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For this month’s podcast, I interview David Zamora, a 31-year-old home care provider I grew up with in Port Isabel, Texas, the true southern tip of the Hell State. We go over a lot in this conversation, all surrounding his move to Brownsville, Texas, two months ago after rising utilities, rent, and a worthless landlord forced him and his family to relocate.
Preceding all of this was the increasing industrialization of the area. First came SpaceX, then the liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plant projects. This was followed by an oil refinery and, surely, more projects that only Brownsville’s economic development corporations and its mayor are clued in on.
We speak here about how both of us were priced out of our increasingly gentrified hometown; the irony of the City of Brownsville’s role in doing so; the relief of paying less for utilities; and the final months of Zamora's time in Port Isabel while he was undergoing chemotherapy treatment for non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Sans cancer, it’s a familiar story for me, too. The house I lived in in Port Isabel is now a renovated Airbnb, with all of the necessary repairs I begged for and never received. And that’s the way most every place in the Laguna Madre area that was once a long-term rental is going: reserved only for the leisure class. The rest of the community is being pushed out to Brownsville or Los Fresnos, another sycophantic community to the area’s “growth.”
In this way, the City of Brownsville’s recent disannexxing of land to Starbase (SpaceX) is perhaps the municipality’s first true dispossession boomerang. What I mean is: it’s spent the last decade taking credit for projects that aren’t in Brownsville, facilitating the dispossession of the Laguna Madre from its homes and natural spaces. Now that’s come back upon their lands, except those boosters—in spite of vocal and organized resistance—welcomed it, because of course they did.
I figured we don’t hear enough from people in Port Isabel about how this industrialization is killing culture and lifeways on its way to killing people, too. My hope is that this conversation will encourage others to speak, to show boosters that in negating the lives of others they are also negating their own.
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