Abstract
This chapter introduces the voices of leaders from the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas. While Valley leaders’ demographics and beliefs are diverse, taken together their Valley stories act as a strategic political and rhetorical project to remake the borderlands as central to the United States’ ideals and its possible futures. The leaders are engaged in an effort to deborder the borderlands region. The arc of the leaders’ Valley stories is a strategic intervention to demystify the borderlands by claiming them as the American embodiment of home. Their stories are set within a history of the Rio Grande Valley, illustrating shifting social, political, and racial/ethnic orders since the 1800s. The Valley leaders’ fundamental yet radical idea is that the U.S.–Mexico borderlands are more, not less, American, than the interior of the United States, precisely because of the influence from Mexico.
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Notes
- 1.
Geologically speaking, an arroyo can be dry or filled with water. When filled with water, an arroyo can be narrow and shallow or wide and relatively deep. Arroyos are common features across the southwestern U.S. landscape. In the Valley, “the Arroyo” refers to the Arroyo Colorado, a distributary of the Rio Grande River that feeds into the Laguna Madre. The Arroyo is 52 miles long (McWhorter, 2010) with a width varying between 40 and 200 feet and depth between two and 13 feet (Arroyo Colorado Watershed, n.d.). The Arroyo Colorado is economically, ecologically, and socially significant to the Rio Grande Valley (Patterson & Lof, 2010; Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, 2019).
- 2.
There were two notable exceptions. One elected national politician and one mayor were upfront with the challenges for transnational families and businesses with the actual violence and perceptions of violence on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo River. They used the violence as evidence that our current militarized approach to the border was ineffective, and if we do not work with Mexico to decrease violence on the Mexican side, American revenue from international trade would suffer.
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These bodies of works are far too extensive and complex to do them justice here. For the interested reader, I recommend critical analyses (Aldama, 2009; Calderón & Saldívar, 1991; Davis, Fischer-Hornung, & Kardux, 2010; Griswold del Castillo & de León, 1996; Saldívar, 2006) and exemplars (Castañeda, 2007; Gómez-Peña, 2001, 1996; Paredes, 1958; Pérez, 1996; Saldívar Hull, 2000; Santos, 1999) as a way to begin learning about these genres.
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Fleuriet, K.J. (2021). The Border and the Valley as Home. In: Rhetoric and Reality on the U.S.—Mexico Border. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63557-2_6
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