Tiny Mexican town gets creative to keep things going while the border is closed

BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK – The US will reopen ports of entry along its border with Mexico on Monday, but things will happen more slowly for the small Mexican border town of Boquillas.

In the looming shadow of Big Bend National Park, the residents of Boquillas will wait at least another week until the park officials can work with US Customs and Border Protection to reopen the crossing here on November 17th for residents like Beronica Ureste have to be creative for a long time to survive.

This week Ureste rode through the middle of the Rio Grande on horseback, wearing a big smile and a backpack full of handmade aprons for American buyers she found on Facebook. Before the pandemic, she and others in Boquillas personally sold the handicrafts to tourists from the national park. Now she has put her business online. You and others rely on family and friends in the United States who can legally travel long distances into Mexico to pick up and drop off goods.

Some vendors often meet halfway across the river to drop off the handmade goods.

“At first I was very scared. I barely used Facebook and didn’t even know how to do it. Even how to post, ”said Ureste, 34, and a mother of two who said her clientele come from cities as far away as Dallas, San Antonio and Houston and as close as Marfa, Alpine and El Paso.

“And my English is not very good and my writing has been worse. I had to use the translator a lot. And now – I agree. I’m getting better.”

When the pandemic disrupted most cross-border travel in March 2020, it dealt a devastating blow to the communities that competed against the Rio Grande – but few have been hit harder than Boquillas. The city with a little more than 200 inhabitants lives from tourism and is home to Texans and park visitors who ride over the Rio Grande in small row boats or on horseback to shop, eat and drink happily.

Part of the village’s charm is its remoteness, which is also a major obstacle. The national park’s Rio Grande Village Store is minutes from the Boquillas intersection. But on the Mexican side, the closest groceries are in the town of Músquiz, Coahuila, about four hours away.

And here, since the beginning of the pandemic, journeys that were considered “essential” are not even allowed to cross the border crossing: The port of entry, which has been operated jointly by the National Park Service and the Border Guard since 2013, has been completely closed.

“Let’s compare Boquillas on one end of the spectrum to El Paso-Juarez on the other, where there are major highways, there are railroads, there is an enormous amount of freight and business,” said Bob Krumenaker, superintendent of Big Bend National Park.

Based on the comparison, Krumenaker said: “Nothing is ‘essential’ in Boquillas … So Boquillas is probably the first to close of all ports and the last to open of all ports, because from an economic point of view there is not much globally” Further.”

He admits the experience “hit the people of Boquillas pretty hard” and said he looks forward to the border reopening.

“Visiting a small Mexican village is part of the typical Big Bend National Park visitor experience,” he added. “There is no other national park or experience you can have in the United States where you can see a little piece of another country in a fairly safe, well-managed recreational or conservation experience.”

Upstream, the Texan city of Presidio, with an aging population of around 5,400, leans against its large sister city of Ojinaga, with more than 24,000 inhabitants.

In the Dollar General of Presidio, just a five-minute walk from the port of entry, manager Azucena Romero remains skeptical that the border will actually open to vaccinated Mexicans on November 8th.

“They’ll say the same thing for the longest time – next month, next month, and it’s canceled,” she said, despite having a message for buyers: “We’re ready. We will be ready. We need you people. “

Romero estimates that Mexicans make up about 70 percent of Dollar General’s clientele. Under the pandemic travel restrictions, the number of customers has fallen by more than half to around 300 a day, she said.

Presidio city administrator Brad Newton said the city lost an estimated $ 350,000 in sales tax to the absence of Mexican buyers. That’s a critical sum for a city on a budget of roughly $ 3.9 million. Some shops are closed.

“We can’t wait for the family to come home,” Newton said. “We are lonely.”

Approximately 89 percent of Presidio County’s population is fully vaccinated.

Across the border in Ojinaga, Mayor Andres Ramos said the reopening is not just about boosting their common economy, as the flow of Americans largely stopped during the pandemic, but also about reconnecting families.

“Presidio hurts and we have to help them,” Ramos said, adding that about half of the total population of Ojinaga has been vaccinated. While residents wait for more vaccines, Ojinaga practices COVID-19 protocols such as:

But here in the heart of the Big Bend region, residents and mammoth rocks only seem to lean against each other for consolation. Living together can be complicated at times. This is not the first time that Boquilla residents like Ureste have been cordoned off by the US. After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the informal border crossing was closed for more than a decade.

Beronica Ureste is riding her horse in the middle of the Rio Grande on Tuesday November 2nd to deliver aprons to the Americans that they have ordered from her via social media. Her cousin Lalo Davila is with Ureste.(Alfredo Corchado)

In 2013, it reopened with a novel facility: a port jointly operated by National Park Service staff and remotely stationed customs officers. The reopening has been hailed as a historic milestone of goodwill by both the US and Mexican governments.

The long shutdown brought lessons for this pandemic shutdown. Here, too, the people of Boquillas had to rely on their resilience and the quiet good deeds of outsiders. Over the summer, Ureste said, men and women in uniforms lured them to the U.S. border crossing and vaccinated more than half of the population of Boquillas.

This closure was particularly difficult for women in the city, said Ureste. While some men still risk short trips across the river to leave handicrafts at the tourist lookout point, most women stay close to their home.

“We have to prepare food, take care of children,” she said. “When the border was open, we could just go outside” to greet tourists and distribute goods. The men return in the evening and cross the Rio Grande on horseback to collect the goods and dollars they have left behind by tourists.

Despite the challenges, Ureste says she has no plans to leave Boquillas, where many of her neighbors are her relatives. And while the 9/11 shutdown sparked a mass exodus from the city, she doesn’t think many people have moved since the pandemic began.

“I’ve gone out and lived in big cities and I don’t like that,” she said. “I love it here.”

Ureste said she wasn’t surprised to hear that Boquillas would open later than other ports.

“We understand that we are a small town and our crossing is different,” she said. But she’s looking forward to the day she does it. Your message to the United States?

“We are here waiting for you!”

Annie Rosenthal is a border reporter for Marfa Public Radio and a member of the Report for America Corps. She contributed to the coverage of this article.

Crafts made by the residents of Boquillas will go on sale on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande on Tuesday, November 2nd.(Alfredo Corchado)

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