Protecting Land and Culture From Oil and Gas Expansion

During our listening tour we visited with Christa Mancias and Bekah Hinojosa near Brownsville, Texas, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf.  They took us to the sites where three liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminals and a slew of oil and gas pipelines have been proposed.  These industrial facilities are part of a large wave of hundreds of new oil and gas export facilities proposed to be built along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf coast.

Christa Mancias, Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas. Photo by Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon.

Christa Mancias is the administrative director for the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas. “This land that we have been on for thousands of years is being desecrated,” she explained. “It’s being stolen again with pipelines coming through, petrochemical industries, and LNG terminals. An LNG terminal has been proposed to be built on Garcia Pasture-one of our sacred sites and very old village sites--which has now been put on the World Monument watch list.”

The Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe has joined forces with many others to protect their land and culture, and block new industrial infrastructure to move oil and gas from West Texas to be exported and burned around the world.  Their organizing, lawsuits, cultural work, and advocacy in permit and regulatory venues has yielded some important victories.

Bekah Hinojosa, Sierra Club. Photo by Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon.

Bekah Hinojosa works with the Sierra Club as a Gulf Coast campaigner and also has deep roots in the Rio Grande Valley region. “This is my homeland and I care very deeply about our future here,” she says. “The state of Texas has done everything they can to protect the status quo of the fossil fuel industry. So we've been working internationally with other frontline communities in Europe and Australia to stop the flow of money to these fossil fuel export facilities in Texas. We successfully got a French bank to walk away from an LNG terminal.  We worked together with folks in Ireland to stop an import terminal that would take in gas from the Rio Grande LNG proposed project. We've had some amazing successes as a result of frontline community member to frontline community member international organizing.”

Update as of July, 2023: With global demand driving increased LNG production and an influx of federal funding for carbon capture, NextDecade’s Rio Grande LNG project has recast itself as “green” and has once again gained momentum with investors (read more about it here). The coalition is fighting to stop early land clearing the company has begun adjacent to the Garcia Pastures historic site, and is pursuing legal, financial, permitting, advocacy and education, and direct action strategies to derail the project. This spring, the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe organized an Indigenous, youth-led, week-long run and walk from the Permian Basin to the Rio Grande valley to bring awareness to the adverse and unjust impacts of these extractive industries.