"EL DEDO" JUAN TREY MENDEZ FINGERS SPACEX GENTRIFICATION PROTESTOR; FREE BEKA HINOJOSA NOW!

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Using surveillance camera tapes, City of Brownsville Mayor Juan "Trey El Dedo" Mendez has released a statement on his social page accusing Rebekah Lyn Hinojosa, 30, of writing graffiti on the BTX mural on East 11th and East Levee Street around 9 p.m. Monday.

The "graffiti" consists of three words: "gentrification stop SpaceX," referring to the payment of $20,000 to a Los Angeles-based artist to paint something that has little relevance to this historical border city.

According to Texas Monthly's Don Solomon
"the city paid for a series of three murals using money that they received from the Musk Foundation in a kind of unanticipated donation that was announced by Elon Musk on Twitter earlier this year. 

So he said that he was going to surprise Brownsville with $10 million for downtown revitalization, and part of that went towards a series of murals.

"And the first mural was a piece created by an L.A.-based artist named Teddy Kelly, and he was paid $20,000 to make this piece. 

"And people in Brownsville got pretty upset when they learned how much he was paid and the fact that it was an out-of-town artist who was hired to create this first piece rather than someone local. Twenty-thousand dollars – this is a lot of money anywhere, but it’s especially a lot in Brownsville, which where it’s almost half the average median family income...

"...the mural, I think, exemplifies the the negative version of that, which is, what if all of this money coming in to Brownsville just gets spent on people who aren’t from there and just gets spread around other people who are not local to Brownsville, and that if you’re an artist in Brownsville or a musician or a seamstress or anything else, that you find yourself out of opportunities and all of this money going around just raises your rent, but it doesn’t end up in your pocket."

Mendez posted on his social page that Brownsville Police Department was able to gather surveillance video from surrounding downtown cameras which lead them to Hinojosa.

She is charged with one count of graffiti a Class B Misdemeanor. Her bond was set at $1,500.

And for good measure, the local daily dug deep into social media to further inflame conservative hearts against her identifying her as the Gulf Coast campaign representative for the Sierra Club. What purpose did this serve other than casting aspersions on this "liberal" organization? To our way of thinking, we agree with Hinojosa that the Musk-paid murals are a form of pollution – gentrification pollution – in the downtown historical district.

Da Mayor's valiant efforts to solve this "crime" by an activist fighting against the gentrified attack on local culture exemplified by the historically-irrelevant murals, is enlightening considering the fact that there was no such effort made when someone defaced the murals painted by local artists on the walls of the same Capitol theater during the Latin Jazz Festival with homophobic and mysoginist slurs. https://rrunrrun.blogspot.com/2017/02/homophobic-vandals-mar-art-students-work.html

But the defaced Latin Jazz murals this time weren't paid by Musk, Hizzoner's idiol. They were donated by local artists to brighten up downtown with paintings of locally-revered singers and performers. At the time the murals were defaced, were there no surveillance cameras at the same spot that would have identified the perpetrator?

Or did Da Mayor and the local cops care? 

Take a gander at the "graffiti" allegedly committed by Hinojosa. She wrote her three words not on the "art," but on an empty panel below the painting. The three words can simply be painted over, unlike the Latin Jazz pictures which were deliberately scribbled over with Magic Markers with homophobic slurs.

So "El Dedo" Mendez will rise mightily to defend the billionaire-paid outside artist for some imagined slight, but did not lift a finger to capture the perpetrator of the defaced Latin Jazz murals which were a gift from local artists to their fellow city residents of images of revered Mexican artists. 

But then, local residents don't put any money in his pocket, and Musk has. We get it, bato relaje.