Recovering the stories of the borderland
Los Caminos del Rio:

Sometimes a compelling local history and the determination of a single activist are enough to strike a spark for heritage preservation, regional development, and international cooperation.

One Man’s Brain-Child

Los Caminos del Rio — The Roads of the River — is a heri­tage corridor straddling the Texas-Mexico border and stretching 200 miles from Laredo/ Nuevo Laredo to Brownsville, Matamoros and the Gulf of Mexico.  It was the brain-child of a Cuban-born ar­chitect named Mario L. Sanchez who fell in love with the landscapes, the villages, and especially the stories of the lower Rio Grande valley.

Sanchez painstakingly researched and documented the architectural and historic resources of the valley, reconstructed the region’s compelling history, and outlined the strategy for designating Los Caminos as a heritage corridor and organizing its continuing development. 

The concept was simple: “If restored and interpreted,” wrote Sanchez, the churches, ranches, public buildings, his­toric sites and river landscapes of the re­gion “have the potential to stimulate eco­nomic activity through increased tourism and preserve a common cultural heritage – ‘shared experience’ — unique to Texas and northern Mexico.”

Organizing the Concept

Throughout the early 1990s, Los Caminos del Rio Made the transformation from book to (A Shared Experience, edited by Sanchez), to “project,” to State Interagency Task Force, to bi-national not-for-profit corporation, to heritage corridor jointly desig­nated by Texas and Mexico.

The political and substantive complexity of the project might be illustrated by the image of one of the early survey projects, in which 28 people from 13 different U.S. or Mexican agencies and representing 15 different academic disciplines toured the valley to document its resources.

A Passion for the Stories

If the project was propelled by the passion of San­chez and others, it seems their passion was inspired by the stories of the Rio Grande valley itself.  Augustine Celaya, president of Los Caminos’ bi-national board of di­rectors, recites whole volumes of history with little prompting:

How the region was settled by Spain in the mid-1700s to protect Mexico from incursions by the French, and how agricul­ture, ranching, and a lively riverboat trade flourished there.

Or how future U.S. Civil War generals Grant and Lee, fresh out of West Point, tested new tactics on the battlefields of the Mexican War, and how Matamoros businessmen “cashed in,” shipping cotton and guns for the Confederacy, and how the Mexican cattle culture made its way into the American West from the Rio Grande valley.

More recently, how Pancho Villa held Matamoros under siege in 1916 during the Mexican revolution, or how that city thrived as an “entertainment destination” during U.S. Prohibition.

A History of Cooperation

One might imag­ine bi-national cooperation in this con­text would be a tricky thing.  But Cela­ya explains that the border has been made faint by years of inter-marriage, business relationships and mutual develop­ment.  Browns­ville, for example, was found­ed by businessmen from Mata­moros.  Laredo and Nuevo Laredo share a similar relationship.

“From the very beginning,” Celeya said, “people were never going to the United States, they were going to the ‘other side’.”

Instead, Los Caminos del Rio, the not-for-profit corporation, has served as a kind of common table, an ad hoc steering com­mittee, for the consideration of a stream of projects funded by some combination of Mexican or U.S. agencies and municipal­ities and others.

Preserving the Past

Rachel Torres, executive director of Los Caminos says current projects include restoration of los ejidos, the collective farms which were a legacy of the Mexican Revolution; refores­tation of the river bed near Rio Bravo, including creation of a new nursery; plan­ning for a festival in Roma, Texas to cele­brate the filming of the 1950s clas­sic “Viva Zapata”; and the $2 million res­toration of a landmark suspension bridge which links Roma with Ciudad Miguel Ale­man.

Near Brownsville, the Palo Alto Battlefield — site of four Mexican and Civil War bat­tles, including the final battle of the Civil War — was recently named a U.S. National Park.  In Ciudad Mier in Tamaulipas an old prison is being restored for use as a library.

One of the most ambitious projects is taking shape in Matamoros, the cultural and economic hub of the region in the 19th cen­tury.  There, in the formerly walled old city, 173 different structures have been qualified for Mexican national historic monument status.  And, despite three-party political conflict, local and national administrations have committed to finance a 20-million peso restoration.

Bi-lingual Board Meetings

Meanwhile, operating costs for the Los Caminos staff of five, including a full-time preservation architect, four field offices, and a legion of volunteers, are funded by annual con­tributions from municipalities in both na­tions along the corridor.  Projects are fund­ed from existing governmental and foundation sources on both sides.  And, Celaya said, the meetings of the 20-mem­ber board “take place in both lan­guages sometimes.”

There are some snags, however.  Los Cam­inos has applied for National Park Service designation as a national heritage area, and Texas U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutch­ison is a supporter, Torres said.  But some of the property owners in the corridor are worried that official status will bring new regulations on their prop­erty — even though federal heritage corri­dor legislation protects against that.

Still Putting it Together

Celaya also admits that Los Caminos has yet to do what it needs to do in the way of market­ing and promotion of the region.  Most of the visitors are still “Winter Texans” vaca­tioning from the upper mid-west, or hard-drinking spring breakers on the beaches of Browns­ville.

Instead, they have concentrated their efforts on restoring or stabilizing historic buildings and other resources.  That’s the priority, Celaya says, because without that, they have nothing to market.  The history — the story — is everything.

Telling the story presents a dual chal­lenge for Los Caminos in the age of NAFTA.  In the booming cities of Mata­moros and Browns­ville, the maquiladoras, and the busy border crossings of Laredo and Mc­Allen, the trick is to preserve the physical heritage from obliteration by new development and population growth.

In the rest of the corridor, they need to rescue their heritage from simple neglect. Out there, Celaya said, “you would see the old river the way it was a hundred years ago.  Those villages sort of stay back in time.”     

The explicit aim of Los Caminos was to create greater prosperity by connecting the fragmented historical attractions of the valley and packaging them for new tourists. But it is too soon to see a signifi­cant economic impact, Celaya said.

“We’re still putting the corridor together.”