By Juan Montoya
In times gone by, when the summer sun beat unmercifully on South Texas communities and barrios, the people would load the whole family in their vehicle, usually and old car or pickup, and take off to Boca Chica to cool off.
There would be a favored place reserved for the abuela, las tias, and of course, los guercos. The bunch would put on cut off shorts, and the girls and ladies knee-length T-shirts to go into the water. Then they would go to the Four Corners, head right on Highway 4 and 23 miles later maneuver past the sandy entrance and hoped they wouldn't get stuck.
(Sometimes sharpies on 4 x 4's would tear up the entrance and sit by when cars got stuck and charge them a fee to pull them out.)
There was no fee to go onto the beach at Boca Chica. The boys and men would sometimes fish using fishing string rolled around soft-drink bottles using metal nuts as weights. They would walk out into the surf away from the swimmers and try their luck. Kids would go off into the dunes and play hide and seek.
To some of the people who went there, the entry fee charged on Padre Island beaches was a fortune that was better spent on gasoline and pollo for grilling at the beach. Some used military parachutes to fashion a tent to protect the ladies from the sun.
And besides, owners of the SPI hotels and condominiums treated the stretch of beach fronting their businesses as a private beach and frowned on the unwashed masses mingling with their paying guests.
Now, speaking with local attorneys with inside knowledge with the feds, it has become apparent that as things are going, Boca Chica will eventually be restricted to the public to protect endangered species like the sea turtles and piping plovers, among others.
Already, if the clean-up crews from Cameron County's Precinct 1 want to pick up trash from the beach, they are required to call the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife so that they can send a spotter ahead of the crews so they won't disturb potential nesting areas. Unless they can get the USFW personnel on the beach, they are prevented from picking up the trash on their own.
Attorneys say that USFW personnel decry the damage done to the beach by vehicular traffic and the disturbance of the dunes by people using four-wheelers or beach-goers walking among them. In May 2018, recreational vehicles were banned from the beach.Now, with the on-again, off-again "launches" of rockets (Hopper) by SpaceX, the beach has been closed continually for days and the public moved miles away from the site. It doesn't matter that they promised 12 launches a year starting in 2013. Now it's six years later and not one rocket has been launched, but the private space company retains the authority to close the beach.
The SpaceX narrative is not that the company will launch commercial satellites 12 times a year, but that Boca Chica will be the site where manned spacecraft will launch astronauts to Mars. This despite the fact that there is no running water to cool the spacecraft at launch.
The recent "testing" of a Hopper has closed the beach indefinitely, with Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevino authorized to sing off on the closings when SpaceX pulls his chain.
This was the beach where local police and some office holders held their fishing tournaments as part of their campaigns. On a hot summer weekend, the sea of people would stretch from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the jetties across the channel from SPI.
If the SpaceX and USFW initiatives go through, the days of Boca Chica as the Poor People's Beach will be a thing of the past.