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Elsa Hull was arrested twice this summer defending a roughly two-acre bird sanctuary on the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo from border wall construction. Both times Zapata County, Texas, deputies dismissed her claims that recently unearthed documents show the federal government does not have the right to develop on this land—in spite of it being in a floodplain.
Yet it's become remarkably quiet on the rio since that second arrest. Surveyors these days approach the boundary line from north and south, but they no longer trespass on this pocket park beneath the small town of San Ygnacio (pop. 495) 30 minutes downstream of Laredo. And, Hull boasts to Deceleration, the machinery scraping the Earth up and down the river from here never got into the park in spite of months of attempts. It's a fact she credits to local resistance.
The fight is aided also by activism in the years after World War Two, when a town petition secured a promise from the federal government to exempt San Ygnacio from disturbance while similarly-sized towns downriver were being flooded and dynamited to make space for Falcon Dam and the international reservoir.
Deceleration sat with Hull on the banks of the Rio Grande this week for an hour-long conversation after paddling on the river with her from an increasingly rare access point for paddlers on the U.S. side of the river. Increasingly, communities are being fenced out of their own land and away from one of the greatest rivers on planet Earth. Just not here.