In the last 8 years, neocolonial corporations like LNG and SpaceX have moved into our home, salivating the borderlands for profit and ignoring local wildlife, vegetation, and marginalized communities. Just this month (September 2022) the SpaceX testing site on Boca Chica Beach, incited a large fire burning 68 acres of protected refuge land, destroying local wildlife and vegetation. This is not an isolated incident, it goes past the last 8 years of SpaceX operating in Boca Chica, where subsidies and tax breaks have been granted from Cameron County, and environmental state laws and policy protecting gulf waters have been bypassed. This also has a historical precedent in the region, in the form of recurrent colonization.
In response to the racial and environmental injustices happening in the Rio Grande Valley, fronterizas Nansi Guevara and Monica Sosa are co-curating Nuestra Delta Magica: Settler Imaginaries & Community Resistance. Nuestra Delta Magica is a three-month-long exhibit that will investigate untold South Texas history of land settlement and colonization as a precedent to current environmental neo-colonialism. This exhibit will also feature the work of six border artists and will take place Spring 2023 in Downtown Brownsville, Texas with the support of Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) and The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).
Our goal as curators is to:
Share untold history and research with the community,
Display artist work in resistance,
Open discussion about colonialism and its impact on our land,
Activate a space that will allow for us to collectively continue to craft, define, and redefine our own identities in South Texas.
We would love for you to follow us on this journey, to collectively take ownership of our own identities, write our own narratives, and protect our environment. Subscribe and follow until the opening of the exhibit in late Spring of 2023. ❤ Gracias
-Nansi y Monica
About the Curators:
Nansi & Monica were born and raised on the border of South Texas, millennials from working class Mexican immigrant families. Monica is from Brownsville, Texas and Nansi is from Laredo, TX. Both identify as femme muxerista fronterizas who continually fight against imposed narratives. They want to co-create true reflections of the beauty of their communities, and demand a healthy and habitable environment for all to grow and thrive in South Texas.