Presidio Officials Worried About a New Trade Route for Truckers. Locals Saw an Opportunity.
Hugo Moreno calls himself a trucker, but no English word quite describes his job. Like thousands of Central Americans, he buys used goods in the United States, drives them home, and resells them. Transporting freight across Mexico can be dangerous, so merchants such as Moreno stick together, trading tips on social media and traveling in caravans. Some call themselves mancuerneros, or “weight workers,” for the loads they carry. The Mexican government calls them transmigrantes.
The 54-year-old Moreno works a second job in construction in Guatemala, but that isn’t enough to support a family. For 25 years, he has been coming to the U.S. to buy cars to resell back home. Mexico will process merchants like him only at certain ports, so until recently every trip Moreno took to the states went through Los Indios, a port of entry deep in South Texas about halfway between Brownsville and McAllen. Around the start of 2020, however, Moreno heard a rumor: Mexico was opening a new transmigrante route at a small border crossing in Ojinaga that would direct truckers through Presidio on the U.S. side. If that was true, Moreno would have a new route to choose from.
Presidio sits an hour south of Marfa, in a desert bowl formed by the Chinati and Pegüis mountains. With more than three thousand residents, it’s the second biggest city in the region on the U.S. side, after Alpine. Ojinaga, a metropolis by Big Bend standards, glitters across the Rio Grande in Mexico. Despite its natural beauty, Presidio has never really tapped into the local tourist economy. It feels far from the luxury weddings in Marfa, the county seat. The town doesn’t track how many travelers come through, but it has noticeably fewer artists and retirees than others in the region. “We’ve always been the stepchild down by the river,” Joe Portillo, the former city administrator, told me.
For decades, officials had tried to change that. They announced beautification projects. They planned for new hotels and art galleries. (Residents sometimes complained; they said officials should focus more on the water pipes, which were regularly bursting, or the roads, which were potholed.) Then, a couple of years ago, city leaders started hearing rumors from Mexican officials about a potential new source of incoming travelers: a proposed transmigrante route through the town. The officials I talked to couldn’t recall exactly when or from whom they heard about the route, and the provenance of the rumors was always a little fuzzy, as though they were bubbling up from the ground like water from a desert spring. “What was missing was anything in writing,” said Brad Newton, a former local development official and the current city administrator.
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/transmigrantes-presidio/
