LATE & CURRENT COLONIZATION

For centuries, native tribes of what we now know as the western border of Texas fought violently against one another for land and other resources, yet the arrival of European settlers and their quest to spread colonial ways and religious domination added a layer of violence to the region that continues to be unmatched and is hard to dismiss as cultural practice. European nations invaded every corner of native lands across the Americas after first contact in 1492. Justified by the name of God and the notion of manifest destiny, Europeans set out to completely erase or assimilate indigenous people, their agricultural, social and especially spiritual practices - all which were purposely deemed nothing more than subhuman, by judging, assuming and manipulating narratives to fit their agenda of dominating “new” lands.

As we continue to zero in on the Chihuahuan desert, we narrow our reflections even further and focus on the Big Bend region of West Texas for the sake of time and simplicity. The Big Bend National park keeps the militarization of the border seeming like a far off issue, park visitors who pay their fees are able to enjoy and admire the Rio Grande, while people coming in from the Mexican side of the border are viewed as a illegals that will be prosecuted for even attempting cross these ancestral waters. The battle over land and resources we read about during Cabeza de Vaca's expedition never ended, it has only continued to shape shift as time continues. Similarly to what the Big Bend saw during the building of Spanish presidios, US Army troops were stationed throughout the Big Bend in response to the Mexican Revolution and the massive land grabbing that came from the breaking of the Treaty of Guadalupe in the early 1900s. The breaking of this treaty led to the stealing of half of Mexico’s territory by the US. The desert seems to stand still while blood continues to be splattered across its mountain ranges and waters. The creation of two nations spurred the never ending battle for control over land and its resources. 

Spanish explorers, colonizers, land grabbers - sent mestizos, who had just undergone the mass genocide of their people, animals, lands, cultures, languages in deeper Mexico, to colonize the lands of to the North. To set up ranches, to subdue the our cousins, the other Native peoples of the North, to build presidios, military forts. Borders, fences, walls. Control. Parcels. Control the land, mine the land, kill the animals. Brewster county is the second in line in terms of unregulated mining and land exploitation in the state. While once again, as we’ve seen time and time again throughout history, indigenous peoples and mestizos are pushed out of the region due to inaccessibility and gentrification of the desert.

This vast desert landscape was once Jumano, Chiso, Apache, Comanche, Mexican. It is home to a small part of the vast Chihuahuan desert, the most diverse desert in the entire Western hemisphere, one of the most diverse arid regions in the world, and now also one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world. Once deemed the Last Frontier, Texas land has witnessed the chaos and massacres that resulted from Spanish and European invasion which pushed tribes into each other's territories, colonial assimilation, or genocide. Throughout the western border of the state we still see standing presidios, military forts meant to keep the Indians out of precious mining lands claimed by the Spanish crown. The abundance of silver, mercury, uranium and manganese created an insatiable hunger within the colonial mind that not even our fierce Chichimeca ancestors could combat. As Anglos and their quest to embody Manifest Destiny spread, railroad systems were established, trade routes and journeys to vast lands rich with precious metals and ample lands for cash crops and cattle grazing became much easier and quicker. West Texas was plagued by the spirit of the dead buffalo, Native Americans, and Mexicans. Cowboys embodying the vaquero way of life and working class settlers tending to the railroad tracks soon took over the identity of the Last Frontier.

Today, over 500 years after first contact, not much has changed. Settler colonial practices are alive and well as mass gentrification continues to plague our lands under the excuse of stimulating economic growth in previously “run down”, “underdeveloped” or “vacant” areas. The practice of arriving somewhere, immediately thinking of how to improve upon and ultimately benefit from said place, its people and resources, is settler-colonialism. Gentrification, 21st century colonialism, is justified by industry and the capitalist system that dominates our entire planet. Primarily privileged white folk continue to travel to our lands, turning them into tourist destinations, buying cheap land by the bulk, building rental properties far and wide, contributing to the inflation of living costs that people of a lesser class cannot afford and continuing to push us into the fringes of society like settlers have done to our ancestors throughout time.

In 1971, artist Donald Judd, turned Marfa, TX, a once secluded, historically native area into a luring escape for artists, attracting people from all over the country and convincing them to stay for the romantic desert landscape and the much more affordable, slow-paced country life. Over time, these much wealthier people quickly came in with a hunger to buy up the cheapest real-estate they could find and filled the Chihuahuan desert landscape with businesses catered to their own interests. Real estate and tax prices skyrocketed, making the wealthy wealthier and making it difficult for the original brown and indigenous border town families of Texas and Chihuahua to afford to exist comfortably. Continuing the violence of settler-colonialism in the area. 

We can fantasize about settlers returning land rights back to their original owners, but we know that this fight is a long slow burn. The phrase ‘land back’ holds many meanings but our fight rests on the fact that as people of indigenous descent, our most important connection is the one we have with our ancestral lands. Colonialism has severed our ties to our Tonantzin Tlalli, our mother earth, for generations. Our goal here is to reintroduce Native American dialogue into the identity of West Texas in an effort to defend the memories of our many ancestors, to honor the families we have lost because of the militarization of our lands through the creation of borders, walls, and deportation. We push back against white hegemony, against 21st century colonialist hipsters building glamping sites full of teepees, against sport hikers who get to climb mountains and swim across the Rio Grande while our relatives in Chihuahua are in constant danger of criminalization for doing the same on the other side of an imaginary border. We fight against the white artists’ narrative of the romanticized western frontier experience, the endless art installations and the mass financial profits that are made off of our sensitive ecosystems, against all of the mining sites digging up our desert mountains, against the pipelines poisoning our waters.

Brewster County is one of the biggest mining counties in Texas, with 61 recorded mines. The major minerals dredged up from the Earth here are mercury, uranium, and manganese, and many of the mines are abandoned to time. Ghost towns abound, the people and places abandoned once companies could no longer make exploitation quite as profitable as it had been. There are still many mines around, however, including many sand mines which truck sand over to fracking sites in the Permian basin. Additionally, pipelines and other infrastructure are being laid throughout the area to solidify the claim unsustainable and disrespectful industries have to the land. The Trans-Pecos pipeline runs through the northern portion of Brewster county, sitting almost empty most of the time. The land here has been exploited, and the people here have been exploited.

Gentrification is a process that can be slowed, halted, and reversed if we collect ourselves together and knit communities with a common vision. Through buying land in Brewster County, we desire to compete with gentrification by reclaiming land and making it accessible to those gentrification pushes out—immigrants and indigenous and Mexican people who have existed here for generations. We wish to open our land to those who desire to be there, to coexist with their community and to be on the land.