A Native Elder Fights Fossil Fuel Companies in Texas – Forgotten Keepers of the Rio Grande Delta
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May 13, 2024
Juan Benito Mancias draws his identity from the landscape at the Rio Grande’s end not because he owns it, but because it owns his people, literally. His ancestors lie buried in it, going back millennia.
Sadly for Mancias, U.S. law provides him no rights to protect his forebearers’ graves, even as they’re ripped from the ground by machines. The official story says the flourishing cultures of this once-mighty river delta died out, leaving no one to speak for their prime Gulf Coast real estate on the southern tip of Texas.
It’s a convenient myth for the developers who see cheap land and labor near the Mexican border as their chance to build Texas’ next great industrial complex, here at the state’s last available deepwater port.
But it’s not true.
Mancias, now a 70-year-old long-haired great-grandfather, knows secret stories that could never be written, about the last free villages on the Rio Grande’s banks, about the massacres, about his people’s disguises and about their flight, at last, in the 1940s to the Panhandle of Texas, where he grew up picking cotton.
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