When Land is Taken: A Conversation That Keeps Returning

A few years ago, I sat down with Marfa Public Radio to talk about eminent domain, specifically, how it was being used to take private land for a pipeline in West Texas. More on the documentary can be learned @ TRANS PECOS.

At the time, the conversation felt urgent. Families were navigating the loss of land that had been held for generations. The language used to justify it was familiar: infrastructure, necessity, progress.

What stayed with me wasn’t just the policy, but the pattern.

Eminent domain, at its core, is a legal tool. But in practice, it reveals something deeper about how power moves, how land can be redefined, reassigned, and removed from those who have stewarded it, often without their full consent.

That conversation has been on my mind again.

Today, similar dynamics are unfolding along the southern border, where private land is being taken to build a border wall. The context is different, but the mechanism feels all too familiar. Once again, land becomes the site where larger political and economic forces are enacted. Once again, the people closest to that land are asked or required to yield to a broader agenda.

These moments ask us to look beyond individual cases and consider the systems at play.

Who decides what land is used for?

Who benefits from those decisions?

And what happens to the communities who are displaced in the process?

In all this storytelling, I often return to the idea that land is not just property, it is memory, identity, and relationship. When land is taken, something more than acreage is lost. A continuity is disrupted.

What I’ve come to understand is that these are not isolated events. They are part of a larger pattern of extraction, one that shows up in pipelines, in border infrastructure, and in many other forms we don’t always name as connected.

The question, then, is not just about any single project.

It’s about how we choose to relate to land moving forward.

Whether we continue to see it as something to be acquired and utilized, or whether we begin to recognize it as something we are in relationship with, something that asks for stewardship, not just ownership.

The conversation continues.

How we treat land is ultimately a reflection of how we understand power.