The first time I saw the Rio Grande, I was with a nun. She took breaks in the afternoon and walked along the north bank of the river near the city of Hidalgo, looking for signs of people who needed help.
She found immigrants, who were hungry, wet, and often alone, and offered them comfort. They knew neither the law nor the language of the United States, and were hiding, desperately, in the canebrakes.
“That river really divides us, doesn’t it?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” she said. “The river is what sews us together. We are two countries but one people.”
I knew almost nothing of the border. I came from the Midwest for a job. My wife and I found a place that, in many ways, we never left, and the Rio Grande Valley never left us.
The Rio Grande Valley of Texas has long existed at the edges of the American imagination. I recall national news magazines from the 70s and 80s that referred to it as “America’s Third World.”
The consistent portrayal was of communities that were impoverished, undereducated, and peripherally isolated as a region at the geographic and economic bottom of the U.S. If the rest of our country even thought of the Valley, their images were of cotton fields and citrus groves, where literacy lagged, and work was too often seasonal and unstable.
In the two and a half decades I spent as a reporter in the state legislature, I can say that I saw politicians look past the Valley consistently, which made investors ignore it, and our fellow Texans consider it an afterthought.
History has proven them wrong. In the four southernmost counties of Texas, Hidalgo, Cameron, Starr and Willacy, a quiet transformation has unfolded. The Valley is no longer a forgotten borderland but has become one of the most dynamic trade corridors in the United States, linking the American economy to its largest business partner, Mexico.
As a journalist who has been returning to the Valley for 50 years, I have watched the transition. The victories have been hard-won, forged out of historic challenges and cultural resilience, and powered in recent years by education, international commerce, and, yes, even rocket launches.
Historian Julio Noboa, who has written extensively on border history and culture, once described the region with characteristic bluntness: “The Valley has always been treated as a stepchild by the state, but it has also always been a place of resilience and reinvention.”
In his words lives the paradox of the Valley’s history. It has endured persistent neglect from policymakers but thrived with an enduring ability of its people to reinvent their communities and chart new futures. My personal fascination with the place is not likely to ever end.
The Valley’s emergence as an economic power becomes even more profound when considering
its past hardships. Texas historian Evan Anders, in a 1967 study, called the region “the quintessential example of a neglected borderland, with schools underfunded, hospitals overstretched, and industries scarce.” Educational attainment in the Valley ranked for decades among the lowest in the state, with illiteracy common and dropout rates high. The literacy rate was among the lowest in the nation.
Consequently, migrant labor defined entire generations. María Elena García, a retired schoolteacher from Mercedes, recalled her classrooms of the 1960s. “We had forty kids crammed into rooms built for twenty-five, hand-me-down textbooks, and not enough teachers to go around. So many children disappeared when the crops came calling. They’d follow their parents north, and the cycle of poverty repeated.”
Economist John Sharp, a chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, frequently mentioned how the Valley’s dependence on seasonal agricultural work stunted growth. “The Valley’s economy was built on instability,” he said in a 2005 interview. “Families survived year to year, but without industries, without consistent education, there was little chance to build wealth.”
I saw many of those obstacles as a journalist when my bride and I arrived. As a naïve young reporter, I wondered why there was not more abundance. In every direction, crops were growing, the smell of orange blossoms filled the air, and I thought we might have landed in paradise.
Eventually, geography conferred what was both a hidden advantage and a problem. Being away from Austin and on the periphery of Texas, the Valley has always been tied to Mexico more intimately than to distant cities. Markets, culture, labor, and family flowed across the Rio Grande. There were two countries, but one region, and a river ran through it. Historian David Montejano emphasized this point in his work. “The Valley economy cannot be separated from Mexico’s,” he wrote. “Its markets, its labor, its culture, all flow back and forth across the river.”
The concept of maquiladoras only strengthened those ties. Multi-national corporations began to build manufacturing plants just south of the border to be close to U.S. markets while employing more affordable Mexican labor and resources. Maquilas started rising in Reynosa and Matamoros during the 1960s but exploded in number and product lines after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in the 1990s. Mexican border cities transformed into industrial hubs, producing auto parts, electronics, medical devices, and consumer goods. Lives changed on both sides of the river after maquilas.
For Valley residents, the ripple effects were arguably profound. Thousands found work in logistics, trucking, and warehousing on the U.S. side, while others commuted to maquiladoras across the bridges. “Without maquiladoras,” argued economist Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, “the Valley would have remained an agricultural backwater. With them, it became a strategic hub for global supply chains.”
There is considerably more to the Rio Grande Valley today than maquilas and manufacturing, but that strategy continues to fuel the engines of growth in the region. The Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge has become one of the busiest crossings in the country and handles more than $40 billion in trade annually. Laredo, just upriver, is one of the busiest land ports in the world and has surpassed even Los Angeles as the top trade port in the U.S.
The Valley is no longer peripheral and is central to the flow of North American commerce. Jorge Martínez, a veteran customs broker in McAllen, described it simply. “It used to be cotton and citrus,” he told an interviewer. “Now it’s cars, computers, and medical equipment. Nearly half of U.S.-Mexico trade comes through here. If you want to see where globalization touches America, most directly, you come to the Valley.”
If trade built the Valley’s modern economic base, education has fueled its social transformation and broader cultural reputation. Nowhere is this clearer than at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Formed in 2013 from the merger of two older campuses, Pan American University and University of Texas, Brownsville, UTRGV quickly became a flagship institution for the region, serving more than 32,000 students in multiple disciplines.
The UTRGV School of Medicine, celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, has brought more than medical training to the Valley. The medical school has also created a sense of prestige for a region long underserved by healthcare. Dr. Guy Bailey, UTRGV’s president, has said, “We are building not just a university but a new future for the Valley. Education is the foundation of everything: health care, economic development, innovation.”
Daniel Salinas, a first-generation college graduate from Edinburg, enrolled in UTRGV’s medical program and found the impact to be deeply personal. “My parents never finished high school,” he said. “Now I’m going to medical school here, in my own community. That changes everything for families like mine.”
The presence of the university and medical school has sparked related investments in research, biotechnology, and health care infrastructure, offering new kinds of jobs that were unimaginable in the Valley just a generation ago. Those types of employment continue to proliferate, even during national economic downturns.
Education and trade might represent the steady building blocks of the Valley’s expanding future, but SpaceX has provided a bit of flash. Since establishing the Boca Chica launch site near Brownsville, Elon Musk’s aerospace company has brought hundreds of high-tech jobs and global attention to a once-overlooked corner of the Gulf Coast. Cameron County, once one of the most impoverished locations in the U.S., was recently named the second-best location for manufacturing in the country. Critics have noted the environmental costs and cultural tensions of the project, but few deny its economic impact.
“SpaceX has put us on the map in a way we’ve never experienced,” Trey Mendez, former mayor of Brownsville, has said.“It’s a symbol that the Valley is no longer forgotten.”
Local contractors, hotels, and restaurants benefit from every launch, and young Valley engineers now see opportunities close to home.
“We used to tell our brightest kids they had to leave for Houston or Dallas if they wanted to work in tech,” said long-time Valley resident José Hernández. “Now we tell them to look east to Boca Chica.”
Even when higher education was lacking, Valley workers were spreading and creating wealth. Many of them worked in the various trades in the Eagle Ford Oil Shale as truck drivers, mechanics, and well-site experts. Money earned outside the Valley was brought home to families and injected into the local economy, sustaining businesses even through downturns, and Latino startups found markets in Valley hometowns to make their businesses profitable.
As a journalist covering the Texas legislature and statewide politics for decades, I watched as the Valley was frequently neglected by policymakers. Residents also complained of being ignored by investors and growing businesses. Roads, schools, and hospitals were chronically underfunded. In Austin, the Valley was often seen as an expense rather than an investment.
But no more.
Things have changed, and dramatically. Persistence and the geography that once meant isolation have created advantages. And the time demands a publication like the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal to keep people informed of growth and opportunities.
Historian Monica Perales, who has watched the Valley’s transformative years, summed up what she has witnessed with one sentence. “The Valley teaches us that marginal places can become central when history and determination align.”
That alignment has been unfolding for years. Multinational corporations now see the Valley, not as a remote corner, but as a gateway. Automotive giants, medical suppliers, and technology firms are planting logistics hubs in Hidalgo and Cameron counties. The Port of Brownsville is booming with energy projects and shipbuilding. Warehousing and trucking companies, stretched thin in other parts of the country, are expanding along the border.
Economist Ray Perryman, who has closely monitored the Texas economy for decades and reports on it regularly, describes the valley almost as an umbilical cord for numerous, growing economic endeavors. “If you are a global manufacturer and Mexico is central to your supply chain, then the Rio Grande Valley is your lifeline.”
Challenges remain. Poverty rates in the Valley are still higher than the state average. Educational gaps, though shrinking, persist. Infrastructure like bridges, highways, broadband, and even electricity, lags demand because of an incomplete network of powerlines. And the politics of immigration often cast the region in a distorted light, overshadowing its economic importance.
As a journalist who has reported frequently on the border and immigration, I have seen up close how the national media comes to the Valley, misunderstands, and even distorts the reality of the situation, which is why the rest of America tends to get a negative view of the border. Optimism, however, is stronger than it has been in living memory.
“When I was young, people left the Valley to find work,” said Roberto Castillo, a veteran from Harlingen. “Now my grandchildren are coming back because there are jobs here, good jobs.”
Writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who grew up in the Valley, once described the borderlands as “a place where the two worlds blend and clash and create something new.”
The “something new” everyone is witnessing is a thriving binational economy, Texan, Mexican, and global. The Valley is becoming the driving wheel of the Texas economy and is poised to become even more influential. With U.S.-Mexico trade projected to continue growing, even with the potential complications of tariffs, UTRGV expanding its research footprint, SpaceX making Brownsville a center of aerospace innovation, and multinational corporations increasingly drawn to the region’s unique geography and manufacturing partnerships with Mexico, the Rio Grande Valley is no longer America’s forgotten frontier.
I kept coming back to the Valley as a reporter and a visitor. Through the years, I continued hearing a lament from people I interviewed or friends who were born and raised on the border.
They often said, “I think someday the Valley will matter.” For the people who built their lives and families on the border, of course, the Valley has long mattered to them and their businesses. The only difference today is that it is increasingly important to Texas and the global economy.
One economist has called it “the hinge on which North America’s economic future turns.”
That one sentence alone is sufficient reason for us to have created the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal. And as you can see on our website, we are already on the job.
