Editor’s Note: This story was a collaboration between the Texas Observer and Inside Climate News (ICN).
Juan Benito Mancias draws his identity from the landscape at the Rio Grande’s end not because he owns it, but because it owns his people, literally. His ancestors lie buried in it, going back millennia.
Sadly for Mancias, U.S. law provides him no rights to protect his forebearers’ graves, even as they’re ripped from the ground by machines. The official story says the flourishing cultures of this once-mighty river delta died out, leaving no one to speak for their prime Gulf Coast real estate on the southern tip of Texas.
