“Frack-aso!: Portraits of Extraction in Eagle Ford and Beyond,” that included a series of workshops with Idle No More. The Eagle Ford Shale is a massive fracking project, and the flares burning off excess natural gas can be seen by satellite at night. Graciela Sánchez joins us to talk about these and other developments here in San Antonio.
Graciela Sánchez talking:
Esperanza, means “hope.” Esperanza was created, again, 28—27 years ago. We’ll get to that place of 28 in January. But it was our desire for some of these women of color, who had gone away to school and come back and said, “We want to live here in San Antonio, and we want to make sure that our lives are lived for peace and justice.” We live in a city that’s a military town, and we’ve been colonized for over 300 years, with five military stations, called the “missions,” back in the 1700s and five military stations in the 20th century. And even though the rest of the country has demilitarized, San Antonio hasn’t. We’ve continued to grow in different ways. So we wanted to work for a culture of peace and justice rather than violence and war.
Fracking is the violence for our Mother Earth, Nuestra Tierra, our land, our water and our air quality. And for our local leaders, it’s always about jobs, jobs, jobs. And they are not caring at all about how it’s really affecting the people who live in that community. And that means South Texas or the Panhandle area.
Eagle Ford is an area that has shale. And, you know, again, you’ve got all these machines that come in and drill down into the earth. And the way they drill the shale that they need for this natural gas is through pumping water into—you know, into the land and extracting.
It’s already happening. And there’s a major growth in that community. So, smaller rural communities, like Karnes County, that have no form of other development, are just demanding these jobs here. But it’s affecting the quality of life.
“Frack-aso” means—it’s a play on words. And I actually kind of came up with it, but it’s like everything’s broken and falling apart, and it’s extreme. And so, we wanted to pull together community voices to portray fracking. We did oral histories of people in South Texas. Right now, just south of San Antonio, we have Calumet, and it’s a refinery. And in the last five or six months, we’ve seen those flares, but there have been fuel spillage. Last week there was a fire in Calumet. And none of the residents, right here in San Antonio, were made aware of the fire or the spillage. And this is—the spill went down to the San Antonio River. And this is a river that has just been fixed up, a lot of development in the south part of the river. And people have been playing in that river. People have been fishing in this river. And they’re not even being told how Calumet is destroying that neighborhood.
— source democracynow.org
Graciela Sánchez, director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, which is going on its 28th year of being a community gathering space in San Antonio, Texas.