WHEN LOVE SANCHEZ takes her two sons and her nieces and nephews to play on Corpus Christi's waterfront, she likes to imagine how the stretch of Texas coastline looked when her Indigenous ancestors lived there- before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, before the city's incorporation in 1852, before the 1858 massacre that nearly wiped out the Karanka-wa. She can't get over the beauty of the palm-lined ocean views and the richness of the estuary where the Nueces River meets the salt water, which have earned Corpus Christi the nickname "Sparkling City by the Sea." Nor can she stop seething over the towers, tanks, and fence lines of heavy industry that now dominate the area. "They make me sick," Sanchez says of the crude-carrying barges she sees passing by the park.
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