Martian Borderlands: Colonizing (Outer) Space in the Lower Rio Grande Valley
Creators: name: Palacios, Jorge
Publisher: name: University of Chicago
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: ethnography
subject: outer space
subject: Mexico
subject: Texas
subject: Rio Grande
subject: SpaceX
subject: Aerospace
subject: Engineering
subject: Science
subject: Technology
subject: anthropology
subject: media
subject: digital media
subject: internet
subject: Elon
subject: Musk
subject: futurity

description: SpaceX’s rocket launch site, Starbase, lies at the bottom tip of Texas on Boca Chica Beach, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico. With SpaceX maintaining a presence in the region since 2014, Starbase is seen as a bridge between Earth and Mars that will generate economic development in the area by SpaceX and government officials. In recent years, increased road closures, gentrification, and explosive rocket tests in proximity to Boca Chica beach, sacred Esto’k Gna sites, local wildlife refuges, the U.S.-Mexico Border, and the cities of Brownsville and Matamoros have been a cause of distress for environmental scientists, activists, the Carrizo-Comecrudo Tribe, and local residents. Brownsville, previously named the poorest city in the United States, sits twenty miles from Starbase with a ninety-four percent Hispanic/Latinx population of mixed citizenship status. Local residents who contend with the region’s militarization and history of racially motivated violence are now faced with the fast-moving aerospace engineering industry, space tourism, and Mars colonization. This study seeks to understand how SpaceX’s presence and activities are politically legitimized within South Texas and what they mean for Indigenous and Latinx residents. This will be done through interviews and Participatory Action Research (PAR) conducted in Brownsville with activists, Carrizo-Comecrudo tribal members, and local residents of Brownsville. Data from fieldwork will be compared with online media and accounts taken by the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Town Hall meetings in October 2021. This research identifies sites of discursive incommensurability that arise between modern scientific rhetoric and the Esto'k Gna, Mexican, and Tejano cosmologies that define the identity of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. In seeing how technoscientific enterprises make universalizing claims of modern science to appeal to liberal notions of technological progress, we can see how space ventures coordinate with neoliberal policies to colonize and dispossess lands here on Earth and in outer space. I argue that SpaceX colonizes the Lower Rio Grande Valley using the same strategies as those used by settlers of the Western frontier. Similar to how Texas public history and education curate an image of Texan mythologies, SpaceX propagates an image of Starbase online through aesthetic images of the technological sublime, devoid of any trace of local ethnic Mexican people and sanitized of any harm done to the area. Theorizing alongside my interlocutors, I illustrate how these conditions in turn create the phenomenon that I call Martian Borderlands, diffuse regions marked by entry-points between Earth and Mars that alienate land for the sake of rocket launches and effectively render local inhabitants alien in the process.