BY ABBY VESOULIS; PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTOPHER LEE
Part Four of the JANUARY+FEBRUARY 2024 ISSUE “American Oligarchy”
After SpaceX and its engineers arrived, Brownsville—a border city of 189,000 that is 95 percent Hispanic and is the closest municipality to Starbase—tweaked its motto. “On the Border, By the Sea” became “On the Border, By the Sea, and Beyond,” an ode to Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars. City officials also tried to give Brownsville a hip new nickname, BTX, as if it were the next Austin (sometimes called ATX).
One afternoon in mid-August, I grabbed lunch with Michelle Serrano at a Mexican restaurant in Brownsville called Emilia’s. The spot, which still has an all-Spanish menu, used to bring in mariachi bands to entertain the lunch crowd, but as we chatted, an old white guy was performing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver.
The scene struck Serrano, a local activist who works for a pro-immigration and anti-gentrification advocacy group called Voces Unidas [RGV], as symbolic of Brownsville’s Musk makeover. The changes were visible not just downtown but outside the city limits as well, where locals had lost their previously unfettered access to Boca Chica Beach thanks to the measure authorizing SpaceX to intermittently close this stretch of coastline.
“The beach has always been a special privilege to us. It has enriched our quality of life despite the low pay that is available to us,” Serrano said. “Traditionally, people have called it the Poor People’s Beach.” Now, the tourists who visit the shore (when it isn’t closed to beachgoers) to gawk at the SpaceX rockets in the distance have a different name for it, Serrano said: Elon’s Beach.