Recovering the stories of the borderland
Los Caminos del Rio: Texas and Mexico

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.”

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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.

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