The 10,000 miles of border between the United States and Mexico as told by the people who call it home.

Images by Elliot Ross, words by Genevieve Allison

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Chapter 1: “The Valley”

South Texas is not quite the same Texas invoked by the state’s favorite symbols and cliches. “It’s like Florida threw up a little on Texas,” a Customs and Border Protection agent hypothesized to us, breaking into a sweat early one mid-winter morning as the temperature soared above 90 degrees. He had a point. The ubiquity of palm trees, strip malls and communities hedged around man-made lagoons is reminiscent of a particular version of Florida - the same one characterised by interminable flatness and humidity, and a shabby charm as a retirement mecca - but the Rio Grande Valley is distinctly something else. It harbours a pulse, or at least an intimation of a new strain of the American Ideal - or maybe a re-energized mid-century one.

Culturally cognate, politically moderate, and socially conservative, South Texas embodies what a local elementary school teacher described as not exactly the American Dream 2.0, but something more like 1.5. As a landscape largely shaped by consumer industry and Mexican heritage, the Valley embodies the strange paradox of feeling archetypically “American” and foreign at the same time. According to the 2010 census, the demographic profile of the Rio Grande Valley is over ninety percent Hispanic and/or Latino. A local gallery owner joked that when Koreans or Indians emigrate here they don’t bother to learn English. During the six weeks I spent in the Valley I was frequently asked where I was told “you are a minority here,” by locals keen to address the culture shock they feel people from other parts of the United States experience in South Texas.

McAllen, a city of around 150,000, is the Valley’s economic centre. More or less one suburban grid, Texas’ twenty-second most populous city radiates out in in blocks of modest single story houses, six-lane streets and enclaves of mansions, past roadside taco stands, big-box stores, sleepy motels, cabbage fields and orange groves. A repetition of this format forms one contiguous metropolitan area that spans from Brownsville in the east and Salineno in the west. Although the valley’s counties frequently rank among the country’s very poorest, they are also some of the fastest growing. In total, the RGV comprises four counties and a population of 1.5 million, which makes it more populous than Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska or North Dakota.

Local politicians are sanguine about the region’s status as an economic frontier and its rapidly developing middle-class living standard, yet according to the most recent census, 35% of Cameron county residents, for instance, fall beneath the poverty line. Roughly 500,000 South Texans live in colonias - low-income, peri-urban settlements that began to emerge in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands with the advent of the maquiladora--factories in Mexico run by foreign companies that export its products back to the country of that company. As a result of a system that employed cheap immigrant labor, unincorporated communities comprised of substandard or informal houses proliferated. Meanwhile, a similar attitude of tolerant neglect seems to have been practised by local authorities, who have for decades turned a blind eye to developments lacking in basic services such as potable water, electricity, paved roads, proper drainage, and waste management.

To the south the RGV shares its border with the Free and Sovereign State of Tamaulipas, Mexico. In this part of the country, the international boundary line is designated at any point by the (current) deepest part of the Rio Grande River and is accompanied by an iron bollard fence that tends to abandon the river and weave at random through neighborhoods, farms, and wildlife preserves, sometimes diverging more than a mile away from the actual border. The vagaries of this have created an ambiguous situation for landowners who technically live on United State’s soil, but legitimately live on the Mexican side of the border wall.

Depending on who you talk to, the proximity of Mexico is either of great consequence or none at all. It seems that you either traverse the border every week, or never at all. So one Saturday morning we crossed the border by walking across a short bridge from Progreso, U.S., a sleepy rural community where downtown is but a few grain silos and a parking lot, to Nuevo Progreso, Mexico, a frenetic little town and parallel universe, trading on its designation as safe place for American tourists to drink cheap margaritas or get discount dental work. We walked up main street and then back again, past it’s colonnades and arcades and discount pharmacies - the prescribed route if you didn’t want to run into trouble, or suddenly find yourself actually in Mexico. In the empty souvenir stores, colorfully painted skulls, bottles of tequila and scorpions suspended in epoxy sat on shelves collecting dust. Long gone are the days where people would cross the border just to shop and peruse.

It felt as if for the sake of business everyone was ignoring the elephant in the room--which was an extremely sensitive, political moment, with immigration and xenophobia against Latin Americans a flash point in the new presidential agenda of Donald Trump. That, and the horrific cartel violence that has marked these border towns for the last decade and driven the tourist trade almost extinct.

The economic effects have been felt both directions. McAllen is home to a number of luxury stores and high-end malls whose clientele are not rich Texans but wealthy Mexicans who travel from as far away at Monterey to shop for premium American merchandise and vehicles. McAllen is in fact the largest per capita sales tax collector in the United States, thirty-five percent of which comes from Mexicans shopping here. Retail is so important to the economy that the city spends 1.5 million per year in economic development, mainly in Mexico. One could think that anxiety surrounding any impact to cross-border commerce and transit would be expressed here more than anywhere, particularly as the Rio Grande Valley is slated to receive the the first miles of the new border wall. But the reality is more complicated.

One afternoon we met Danny Armendariz and his wife Lucy at their home in Hidalgo City. Serving hot quesadillas and cold Dr. Peppers in the shade of their garage, Danny shrugged off the prospect of a wall going up in their neighborhood. "Me?" Danny asked. "Oh, I don't worry about the wall much. I don't think it affects us one way or another." He seemed convinced of this even though his corner-section house sits in a subdivision a block from where Trump's proposed wall would run. With a boyish enthusiasm for cars (at the time of our meeting he owned seven), Danny, manager at the chain restaurant Luby's, was happy with his consummate version of American life. "I have my cars, my 4x4s, and a house, and that is what I like."

It was an unseasonably hot day, as it always seemed to be. Outside, a few people had pulled up to sift through their yard sale. Mexican nationals by birth but brought up in the U.S., Danny and Lucy both strongly identify as American. They reserve Mexico for vacations and shopping: "We go at least once a week. Sometimes we go three times a day," Danny told us, explaining that everything is half the price.

Danny speaks in a valley tongue that his wife is at pains to make known is native to Texas--not Mexico. When they briefly relocated to Oklahoma and would be asked where they were from, they’d answer Texas, only to have the question repeated. That their hispanic identity was also a distinct Texan identity (Tejano), was a concept foreign to many Oklahomans. The South Texan poet Gloria Anzaldua famously listed just some of the languages native to the Rio Grande Valley of her upbringing as English, Slang English, Spanish, Mexican Spanish, North Mexican Spanish Dialect, Chicano Spanish, Tex Mex, Spanglish, and Pachuco (or caló - -words distorted by english or anglicisms). To Chicana tejana Anzaldua, language indicates one’s homeland.

We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us is a common refrain here. We heard it in conversations and student discussions. It has a powerful way of reclaiming the Valley and its people as not only as native to this land before the imposition of a border, but also to the border itself and its complex, vibrantly heterogeneous cultures.

When we met Jaymin Martinez, her quinceañera had been an extreme focal point of her young life for a matter of years. Months had passed since the party, but her pink tulle dress still hung in the centre of her bedroom, animated by a teenager’s dreams and the occasional gust of wind. "I started very late," Belinda Martinez said, admitting she began planning her daughter Jaymin's quinceañera only nine months out. "People spend two, three, four years." For even the most humble ceremony, there's the venue, catering, dress, tiara, bouquet, toasting glasses, photographers, videographer, professional portrait, photo album, band, and decorated Hummer, limo, or truck.

Until the 1980s, this centuries-old celebration—primarily a Mexican girl's rite of passage into womanhood on her 15th birthday—wasn't widespread in Hispanic communities in the US. It was simply too expensive. Today, however, Hispanic consumers in the US have more purchasing power, and it's increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 7.5 percent—more than twice as fast as the 2.8 percent growth for the total US. In the past five years alone, it has reached $1.38 trillion. As a result, the quinceañera business is a booming industry in South Texas. A party typically costs between $5,000 and $20,000.

One evening when we joined the Martinez family for homemade tacos, Jaymin told her parents, "I also want a sweet sixteen." George, a soft-spoken hardware assistant at Lowe's who takes a keen pride in his children, reminded her gently, "We'll still be paying off your 15th." In recent years, the Martinez family has faced several hardships—and still, they felt it was important to continue this Tejano tradition.

One block from the border fence, the Martinez home is tidily decorated with western-themed curios and family pictures. Out of the chaparral that buffers the street from the border fence, traffickers and smugglers regularly appear, even in broad daylight. "Spotters" for the cartel vigilantly patrol the street, as do Customs and Border Patrol, who many believe to be corrupt. "You just don't know who you can trust," George said, explaining why in his Brownsville community there was an aire of insularity even amongst neighbours and friends. The quinceañera had given the family a rare chance to bring family and friends together, honor a centuries-old tradition, and celebrate a fifteen year old’s glowing, proud, and indomitable dreams.

The night after Donald Trump's election, Alfonso Nevárez sat down with his friends, family, and a bottle of whiskey. He's known affectionately as "Poncho." "We finished that bottle," he said, laughing solemnly. As the Democratic state representative of District 74—the largest in Texas—he said that he serves a constituency that spans 12 counties and two time zones. His criticism of the people he serves is tempered but vigorous. "The apathy is just awesome. Our political system works, but there's so much passivity. Now you have people out marching, but they didn't vote. Lack of participation gave us Trump."

Palpably exasperated, Poncho went on, "There's a lull settling in, and it's not good. How many times can you muster righteous indignation?" He's part of a generation of Hispanics who have become leaders and professionals, but who grew up at a time in Texas when white men and women held most of the positions of authority and influence. Now, he sees the 40 years of progress that's been made slipping away. Trump's rhetoric, he recognizes, has tapped into the past, targeting the white, rural conservatives nostalgic for their former power. "I can't remember when there was more tension."

With this, Poncho doesn't just mean the tension between minority and white America, Republicans and Democrats. He also worries about an intensified strain of anti-immigrant sentiment between first- and second-generation Mexican Americans. He alluded to the characterization of immigrant groups in this country "pulling up the ladder behind them," explaining that the real issue for them was finding a sense of belonging.

On his ranch just outside Eagle Pass, Poncho reclined on a patio chair one Sunday evening, wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a Star Wars T-shirt. His house, with its antique flourishes and plush Spanish style, seemed as if it were from another time period. Yet a sense of vitality and accomplishment filtered through its dated extravagance.

Across the river, the outskirts of Piedras Negras, Mexico, glowed in the early evening light. The cities of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras are so close to each other that they share many festivals and ceremonies. In 2008, after the US government succeeded in suing Eagle Pass for a parcel of land near the border, a fence was put up around the city's municipal golf course, technically placing it on the Mexican side. When we visited, we learned that citizens from both countries play there, and on the course, as elsewhere in the neighboring towns, there's constant chatter about border security and illegal immigration.

Poncho, as vice chairman of the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee, was indignant: "People say we have to do something. I say, 'About what?' Why are we supposed to be looking for a remedy when we're not sick? Long before this river became a flashpoint for political careers to live and die by, we were here, living and dying by this river."

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