We drive along Cesar Chavez Road in the small city of Alamo, past the once beautiful farmhouse with the front porch where my tío, tía, and three primos lived. I open my window. Instead of smoke from my tío’s barbecue pit greeting my senses, I get a whiff of the unmistakable smell of boiling corn. Elote! But the aroma is not emanating from the house. It’s coming from across the street.

“This used to be my tío and tía’s house,” I tell my three kids. “Before this was César Chávez, it was called I Road.”

It’s 2019. My uncle and his family have moved away, and the house is abandoned, overtaken by grass and time. My children are not interested. They are preoccupied with where we are going and not what’s along the way. I haven’t told them our final destination, something I often do to pique their interest in our quests to reconnect with the Rio Grande Valley. This place I call home—an in-between region that is simultaneously Mexican and American—is a place they’ve never fully known.

“Where are we going?” they ask. “You’ll see. It’s a surprise,” I say. What they don’t know yet is that our destination is Pulga de Alamo, the self-proclaimed “biggest and best flea market in the RGV.” The claim is supported by its sheer size: acres upon acres of covered stalls, two vendor warehouses, four parking lots with hundreds of spaces, and a dance hall with a pavilion. You can spend an entire day at the pulga meandering through the lanes and only see a fraction of it.

My two oldest sons, Elijah and Miqueas, are 14 and 9 years old, respectively. They were born in Oregon, where my wife, Julie, is from. I lived there for 11 years before returning, with my family, to the Valley. My daughter, Vivian, who was born in McAllen, is 5 years old. It’s the only home she’s ever known.

As we ride past the old house on the left, their eyes fixate on the parking lot to our right, at multitudinous car windows glinting in the summer sunlight. Portable canopies are lined up along the chain-link fence, where a series of vendors sell the same thing: window tinting installed right on the premises. “De volada,” the workers tell prospective clients as they snap their fingers, telling them the time will fly by quickly, like a bird passing in the sky. I pull my Nissan Altima around the back to the dusty caliche parking lot.

The journey begins to feel ominous, maybe even a little dangerous—though I know it’s not. My kids’ eyes grow wide as they finally see the high yellow turnstile at the entrance, the throng of people coming and going, walking along avenues of stands with a variety of goods for purchase.

This is their first time at Pulga de Alamo. Though its official name is Mercadome, and it houses the Alamo Dance Hall at its center, locals refer to it simply as La Pulga—as in the one and only. We in the Valley know there are similar flea markets across the state in cities like San Antonio and Houston, but we pay them little attention. This is our destination. This is our flea market.

Now, you may have an image in your mind when I say flea market. You may imagine yourself quietly perusing others’ wares on a leisurely Saturday afternoon, smiling politely at vendors. You picture handmade crafts, antiques, scented candles, and assorted bric-a-brac. You may even recall a snack bar tucked away in some corner, selling canned sodas, popcorn in red- and-white striped bags, and hot dogs on paper boats with condiments stacked neatly in bins. They share the same lineage of selling inexpensive items and the root of the phrases “pulga” and “flea market” is the same: Legend has it the name originated from the Saint-Ouen Market, an outdoor bazaar in Paris known for selling flea-infested textiles and couches salvaged from the garbage.

But Valley flea markets are far more expansive and go beyond the traditional definition of the concept. Pulga de Alamo is an entirely cash-based economy. It’s also a livelihood for many. As one vendor told me, If the pulga doesn’t have it, you don’t need it. On Saturdays and Sundays, when the entirety of the pulga is open for business, this is certainly true. You can buy fresh fruit and vegetables, piñatas, used and new clothes, tools, generators, mowers, kitchenware, phone and tablet accessories, jewelry, pets, toys, video games, DVDs, computers, and vitamins. On weekdays, the only portion that is open to the public is the enormous parking lot, where vendors sell their goods under canopies and the pulga is akin to a yard sale, albeit a large one.

When you return to a place you loved in your youth and see how it has transformed from your memory, there is a sense that you can’t go home again. I Road is now Cesar Chavez Road. Houses full of memories lie empty. Upon my move back to the RGV in 2011, I discovered that the home of my family’s origins, a place I had once thought impervious to change, had in some ways become no different from the rest of the country. The Valley I remembered had devolved into streets of suburban strip-mall sameness.

Decades ago, Julie and I were engaged and she was living with her grandparents, who retired in the Valley city of Pharr. We announced we were leaving Texas so I could take a teaching job. Almost everyone cuffed my shoulder, stuck out the tips of their tongues in that Valley way to indicate playful disbelief, and said: Ahhh! You’re moving away? OK whatever, dude. You’ll be back! They weren’t wrong and, true to the aphorism “Everyone from the Valley comes back,” Julie and I did return many years later. Our families, our easy way of dipping into our colloquial Spanish when the English word won’t do, our hand gestures to communicate without words, our Valley Tex-Mex dishes and variations you can only get here—all these things called us back.

At great risk to my credentials as a chronicler of the Rio Grande Valley, I have a shocking confession: I wasn’t born here. My roots go back generations, as my grandparents made McAllen and Hidalgo their hometowns, but I’m not “Puro Valle.” I was born in Indiana, where my parents moved for jobs. But they wanted to raise their children where they had grown up, so we moved to McAllen when I was 10 years old. And when I became an adult and got married, I repeated the pattern to find adventure and sought a job elsewhere, first in Florida and then the Pacific Northwest. I state this because it’s something we in the Valley are sensitive about: how deeply this place is ingrained in our DNA and how we feel the need to establish our bona fides. What’s most important is I live here now.

If you are of Mexican heritage reading this, you might raise your index finger and curl it repeatedly like a head nodding “yes” to indicate your understanding. Like my parents before me, I came back for family, but I also returned to reconnect with our Tejano culture—the sounds, the smells, the aahs, and the bidi bidi bom bom of it all. I felt a sense of urgency, considering the small window of time we have in our childrens’ lives to create a foundational sense of identity. I want our kids to acculturate to the way of life that is deep in our bones, as I had all those years ago, and going to the pulga plays an integral part.

During those early years just before I was a teenager, when I began acclimating to my parents’ old home, we frequented pulgas. We traveled all around Hidalgo County, which is sandwiched between rural Starr County to the west and coastal Cameron County to the east. In McAllen, there was the flea market on South 23rd, simply named La Pulga de la 23, that used to be the Fiesta Drive-In movie theater. A favorite for me in McAllen was the Bargain Bazaar, which was indoors with central air conditioning. I would spend the whole day thumbing through boxes of comic books. I’d also sheepishly ask the martial arts vendor if I could see the shuriken, Sai swords, and foam nunchaku, fighting the urge to prove my fighting skills there in the aisle.

But these pulgas only exist in my memory. La Pulga de la 23 is a shell of its former self, with most stalls empty and lacking. The Bargain Bazaar is now the Mercado District, with hipster patio string lighting, faux shipping container walls, and artisan foods. It now resembles an upscale version of a market more comparable to something you would see in Portland, Oregon, or Austin. Gone is the happily haphazard assemblage of community I experienced growing up. Moving back to the Valley fills me with realizations that time has marched on, and the region is not in fact immune to change. There are vestiges of the old Valley I know, but substantial portions of it look like every other state I have lived in or traveled through. Though some of the favorite pulgas of my youth have folded, thankfully many persist.

In Mission, there are more than a few, most notably the 4 Mile Line Flea Market, which offers a drive-thru option. On the other side of the Valley, in Brownsville: the 77 Flea Market and the Browntown Flea Market. Despite every effort to make the Valley exactly the same as the rest of the country with predictable storefronts, pulgas remain, resistant to cultural and commercial assimilation. These existing flea markets have become the last bastion of everything we in the Rio Grande Valley hold dear: food, family, community, and bargains.

Standing at the gates of Pulga de Alamo, like a Tejano Gandalf, I make a declaration to urban sprawl and modernity: “We will make our stand here and you can go no further.” My kids ask me what I am talking about. “Don’t worry about it. Here,” I say, handing them quarters to pay the 50-cent entry fee to the señora in the yellow booth. As my kids awkwardly hand over their quarters and wait for a ticket—a long line forming behind us—the señora impatiently waves us in.

After entering the northside entrance, there are various lanes to choose from. Past the used tool vendor with chamois hanging from hooks—wrenches, metal files, and machetes laid out across a table—there is a fruit and vegetable market stocked with boxes of ripe mangos, their open tops facing out, enticing passersby. To our left is an elotero in a boxy trailer, steam from the boiling pot of corn ears emanating from the open windows. On a table next to the trailer is a help-yourself station with all the typical elote fixings: a Ziploc bag of cotija cheese, jars of chile powder, and a large saltshaker. Which way do we go?

“Can we get a corn?” Elijah asks. I know an elote will suit Elijah and Vivian, but for Miqueas, who eschews any kind of vegetable other than potatoes, I have something else in mind. I ask him if he knows what a spiropapa is—a treat I’ve only recently discovered, as pulgas did not sell these when I was younger. Some change is good.

After ordering at the trailer and handing over my bills, the vendor gives us each a spiralized potato that’s been elongated, wrapped around a wooden stick, and deep-fried. I walk my children over to the tray where bottles of condiments await at another self-serve station. No neatly arranged packets here. Ketchup, mayonnaise, and chile are in squeeze bottles next to a flat aluminum tray as large as a tabletop. The trick is to lay the spiropapa horizontally and drizzle whatever you want on it as the tray captures all the excess. It’s a messy proposition, and I must train my children on how it works, but they quickly learn and relish the experience. Though this is hardly the healthiest option, we’ll need fuel for what’s to come. Vivian gives the snack a new name. “Rotato,” she says, and we all laugh.

At one booth is Victor García, a well-dressed clothier and owner of Guayaberas Yucatecas. He sports sharply creased pants, immaculately shined exotic cowboy boots, and one of his own shirts—the iconic Latin American guayabera with embroidery and four pockets. Lured by the shirts hanging on racks in the entryway, I pause. “You can try whichever one you like,” he says, waving his hand to invite me into his store. Presentation is everything to Victor. He has paintings hanging, carpet on the floor, and guayaberas on display throughout his shop. There is also a picture of his father on the wall, a former wrestler in Mexico he proudly tells me about. I sense the children getting restless, but I will not walk away without a shirt. My eye lingers on a black one with patterned, embroidered lines, and Victor uncannily tracks my line of sight. “That one would look great on you.”

My children convince me to buy them cast-off McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, fidget spinners, and a used video game, but I draw the line at buying Vivian a pair of parakeets. As the kids’ energy wanes, I tell them there is one last thing to experience: the tardeada, the afternoon dance that ends the day. This tradition has its roots in Mexico but traveled as Mexican Americans made their way north. As I was taught by my friend Martín Leal, a historian and the owner of Angelita’s Casa de Café in Brownsville, the tardeada played a large role in the birth of the Valley’s own creation: conjunto music. The latter is playing as we enter a concrete dance floor ringed by wooden park tables and drink vendors shaded by a corrugated pavilion. This is Alamo Dance Hall, the heart of the pulga.

It’s early still and there is only one older couple dancing to the four-piece band playing the button accordion, bajo sexto, drums, and electric bass. The couple’s movements are graceful, like they’ve been dancing together for decades. They orbit the center of the dance floor, as is our tradition, and pass us. While my boys go and get aguas frescas and bottled waters, Vivian and I join in the dance, our movements awkward and halting, unpracticed. I realize this is another thing I’ve missed: the easy way our people dance, the music we feel deep inside. As often happens when one couple is joined by another at weddings and quinceañeras, Vivian and I dancing together prompts others to join in. Vivian and I hold hands and spin, and I take us closer to the center so we won’t impede the flow of the other dancers, though this is never a concern as they are used to gliding right past the uninitiated.

I do not know it in this moment, but the tardeada, a long-standing Mexican tradition and Valley way of life that celebrates a hard day’s labor, will also change. Like the relaxed, unhurried nature of Valley life, represented on the dance floor by leisurely turns and effortless shuffling of feet, this kind of tardeada will be gone in a few years. But not in the way of loss I’ve experienced. Instead of shrinking into a thing of the past, seen only in the faded, blurry images of a beloved photo album, it will come into clearer focus, expanding into something larger that, aided by technology, will be shared and reshared with the rest of the world.

Social media will get involved with the pulga. Out of nowhere, sometime in 2023, a Valley celebrity will emerge: Bronco 956. José Urbina Rios, a construction worker by day and an internet sensation by weekend, will go viral with his larger-than-life personality and shoulder-shimmying dance moves. Named Bronco 956 for his resemblance to the lead signer of Bronco, a band from Nuevo León, Mexico, Rios will be followed by other viral personalities. Take La Barbie, with her fringed pants, mane of curly blond hair, ever-present cowboy hat, and immaculate makeup unaffected by the heat. Or El Caballito 956, a 90-year-old dancing sensation known for his fancy shirts, gold jewelry, and a signature dance move where he flicks the leather fringe at his waist.

With the advent of these exuberant personalities, the tardeadas at Pulga de Alamo will transform. The tradition will become a caricature of itself as the crowds grow. People around the country will see our people in their dancing glory as videos go viral. And n’ombre, cállate, shut up, pulgas will even be featured on the front page of The New York Times. And again, the Valley will change, expanding and becoming an exaggerated version of its past self.

Five years ago, as Vivian and I spin some more on the dance floor as my boys, who are at the park table enjoying their drinks, whiz by my line of sight. They don’t know the past of this place and none of us know the future, but we have this moment, this lazy tardeada inside Pulga de Alamo. In this moment, time stands still, and it is perfect.

Rubén Degollado’s Open Road essay “Home Before Sundown” appeared in the October 2022 issue.