Rio Grande Valley a burgeoning one-story metropolis

Get Outta Town is an occasional series exploring Texas locales near and far that offer uncommon sights and experiences.

Like most San Antonians, I’ve met quite a few people from the Rio Grande Valley, colloquially known simply as the Valley or the RGV. I’d pictured a collection of smallish towns, from Brownsville to Rio Grande City, loosely knit together over a large geographical area. 

Little did I know that the RGV is a burgeoning mini-metropolis, with its two statistical areas combined (Brownsville-Harlingen-San Benito and McAllen-Edinburg-Mission) larger in population than San Antonio or Austin. And if you include the Mexican cities on the other side of the Rio Grande, the Valley’s population equals that of San Antonio and Austin put together. This demographic fact can sneak up on a visitor, as most buildings are one story and there is no sector of glass-walled high rises in sight.

But the collection of once-small towns, now intimately connected by a vast grid of highways, byways, roads and boulevards, still retains small-town charms and multiple points of interest.

First, the past

Turns out the Museum of South Texas History was a good place to start. An immersive exhibit on the influence of late 1800s railroad pioneers offers a glimpse of what was to come, with a bevy of entrepreneurs competing to connect the towns of Brownsville, Harlingen, Weslaco, Donna, Alamo, San Juan, Pharr, McAllen, Mission and Edinburg. 

Water magnate Colonel Sam Robertson conceived of a “spider web” of tracks covering the area, which laid the groundwork for the interconnected one-story metropolis of today.

A special exhibit in the Old County Jail annex of the museum details the tale of a cache of hidden gold coins discovered under a house in nearby San Diego, buried by a doctor in 1933. The eventual inheritors of the gold cache created the Hector and Gloria López Foundation with a $275 million gift to provide scholarships for first-generation Latino students of South Texas to attend college.

The exhibit is in the jail’s former inmate cellblock, an appropriate warning for anyone thinking of stealing the six gold coin examples on display. An armed police guard is on duty every day during the exhibit’s open hours. 

Rest easy, though. The gallows inside the old jail is no longer in use, but seeing the noose and floor door beneath still made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Upstairs in the main museum features the Rio Grande Legacy exhibit, examining the river’s influence from prehistory through the Spanish Colonial era to the present.

The Walmart of libraries

The RGV boasts at least 10 Walmart Supercenters, not counting Walmart Neighborhood Markets, as the chain’s slightly smaller stores are called. When a central McAllen Walmart supersized in the mid-2000s, it left behind an abandoned big box store building just down the road — an ongoing problem for many communities, some of which find creative solutions. 

McAllen solved their problem in 2012 by pouring $24 million into a project to convert the former 123,000 square-foot superstore into a super-sized public library, which it now boasts as “the largest single-floor public library in the nation,” in keeping with the one-story metropolis theme.

A landscaped plaza greets visitors, who enter to see a busy computer lab with 100 stations. Down the grand hall, the vast shelving section reveals itself, with many of the library’s 360,000 books, magazines, CDs and DVDs readily accessible.

Quiet rooms abut the information desk, and a series of 14 reservable study rooms line the east side of the main hall. Many of the rooms

In the genealogy section, I quickly located a tome on the history of the RGV, including a map that illustrated the “spider web” of railroads envisioned by Robertson.

On the way out I stopped to check out a display of the same Frida Kahlo sculptures that adorned the San Antonio Botanical Garden in 2021.

Chachalacas

A nearly opposite experience awaits on Edinburg’s East Side, within the confines of Edinburg Municipal Park. As its website notes, the Edinburg Scenic Wetlands and World Birding Center is a 40-acre plot within the park built on reclaimed farm fields and incorporating the city’s effluent and floodwater ponds.

Swaths of interconnected concrete roads give way to a serene wooded setting that makes a haven for hundreds of avian species. 

Upon entering the red clay trails of the center, a nervous-nelly group of plain chachalacas darted about a picnic area, my first glimpse of this RGV native species. 

At the pond, gaggles of black-bellied whistling ducks noisily took flight each time I approached their shoreline hangout, while snowy egrets rested in trees along the far shores like clumps of snow on evergreens. Walking out, I made nearly face-to-face contact with a rare green heron, which some believe symbolizes new beginnings, good fortune and growth.

Mind fed, belly full

A tip from a San Antonio friend brought me to the Cast Iron Cafe in bustling downtown Pharr, a mere 20-minute drive from the immersive nature experience of the park. 

Cafe co-owner Omar Rosel thrived in the San Antonio music scene for 20 years, but when the right building became available, he and fiancé Dusty Lunt decided to follow their decade-long dream of opening their own restaurant.

“This is the perfect place for us to call home,” Rosel said. “Because of the old country store vibe, along with [that] we could renovate it to look more modern.”

The menu is also a combination of classics such as chilaquiles and “Your Mom’s Meatloaf,” but the option of a pour-over Colombian coffee with beans from Hill Country roasters Weathered Hands is a new addition to Pharr’s culinary options. 

The Cast Iron Cafe is located across the street from Alejandro’s Cafe and the Junction Cafe, both longstanding mainstays of Pharr’s downtown. All parking spots near the cafes were filled on both Sunday and Monday mornings.

While there are more traditional Mexican restaurants in the RGV than even Google Maps can count, Rosel said others like himself and Lunt are relocating from big cities and bringing their inventive food ideas to the Valley.

“There’s little hidden gems where you can find some delicious stuff that is really under the radar right now,” he said.

They mentioned Ana Liz Taqueria, which they said opens at 4 p.m. and tends to sell out quickly, Teddy’s Barbecue in Weslaco and Diego’s Food Truck, a novel farm-to-food truck concept that fashions gourmet-level fare such as a Turkish hot chicken sandwich, lobster and crab grilled cheese or lamb gnocchi in a tomato tamarind broth. Cooking With Diego classes are regularly offered, wherein the chef teaches how to make his tasty delights.

Crossing the border

Former District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño, now executive director of the San Antonio Philharmonic, invited me along to his mother’s cousin’s 80th birthday party in Reynosa, to experience a true Mexican family celebration.

Treviño’s mother Maria del Rosario Rincón, a Reynosa native who has lived in McAllen since 1957, knew all the right moves for a smooth border crossing. We parked at a cash-only lot on this side of the border bridge, she brought along four quarters for each of us to drop into the turnstile slot (and 30 cents each for the way back) and had arranged a van to transport us and several other relatives from the crossing to the event venue.

Gloria Nañez, called Tía Tico, gestured to the festive roomful of 40 or 50 relatives and said, “all these are Beto’s tías, if not by blood, then by love.”

The town of Reynosa looked a bit morose and rundown on our short drive, but you’d never know it from the vitality inside the cozy event space festooned with flowers, candy and colorful decorations.

Treviño had said crossing by foot was the way to go, proved later that night by the seemingly endless line of headlights waiting on the Mexico side to cross the road bridge. Our wait was about 20 minutes, with only two guards checking passports. But just like that, we were back home.

Crossing the bridge had reminded Treviño of a childhood trick his mother would play on him. She “would say that I wasn’t really a Mexican or an American, because I was born right on the bridge.” Every time they crossed, they’d stop at the border marker, and she’d say, “You were born right here,” he said, laughing at the memory.

Rincón reflected on how much the Valley has changed during her lifetime. “There used to be orange groves all over the place, it smelled beautiful in March and April,” she said. Now, she has a single orange tree in her yard, and the growth of the cities has pushed the orange groves aside.