focus on getting through this moment.
“I did it,” she says after she’s handed the alligator back. “I never thought I’d do it. But I did. And I survived.”