@article{THESIS,
      recid = {7220},
      author = {Palacios, Jorge},
      title = {Martian Borderlands: Colonizing (Outer) Space in the Lower  Rio Grande Valley},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {M.A.},
      address = {2023-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {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.  },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/7220},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.7220},
}