Boca Chica is an area on the eastern portion of a subdelta peninsula of Cameron County, at the far south of the US State of Texas along the Gulf Coast.

These include Mexican land grants, Mexican and American ranches, a battlefield of the American Civil War, a 1920s beach resort, and a state park (Boca Chica State Park);[1] additionally, a small settlement named Boca Chica Village existed in the area from 1960 to 2020.

In recent years, the area has become more widely known due to being the site of Starbase, a major facility of aerospace company SpaceX for the development, manufacturing and testing of its rockets.

The devastating 1933 hurricane spurred the Works Progress Administration to take part in the dredging and construction of the Port of Brownsville, a venture that the city had been trying to complete since 1928.

[4]During the years that the ship channel was under construction, a nationally known rocketplane entrepreneur, William Swan, disappeared over Boca Chica as he attempted a rocket-powered human flight in 1933.

As part of a skydiving exhibition over the Del Mar Resort on Boca Chica, he jumped out of an airplane in "an attempted manned rocket backpack flight.

[5] The completion of the port and the dredging of the Brownsville Ship Channel created a new human-made northern boundary of the Boca Chica peninsula.

It was fought 12–13 May 1865, on the banks of the Rio Grande east of current Brownsville, Texas, and a few miles from the seaport of Los Brazos de Santiago.

The tract is a former Texas state park located in the Boca Chica Subdelta separated from Mexico by the Rio Grande.

The state park land is now managed by the US federal government as part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.

[7] Although the owners partially rebuilt and continued to operate during the 1930s, the remaining buildings were turned into a base for the US Coast Guard during World War II.

Boca Chica Village is the name of a small unincorporated community as of 2014[update] located on Texas State Highway 4, about 22 mi (35 km) east of Brownsville.

It was formed in 1967 under another name as a land development project, and a community of about 30 ranch-style houses was built before the settlement was devastated by Hurricane Beulah later that same year, which greatly affected the progress of the would-be town.

[15][16][17] As early as August 2020, SpaceX indicated it was looking to build a resort in South Texas with the intent to turn "Boca Chica into a '21st century Spaceport'".

[18][19] In March 2021, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk more formally announced plans to incorporate a new city in the area of Boca Chica to be called "Starbase, Texas".

[30] The petition stated that nearly 500 people currently live in the area, and it proposed having SpaceX security manager Gunnar Milburn serve as its first mayor.

[31] On February 13, 2025, Treviño assessed that the basic requirements of a Type C municipality were met, and ordered an election on the incorporation petition to be held on May 3.