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

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.

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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.

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