The Washington Post
MADERO, Tex. — The most recent government letter arrived in an envelope marked “Urgent: Action Required,” so Fred Cavazos asked his family to meet at their usual gathering spot on the Rio Grande.
He and three of his relatives crowded around an outdoor table as Fred, 69, opened the envelope and unfolded a large map in front of them. It showed a satellite image of the family’s land, 77 rural acres on the U.S. border where Fred had lived and worked all his life, but he had never seen the property rendered like this.
“Border Infrastructure Project,” the map read, and across its center was a red line that cut through the Cavazos family barn, through their rental house, and through a field where they grazed a small herd of longhorn cattle.
“This is where they want to put the wall,” Fred said, tracing his finger along the line. “They want to divide the property in half and cut us off from the river.”
They stared at the map for a few seconds, trying to make sense of it.
“Border Infrastructure Project,” the map read, and across its center was a red line that cut through the Cavazos family barn, through their rental house, and through a field where they grazed a small herd of longhorn cattle.
“This is where they want to put the wall,” Fred said, tracing his finger along the line. “They want to divide the property in half and cut us off from the river.”
They stared at the map for a few seconds, trying to make sense of it.
It seemed to Fred that the government was interested only in a thin strip of land running across the width of his property, just wide enough to build a wall, leaving the Cavazos family with land on both sides. But even if they lost only a few acres of land to the 30-foot wall, the barrier would sever the property in half and make it difficult for anyone to access the riverfront.
The map didn’t show a gate or a door, and Fred wondered how they would travel from one side of the property to the other.
“We’d lose the renters,” his sister said. “We’d lose the cattle without access to the river.”
“All of it,” Fred said. “Who wants to live on the other side of that wall? If this goes through, our property’s useless.”
In the three years since Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign with a promise to build a “great, great wall,” Fred had tried to dismiss the idea as an easy applause line, a fantasy both too expensive and too complex to become reality.
“We’d lose the renters,” his sister said. “We’d lose the cattle without access to the river.”
“All of it,” Fred said. “Who wants to live on the other side of that wall? If this goes through, our property’s useless.”
In the three years since Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign with a promise to build a “great, great wall,” Fred had tried to dismiss the idea as an easy applause line, a fantasy both too expensive and too complex to become reality.
Texas alone has more than 1,200 miles of border, much of it similar in nature to the Cavazos’s land: rugged, remote, unfenced and privately owned.
But, in March, Congress approved $641 million toward building 33 miles of Trump’s wall in the Rio Grande Valley, and now every few weeks, Fred was turning away another government official who had come to ask for the right to access his land. They wanted him to sign a “Right of Entry” form so they could take soil samples, survey the flood plain and plot the final path for a hulking concrete-and-steel barrier.
Fred and his family had consulted with a pro-bono lawyer, who helped explain their options. They could sign the forms, grant access to their land and expect to eventually sell some of their property to the government at market price for construction of a wall. Or they could refuse to sign, risking a lawsuit and the possible seizure of their land by eminent domain.
“What kind of choice are they giving us?” Fred said now, staring at the map. “We let them have them access, or they take it. Either way, we lose.”
“We can’t give an inch,” said his cousin, Rey Anzaldua, 73. “It’s the principle. I don’t care if they offer us a million dollars. We’d be selling off our history.”
Fred’s ancestors came from Spain to the Rio Grande Valley in the 1760s on a Spanish land grant of more than 500,000 acres, giving them ownership of almost a third of the Valley. Over the generations, some of that land was lost to taxes and land grabs as governance of the Valley changed from Spain to Mexico to the independent Republic of Texas, which became part of the United States in 1840s.
The Cavazoses had continued to lose land, much of it transferred to settlers through sales, tax penalties, fraud and thievery. The family had hired lawyers to investigate and had filed legal claims, but by the time Fred was born, what his parents had left was 77 acres, a rectangular plot tucked against the river. They built a small house, a farm store, and then cut down patches of unruly mesquite to farm cattle and cotton.
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3 comments:
It has been decided with a line in the sand, that the decision was made to move all the scumbags out of the city so that the crooks can be rounded up in one swoop. Unfortunately decent people will lose their homes. It will be better to put the scumbags in jail and send them to Louisiana for a while and leave us in peace.
Welcome to our Cameron County corruption gang. Our state legislators, state representatives, judges, senators and governors are "greedy" and part of the corrupt manipulation of stealing and getting access to their land. This seems to be the Narciso Cavazos land grant. Texas legislators created laws to legally steal descendants large land grants, and now those same premediated corrupt laws are coming and biting them in the ass. What happened to the other 423,000 acres that was left from the 500,000 acres? Taxes, and what other manipulation by our so called Texas govt. was used to steal the land.
What ever happened to the Sports park scam where Charlie Atkinson was double dipping, just news for a while to give them time to cover the tracks.
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