This is Native Land
“Con conocer nuestra conexión a la tierra, podemos pelear por ella ”
-Juan Mancias, Tribal Chairman, Esto’k Gna Tribe of Texas
Climate in the lower Rio Grande Valley has been historically arid, with sporadic flooding periods. The Esto’k Gna and other indigenous groups of the Rio Grande delta have moved around and across the Rio Grande river freely for thousands of years. Juan Mancias, today’s tribal chairman of the Esto’k Gna tribe, (known as Carrizo Comecrudo), tells that originally the tribe came from the mouth of the river, la boca del rio. The water flows from Colorado, washing down with the beauty and abundance washed down to create the first woman.The Carrizo tribe has always been a matriarchal tribe, led by women.
The Rio Grande delta at Boca Chica beach is an ancestral sacred land for the Esto’k Gna Tribe, who is fighting hard to protect sacred land from LNG or (Liquified Natural Gas pipelines) and SpaceX.
“We have this ritual,” Juan says, “when a baby is born, we bury the umbilical cord. This is so that our descendants never forget where they came from, they came from the land, the earth. If we know where we came from, we can know how to protect the land and fight for it.”
This is a reminder that we come from the land, and we need to work to protect it. Juan Mancias, says the Carrizos were the first people enslaved by the Spanish in these lands through their encomienda system. Missions and encomiendas set up a system to violently convert indigenous population into Catholicism to steal the resources of the land and the labor of the people. Furthermore, Juan shares a local Spanish say, patas rajadas, that refers to the Spanish invaders practice of cutting off the feet of the Carrizos who refused to convert to Christianity.
Christopher Basaldú, PhD, Tribal member of Esto’k Gna, explains that the river is more like a road than a wall or a border. Before the Spanish invasion, there were villages along the Rio Grande, temporary village sites made up of Wamacsused by many Esto’k Gna clans. A village is not just a place, a village is a group of people that move together, says Christopher. The whole area, between the river and the ocean, was seen as a source of life and food, abundant with freshwater and saltwater ecosystems, and with important wildlife. Moreover, the delta was an important gathering and living area for many nomadic tribes and clans in this area, it was a place of union and communion and interrelatedness. Today, at the delta, there are fishermen on both sides of the river, fishermen throwing out their nets or lines and gathering fish to sustain themselves and their families.
Boca Chica beach, our working class beach, where RGV families meet, set up communal barbeque pits and share a meal. People still live very communally, adds Christopher, “this is the real magic of the Rio Grande Valley.” These are sacred ancestral sites for the Esto’k Gna people. Our ancestors live on through the air and water, and become our medicine, explains Juan Mancias. When we die our water evaporates and goes back into the earth. We are 70 percent of water, and this is how we are connected to our ancestors now.
Currently, these sacred sites are not accessible to the Esto’k Gna people. Space X closes the beach for a significant portion of the year, and Garcia Pasture is considered private property seized by the Port of Brownsville so “if we try to go on this land, we would be arrested for trespassing, " says Christopher Basaldú.
Native peoples have been fighting to protect their sacred land for more than 500 years. There has been a systematic genocide of Native people in so called Texas to seize and steal sacred land. The anglos could not distinguish the natives from the indigenous and mixed mexicanos, and for survival native people would sometimes pass as Mexican. The pressure to proximate to whiteness in the social hierarchy, and the violent stripping of land and culture from indigenous people have created an ongoing de-indigenization process.
This is all part of a colonial project, explains Christopher Basaldú. Mexico is a European-colonizing nation, and the core of the nation-state is to be homogenous, it cannot have diversity. “La Patria” is a colonial project that systematized the racial caste system, creating blackness and brownness to have an exploitable labor base. The nation-state created “la patria” so that the white elite could have a cleaning lady.
