Hey y’all.
I’m wrapping up my capstone for graduate school and will soon return to Texas. Or what’s left of what I can remember of it. I'm contending, like many of you, with the momentous news that Brownville’s economic boosters have hitched our future to autonomous killing machines developed in league with none other than Palantir, AI-powered attack boats going into mass production in a time of wanton targeted extrajudicial killings across the Caribbean and Pacific oceans.
And so with as much certainty as anyone who’s had to report on the region’s asinine politics, let me offer this observation:
Our future has been jettisoned by the RGV’s elected and business leaders entirely for their own personal legacies. For an idea of immortality. The long-term health of people and the landscapes enfolding us, for them, always comes second, if at all.
There’s a doublethink happening among the Valley’s elected officials that I haven’t seen acknowledged, including by a local news ecosystem so busy manufacturing consent for the region’s transformation into the next U.S. military industrial complex/colony. So let me give it a stab.
These so-called boosters are engaging in doublethink when they talk about bettering our lives. They should know full well that the industries coming to the Valley–oil and gas, more space commerce, and now the Saronic war machinery company–are death throes investments.
These companies reach for the southern tip of Texas because there is nowhere else to go, no one else easier to please for so little. And yet these elected and economic development suits are trying to enshrine themselves before they, too, are lost to memory damnation, their names spoken only when referring to who’s responsible for the betrayal.
That’s the only way they can tell you (because maybe they earnestly believe it) that an oil refinery is a great opportunity for poor old Brownsville. Then, two weeks later, one will blow up on the opposite end of the Texas coast, because sometimes the universe provides an inarguable truth when it's needed most.
This month’s newsletter comes from late nights in a string of hotel rooms, Washington, D.C., Boston, and St. Paul, Minn. Penned when I’d be too pissed off to sleep after reading news from Brownsville and beyond over the last few weeks. This is my attempt to define what drives an ongoing murder-suicide of the Rio Grande Valley, a unique mix of apathy, ignorance, and enabling end-times fascism that now defines the politics of the region. As I write below: It's all done in the name of living forever while destroying our collective futures.
— Gaige Davila
Saronic illustration of planned autonomous shipbuilding yard at the Port of Brownsville. Courtesy image
The Last Land Battle of the Civil War Happened Near Boca Chica Beach.The Motivations Behind the Needless Killings Are Surprisingly Current.
Gaige Davila | Deceleration
A month after the Civil War formally ended, Union and Confederate soldiers killed each other in Brownsville, near Boca Chica Beach, for two days in May 1865. An informal truce had paused the warring for months before what would later be named the “Battle of Palmito Ranch.” At least one historian attributes this truce breaking to the insecurity of John Salmon “Rip” Ford, who was leading the Confederate forces in Brownsville at the time.
Ford likely knew the war was over, but formal declarations mean nothing to people who have have profit and posterity top of mind.
“What was at stake was honor, money, and perhaps a bit of racism,” Texas A&M International historian Jerry Thompson wrote in 2003. “With a stubborn reluctance to admit defeat, Ford asserted that the dignity and manhood of his men had to be defended.
“Having previously proclaimed that he would never capitulate to ‘a mongrel force of Abolitionists, negroes, plundering Mexicans, and perfidious renegades’ who would ‘murder and rob ... with impunity,’ Ford was not about to surrender to invading Black troops," Thompson wrote.
"Ever more important was the large quantity of Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy's cotton stacked in Brownsville waiting to be sent across the river to Matamoros. If Ford did not hold off the invading Federal force, the cotton would be confiscated by the Yankees and thousands of dollars lost.”
Ford would later become the mayor of Brownsville and edit some of its long-gone newspapers before dying in San Antonio.
But his legacy is most attached to the Battle of Palmito Ranch, which is considered the last land battle of the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the war’s four years, the last dying in Brownsville after the war had already ended. Ford’s reasons for initiating this killing hold only political or wartime merit for those who detach such things from dead people, as the worst historians do. Ford had no moral justification for the killing. Ford had a blood oath against being lost to history—and if there was a chance to make money, he was going to get his.
This same arrogance is embedded in Brownsville’s, maybe in the entire Valley’s, political consciousness today, a historical memory that plays out over and over again as if the city has been cursed for the many sins of its forefathers. Recently, leadership in Brownsville, Harlingen and even Port Isabel’s school district sold out their communities to Saronic for essentially nothing. The linkage to Palantir didn’t make a single wave.
“Palantir is committed to accelerating the American manufacturing renaissance and partnering with companies like Saronic that are able to say the same” said Emily Nguyen, Head of Industrials at Palantir Technologies. “Warp Speed will unify Saronic’s manufacturing processes, providing the insights and operations that will give Saronic greater control, visibility, and agility as they continue to rapidly scale.”
