One Year on the River

A Note from the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal’s Founders

A year ago this week we published our first stories. The premise was simple and, to some people, improbable. Three million people live along this stretch of the border, on both sides of the river, and they had no central publication for business news.

That absence never made sense to us. The four counties of the Rio Grande Valley move sixty-seven billion dollars in trade with Mexico every year. Mexico is the largest trading partner of the United States, worth $935 billion annually to the American economy, and $272.3 billion of that lands in Texas. SpaceX put its launch facilities on the coast near Brownsville and helped turn that city into what one economic analysis called the second-best location in the country to manufacture a product. Multinational corporations, customs brokers, developers, venture investors and Mexican industrialists were all making decisions here. None of them had a reliable place to read about it, and the border, from El Paso to Brownsville, is now the busiest economic corridor in the Western Hemisphere.

The idea had been sitting between us for more than a decade. We met during the immigration crisis of unaccompanied minors arriving from Central America, one of us managing the national press corps that descended on the Valley, the other running economic development for a city in the middle of it. We talked then about how badly the region was covered, and how much was happening that nobody outside it understood. Careers intervened. Covid intervened. A cancer diagnosis and a successful course of treatment intervened, and then, as those things sometimes do, clarified everything. One of us decided not to seek reelection as mayor. The other closed out a consulting practice. We started hiring.