As I descend from San Antonio into the pulsating heart of the Rio Grande Valley on a dewy spring morning, a disconcerting string of fast-food joints, gas stations, and billboards for personal injury lawyers whizzes by on the highway. It’s like strangers are welcoming me home on my return to Brownsville in search of my father and the passionate tenor of his voice. He’s been missing for 10 years. Vanished without a trace, as if the Rio Grande swallowed him whole. And all too often it feels like he took a piece of me with him.
People have a nasty habit of going missing. Not just on the border but all around us, everywhere. Poof. They’re gone. But we can find echoes of them in the grooves they wore, the places they inhabited. As those places change, we wonder: Would our loved ones have evolved with the surroundings? Or would they have remained immutable, steadfast monuments of the past? What would they think of the place they once called home?
My father, Rodolfo Ruiz Cisneros, was not only steadfast; he was obstinate, an invincible force, an immovable obstacle. It was not just a matter of his sheer size and physicality; his indomitable will rendered him fantastically imposing.
The first stop on my quest to find my father is a fabled field where we both spent our youth: the football stadium at St. Joseph’s Academy in Brownsville. Here, under soaring palms and stadium lights, I played trumpet in the marching band on the same emerald grass my dad mowed in the 1950s in exchange for his tuition. As a teen, he earned a spot on the defensive and offensive lines of a championship team because he literally could not be moved out of place and never ceased straining to reach his ambitious goals.
His father was an orphan of the Mexican Revolution who traveled to Texas from Aguascalientes, in central Mexico, seeking a better life. His mother, also orphaned at a young age, descended from one of the families that settled the area in the mid-1700s. What is now Brownsville-Matamoros was then known as San Juan de los Esteros. Her ancestor Juan José Cisneros owned a Spanish land grant called Caja Pinta and raised cattle on both sides of the Rio Grande. It was not a border then—it was simply a source of life.
When my dad was a young man, growing up as a first-generation American, he knew little of his heritage beyond the Mexican boleros he loved to sing. He and his five siblings grew up in relative poverty, but he was driven by an insatiable hunger to make something of himself. Perhaps the unspoken past urged him on to reclaim some lost birthright. Or perhaps it was simply the allure of the American dream that spurred him to achieve not just on that football field but in the classroom, becoming the first in his family to graduate from college. He set the bar high. When I look back at our contrasting upbringings in the same exact place, I think he was chasing a dream while I was simply striving to step out of his shadow.
I can still hear the cheers, but I can’t catch a glimpse of him as I scan the empty bleachers. Not the teenage lineman or the handsome crooner he grew into, his voice soaring in the company of trios and mariachis at long-vanquished places like the Drive Inn and the U.S. Bar across the river. Nor the elder him, his face battered by the relentless sun, his wavy black hair and thick mustache defiantly intact, his guayabera and botines impeccably oblivious to the passage of time.
I cruise down Palm Boulevard and pause where I reluctantly know his body did the same. It’s difficult for me to accept, even on the 10th anniversary of his passing. The campo santo is called Buena Vista Cemetery, though I’m not sure it ever had a good view of anything but a highway overpass and the back end of an H-E-B.
Standing solemnly at his tombstone, I recall the mariachis singing “Sin Ti” as his coffin was lowered into the chasm. He is not here either.
Downtown Brownsville is a desert of stone and clay, a weathered testament to a bygone era’s hopes. But still it stands somehow, thanks to—and in spite of—generational hubris and good intentions.
When I came into this world at Brownsville’s Mercy Hospital in 1968, my dad was launching his childhood dream across the graceful arches of the circa-1850 Spanish Colonial Market Square. While in high school, he’d worked as a delivery boy for one of the drugstores around the corner. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, he came back to his birthplace and set up shop at the heart of it. Purchasing the Pan American Drugstore from its retiring owner, he proudly hung out his shingle, renaming it Ruiz Pharmacy. His experiences have inspired much of my writing—magical realism novels set in a world where the physical border is as permeable as the one between life and death, present and past.
One of my earliest memories is of accompanying my dad to his shop here at Market Square and listening in awe to him belt out Mexican songs while filling prescriptions. As he sung of heartache, loss, and unrequited love, he worked his magic, helping others to heal or at least remain hopeful. Those early days spent in the shadowy corners of his pharmacy shaped me. They instilled the value of hard work, the importance of treating others with respect, and the beauty of my heritage. From them, I developed my faith in the American dream.
The classic corner drugstore is a vestige of the past, but near the spots where my dad exercised his labors of love and aspiration, there are signs of rebirth. Big chains have not swooped in to render this historical district of low-slung border brick, Greek, and Spanish Mediterranean Revival buildings a clone of others littered across the nation. Instead, Brownsville’s own chefs and entrepreneurs have poured their energy and money into these timeworn city streets. Brownsville is now an alluring mix of homegrown establishments infusing new life into old spaces. I think my dad would be pleased. Huddled at the river’s edge, the old town center is fighting to retain its character and overcome the challenges fate and neighboring nations constantly throw its way.
When I was growing up in the ’80s, downtown seemed broken. The peso devaluation of 1982 hit local merchants hard, and crowds of well-heeled Mexican shoppers never quite returned to these parts, preferring the air-conditioned confines of the now-defunct Amigoland Mall. In those years, my dad relocated his store to 1015 E. Washington St. Next door, where a popular nightclub now thrives, then sat one of the many ropa usada shops that sprouted like weeds. Heaps upon heaps of fading fabric. Rags waiting to be worn anew. Tough times I witnessed firsthand as I was coming of age.
I sped to Washington Street when I received my admissions packet from Harvard. My smile barely fit through the door when I barged into the drugstore with that big crimson envelope. My dad had imparted enduring values to me: audacity, sacrifice, and perseverance. He compelled me to push a lawn mower across our yard in the blistering Brownsville heat so I would never forget there is dignity in sweaty work. At the same time, he pushed me to be the best in school so I would not have to depend on manual labor to make a living. In this moment, we shared in the rewards. If I let myself believe I was finally stepping out of his shadow, I would someday come to realize this was not the case. I was not eclipsing him. I was standing on his shoulders.
Basking in the glow of sun and memories, I stroll by the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. I find my dad’s final storefront as I round the corner on Jefferson Street. Inside the modest shop, he was found unconscious, his keys still dangling in the lock. He’d been chasing a repeat of the success his business experienced on Washington Street, opening across from another busy bus stop. Here, he served the humblest of people, but he did so with joy, referring to his store as a little corner of Mexico in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley. People from both sides of the border were welcome. They were seen and heard and served. How I wish he were still here, dispensing encouragement. His dream had always been to succeed while helping others.
Leave it to a romantic to suffer a deadly heart attack on Valentine’s Day. Steps from where my father’s dreams began, they reached their conclusion that heartbreaking day 10 years ago, sending me on a search ever since. He always told me the deer never roams far from the spot where it is born. I do not find my father’s spirit here, but I spy antlers in the shadows cast by the rustling palm trees onto the cracked sidewalk. Shifting in the breeze, the antlers summon me to keep searching.
I chase an idea to Boca Chica Beach. This search is not physical, and it is a journey I will never complete. My writing is a quest for reconnection and discovery that propels me into the future even as it immerses me in the past.
When I was a kid, State Highway 4 was a desolate road, slicing east through ancient ranchlands as Brownsville vanished in the rearview mirror. These haunts, originally home to Indigenous tribes, were part of the original 13 Spanish land grants that comprised San Juan de los Esteros. When the Rio Grande was declared the new border after the Mexican-American War in the 1840s, the lands were torn from their roots and original owners. My dad once told me he’d found a spot here where some of our ancestors were buried. To him, this soil was sacred. Every time we traversed this liminal space, a hush fell over the cabin of his pickup truck. It was the perfect meditational prelude to our time on the undeveloped beach.
But the road to Boca Chica Beach is no longer a pristine ribbon of black asphalt unfurling toward the blue horizon. It buzzes with heavy trucks carrying equipment to the SpaceX launch facility. The legendary ranchlands once dotted only by cacti and forgotten tombstones are now cluttered with interstellar apocrypha. There are signs bearing likenesses of Elon Musk, who is lionized with a 9-foot-tall roadside bust. Peering cryptically at the horizon, he keeps vigil over my ancestors’ lands.
The beach was once a refuge of sand and salt marshes, home to endangered species clinging to a fragile existence in a subtropical estuary ecosystem. But it’s now in the throes of industrial blight. Proponents see it otherwise, as a hub for the booming aerospace industry. Detractors note that it comes with thunderous rockets rattling distant homes like cages, terrifying wildlife and spewing toxic fumes into the air. The mix of space-themed establishments, signage, and murals makes it feel a bit Roswellian.
Ages ago, my dad and I turned right when we reached the abandoned beach, driving as far south as we could. From there, we walked barefoot on the sand to the mouth of the river.
Just as we did then, I now stand on a desolate dune and gaze out at the glassy smooth spot where the river meets the Gulf of Mexico.
Pointing to it, my father once said, “The sea may look tranquil on the surface, but it is turbulent underneath. Many a man has been dragged out by the undercurrent and drowned, thinking they could master it.”
My dad was a ranchland philosopher. Neither his body nor his ghost are here, but his wise words of caution still churn in the twisting winds. He taught me to dream boldly, but not to act brashly.
People fret about SpaceX and how its presence is impacting the environment and changing this town. My dad did not agree with industry blemishing Boca Chica Beach, violating what it meant to so many who have lived here for centuries, humans and wildlife alike. It’s yet another incursion in a place that has already witnessed so many, plundering what’s pure and real in exchange for ephemeral promises and fleeting treasure.
But who can blame Brownsville for believing? This place has always harbored audacious hopes driven by deluded dreamers, including my father and me. Is Starbase literally Brownsville’s moonshot? Or will it be another big bang that ends in a whimper?
Either way, I do not fear for Brownsville’s future. This border will remain the same: a crossroads for many but home to few. In honor of its origins, I end my day where Brownsville’s history began.
My father and I crossed the Gateway Bridge countless times. Locals call it “El Puente Nuevo,” as it was the second bridge in the area to span the Rio Grande. We saw it not as an impediment but as a convenience, an essential but unremarkable element of our daily routines. We crossed it into Mexico for haircuts at an old-fashioned barber shop followed by shoeshines in the plaza, fresh avocados smooth as warm butter at El Mercado, and mouthwatering pan dulce from El Trigal. We took the bridge on Sunday morning drives to the small family ranch my father cultivated on the road to what is now known as Playa Bagdad. Since then, the Puente Nuevo’s nickname has been rendered an anachronism. There are newer bridges—but fences and coils of barbed wire spool between the river’s edge and those towering barriers.
I stand at the fence, my hands wrapped around cold metal rods, squinting at the river and the land of my forefathers. My mom and dad used to take my brothers and me to our abuelita’s house across the Rio Bravo, as we called it, daily. An enormous Mexican flag unfurls on the opposing banks so large I can’t make it out unobstructed by the vertical bars. We are all prisoners in a way—trapped where we came from, trapped where we went to, only free while in motion between the two.
Dejected but determined to find some sign of my father as the sun sets in silence, I make one final stop at my first home, on West Levee Street. As the name implies, when you look at the address on a map, you see how close it is to the river. Gazing past the rusted chain-link fence, I dig into my earliest memories.
I must have been about 3 years old. I see my dad standing outside in dark polyester Sansabelts and a white V-neck T-shirt. It’s late on a Sunday afternoon, and the whitewashed cinder block house takes on an orange hue as the sun plays hide-and-seek behind the palm fronds. He waters the rose bushes that line the driveway and then scoops me up to swing with him in the pink hammock his father brought from Veracruz decades earlier. We are here together for that moment, for always.
The memory reminds me that it is not the grand ambitions we impart on our children that they will remember us for but rather the simple moments. In their stillness and silence, we offer our souls with tenderness. And while grand dreams may fade, these fleeting interactions live on.
The next morning, I hit the road to the beckoning north as the sun rises over Boca Chica. When we journey down these highways to the places of our past, I wonder, are we going somewhere that still exists in the present, or are we traveling through space and time, rediscovering ourselves in the places that haunt us, that now only exist in our memories?
I came searching for the ghost of my father, but I found a ghost of the border. The border has changed more than I thought it had because I have long been living in a border of my own making, one based on myth and memory. There, in that ghost of the border, I find my father, his voice cutting through the fog like the lighthouse that once guided ships into the bay at Port Isabel.
In the still cool blue of dawn, I feel a presence accompanying me as I escape the magnetic pull of the Rio Grande Valley’s shadows. I had to come home to understand this: My father isn’t missing, but I’ll always miss my father. His dreams did not die on that drugstore floor in downtown Brownsville. He is not fully here, yet he is also not completely gone. Some giants cast a shadow so long it lingers after they part.
Together we balance on the edge of yesterday as we search for tomorrow. Battered but not broken, always striving with audacity, sacrifice, and perseverance—just like our hometown. Perpetually grappling with the notion that “ni de aquí, ni de allá” means “not from here, nor from there”—not only in terms of the United States and Mexico but also of the present and the past, the living and the dead.
When you grow up on the border, cultural identities and states of being are blurred in the repetitive act of crossing. All definitions and constraints fall away in that instant. Straddling borders is when and where we are fully ourselves and free.
A thought materializes as I plunge into the no-man’s-land between Raymondville and the border patrol checkpoint at Sarita: What if borders could unite us instead of divide us?
I turn to see my dad sitting next to me in the cabin of my truck, breeze flapping through the open windows, and I am overwhelmed by the sense he is about to sing.