Brownsville cops arrest activist for anti-SpaceX graffiti, mayor posts her info on Facebook
Bekah Hinojosa was still in her pajamas Wednesday morning when she heard a knock on the door. Probably just FedEx, she thought, though the knock did seem a bit loud. When she peeked through her peephole, she saw a swarm of men. “Who is it?” she inquired. They were Brownsville police officers, she soon realized, there to initiate what would become a traumatic 24 hours for Hinojosa that would end in her border city’s mayor posting her mugshot and employment status on social media—all for the alleged crime of a little protest graffiti.
Hinojosa, a local environmental activist with the Sierra Club and Another Gulf Is Possible, says she cracked the door open and “they just pushed themselves into my apartment … grabbed me and handcuffed me.” She pleaded for the chance to change clothes—she was wearing a thin shirt and pants, no bra—but the officers refused, she said, even threatening to charge her with resisting arrest. There were around four officers total, she believes. She was still barefoot as they led her out to the car to take her to the police station downtown.
The charge that precipitated this? A Class B misdemeanor for allegedly spray-painting the words “gentrified” and “Stop SpaceX” below a new mural on the side of a city-owned historic theater downtown.
SpaceX, the $100 billion corporation founded by Elon Musk, has built a controversial rocket launch site by a beach east of Brownsville, a 94 percent Hispanic city with a 29 percent poverty rate. The prospect of high-paying jobs and Musk’s promotion online of the area have helped fuel a vertiginous rise in home prices since 2020. The mural—an array of geometric shapes plus the phrase “BTX”—was paid for by the Musk Foundation and painted by a Los Angeles artist; some locals, including Hinojosa, view the mural as a symbol of outsiders gentrifying the area.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/brownsville-cops-arrest-activist-for-anti-spacex-graffiti-mayor-posts-her-info-on-facebook/
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