a tree of fair beauty and grace

There was a time when I trusted my perceptions, a time when the landscape of my birthplace seemed immovable, untouched by time or distance. The roadside grain elevators, the feedlots, the Mexican cafés—they all existed in vivid detail within a mental map that came with directions through backroads and which direction to take when you hit the railroad tracks, a blinking light, or a dead end.

In my early years, the entirety of my known world existed within the bounds of Laredo to the west and the Gulf to the east, the expanse between San Antonio and the Rio Bravo, known as the Grande to some. It opens to the south of US 281 and 59 at George West. I recognize those crossroads as the gates into an imperceptible plane, a spiritual home.

From there I travel south, across routes as familiar as the face of my mother, now nearly 20 years departed, and as natural to me as the creases appearing on mine. It’s a harsh terrain where cactus tumbles over barbed wire fences and every living creature was seemingly born to bite, poke, or sting. But here this native daughter perceives a liminal space where the voices of long missed parents and grandparents are heard: “You better get home before it’s dark—you’ll hit a deer.”

Here, even death is transcended.

We are a particular breed of people, the sons and daughters of the brush country, and this isn’t just my pride talking. Cultural geographer Daniel D. Arreola surveyed the region and came away struck by its “long deep taproot of heritage” and folks’ “unusual attachment to place,” a region where culture, identity, and even faith are intertwined with the land. This is an expanse of country where the chronicler of centuries of folk history is a mesquite tree.

“I AM of the highest quality of Mesquites,” announces Elena Zamora O’Shea’s narrator in El Mesquite: A Story of the Early Spanish Settlements Between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. The mesquite recounts the practices of Indigenous people, who ground mesquite beans for meal, as is done today. The indefatigable mesquite, who held prejudices against these people, also withstood the arrival of outsiders: “I was a tree of fair beauty and grace when the Spaniards in very strange attire appeared on the horizon …”

I will admit that growing up I often complained that nothing ever seemed to change, and when I finally moved away, I devised tricks to recreate a bit of South Texas. There was the time while living in Brooklyn when I took to burning flour tortillas on the gas stove. Through the smoky aroma materialized the doves’ lament, the sizzling chicharras, the blooming lantana. Memories and images unfurled across my mind like an accordion roll of Polaroid photographs.

Present moments sometimes blurred with past memories. At a ranch near Austin, I worked a combination lock by the light of my truck’s headlights and the instant I pushed open the metal gate, I returned to the familiar. The truck that once belonged to my father ambled over the caliche road like a weathered old man, just like a truck is supposed to. But I hadn’t returned home; I had arrived for a writer’s residency outside of Austin at the former ranch of J. Frank Dobie, the legendary storyteller who extracted folk tales and dark mythologies from the South Texas chaparral.

See how easily they blend together—memories and  geography—to color perceptions? There’s a comforting reassurance that comes from perceived predictability. Within that peace, I had little reason to peer deeply into my mapping or its origins.

A person eventually reaches a certain maturity and must reckon with who they are and where they come from. That time may come, as it did for me, when the last of our family historians had passed on, when all the reminiscing and retelling of old family tales did nothing to assuage the sense, deep down, that engraved impressions now seemed less certain.

I began to revisit scenes from childhood like the afternoon drives around the town square in San Diego, the Duval County seat. From the backseat, carsick, I watched my grandmother and tías point at stately homes, recalling the families who once lived there. I was confused by their fascination with abandoned homes that to my child’s eye were clearly haunted.

The San Diego I knew was a highway town where truckers showered and gassed up and the site of the annual pan de campo festival—ranch bread baked in cast-iron Dutch ovens over an open flame. But with some prodding, I learned that San Diego was once prime sheep country. Here, families with roots in Camargo and Ciudad Mier Tamaulipas reaped hundreds of thousands of pounds of wool, with 100,000 head belonging to just one Duval County landowner.

Where I perceived just another small town, my grandmother and tías perceived another realm, where families promenaded around the plaza while children played. They deciphered the 1876 plaza as a living artifact, designed in accordance with the Laws of the Indies issued by Philip II in 1573. These specified the construction of a plaza in colonial towns across northern Mexico and future South Texas. They were reading into the landscape family bonds and a world configured to reflect a genesis story, a historical timeline, and a struggle to survive.

The sheep farmers became ranchers, and with the mass introduction of cattle that nibbled on mesquite pods, the water-greedy trees proliferated to become a defining feature of the landscape I later accepted as “natural.”

But now even the cardinal points of a childhood domain that turned on the north-south axis of US 281 and 77 were subjected to a closer look. Homero Vera, a historian of South Texas ranching families, once told me of the older routes farther west. North and south, he told me while sketching a croquis on a napkin, stretched from Ciudad Mier in Mexico to San Diego and Goliad. They were Indian trails and trade routes formed along water sources, where travelers sought medicine and healing and often encountered different habitats.

Novels, films, and Dobie’s folktales have rendered the region a forbidden landscape rife with violence. But in the theater of the “Comanche raids,” 19th-century Swiss botanist Jean Louis Berlandier joined Comanches on hunting expeditions, visited Kickapoos, and mingled with dozens of other bands of native people. The Swiss-born naturalist chronicled our landscapes in an 1820-30s expedition dispatched by the Mexican government to investigate reports of unrest near Gonzales and Goliad.

Young Berlandier cataloged the flora, fauna, and cultures of the region, fixing his borrowed cyanometer to register the saturation of blue in the sky. He marveled at lifeways “that accommodated to the natural environment rather than try to mold it artificially,” Russell M. Lawson wrote in his book Frontier Naturalist Jean Louis Berlandier and the Exploration of Northern Mexico and Texas.

Up around Three Rivers, near the site I long regarded as a spiritual portal, Berlandier noticed the starry night sky “kindled the imagination” of commissioner Lt. Jose María Sánchez. It moved him, Berlandier wrote, “to reflect upon the great mystery of the unknown and the boundless power of the Supreme Being that brought everything out of chaos by His infinite power.”

It occurred to me while reading their accounts that the Valley I believed to reveal itself only to its native children was observable to anyone given the right intention.

Off to Texas we must go, I tell my partner in 2021, insisting that eventually a Tejana feels compelled to return home or somewhere thereabouts. There were circumstances that had convinced me—the months locked inside a tiny New York City apartment during a global pandemic, the sound of wailing ambulance sirens, day and night. I need space, open air, and miles of natural beauty.

The Rio Grande Valley is not New York, and I can now attest to the truth in the cliché about not being able to go home again. Everything is familiar but nothing is expected. There are no Sunday barbecues, no afternoons lounging around with cousins.

I take an early morning boat ride and witness the Rio Grande with Marianna Treviño Wright, then executive director of the National Butterfly Center in Mission. At first light, we witness the majestic beauty of a great egret delicately perched on a tree branch. A farmer on the Mexican side grooms a handsome stallion and we wave—buenos días. News reports from the river somehow miss those moments. They miss the cowboy priest, the Rev. Roy Snipes, who cruises the river at sunset, checking on the reflectors that he installed to guide boaters.

Roy invites me onboard one evening, and we ride against the current toward the sun, relaxing behind the horizon. When I glance back, I fix my sight on the smiling priest, his spirit unbounded.

Some absences and disappointments, meanwhile, are harder to take. My friend Jesse, an attorney, has no time to reminisce about our youth; he’s busy opening a nature store. Jesse hands me a milkweed plant, for attracting monarch butterflies, and urges me to become a master naturalist.

Postcard memories take on nuance and detail. No longer do I perceive a solid chaparral but instead thorn brush, palm forests, and an ancient sand sheet that stretched from the coast to nearby ranches. The boundary of my world contains 11 biotic communities where more than 500 bird species draw tens of thousands of visitors, sustaining a billion-dollar ecotourism industry in a place where the extent of my ornithology was dove-hunting season.

On long walks deep into the thorn forest, I lock eyes with a hawk perched on high, just as Zamora O’Shea’s mesquite did: “The birds used me as a resting place, perching on my limbs as they surveyed the grounds on their journeys.” When she wrote, “these birds did not know our lands,” she was referring to the thousands of birds for whom our country is a crucial site along the thousand-mile migratory route.

Within a single bush, a world of butterflies thrives. I become a devotee of the western pygmy blue, so tiny and delicate it is easily mistaken for debris, and the scarlet flowers of the Turk’s cap, beloved by hummingbirds.

Time comes into sharper focus. The squat sabal palms found on both sides of the river belong to the species recorded in the 1600s by Juan Bautista Chapa. Sightings of cottonwood, willow and cypress, mulberry and mesquite, and live oaks like the ones we see today were recorded by Captain Alonso de León in the 1600s. He observed deer, antelopes, jackrabbits, coyotes, cottontails, javelinas, armadillos, raccoons, wild or feral cattle and hogs—fauna that is native to our lands and seen today.

From the bluffs in Starr County, near the bridge that connects Roma with Ciudad Miguel Aléman at the curve of the river, I marvel at fantastic sunsets just as I imagine my great-great-grandfather did in the 1800s when he ran a ferry up and down the river. The geology later captivated Maj. William H. Emory, who described Roma as “beautiful” in his 1857 report to Congress.

Reflecting the biased and limited perceptions of his era, Emory referred to a region “frequently mapped,” though “the largest portion of it had never been traversed by civilized man.” Within his inventory of natural wonders, he delivered to Congress a future for a “border region” stripped of habitat and transformed into commercial agriculture shipped north by a future railway. “In situations sheltered from the northers,” he reported, “I have no doubt oranges and lemons could be raised with facility.”

The orchards he envisioned became in my childhood map a natural feature of the Valley. But I now understand the modern world as merely a reflection of the visions of largely unknown architects and the wants and needs of faraway people. Taking a closer look at my frayed mental map, it occurs to me that defining features of the assumed natural world were recent creations. The cattle ranches and oil wells were but a recent layer, though they had long populated my mind like the miniature metal derricks, with rotating oil well, my mother once ordered from a traveling salesman as gifts for my father and my brother, a roughneck.

All along, the source of the perceived immovability was me. The disappointment at my short-lived return, the family reunion that never occurred, came from hopes projected through Polaroid picture memories. Your cousins are now patriarchs and matriarchs of their own clans, Jesse tells me before exposing the truth to my expectations: “We weren’t waiting on a shelf for you to come back.”

I was the inheritor of stories, a preserver of histories, but I was not the imagined creator. That changed in the summer of 2025 when I set out to map the evolving landscape of home through discovery, through curiosity, through new people.

On the shady shoreline of the Rio Grande, Gloria Alvarado Galindo, her friend Alex, and her daughter Gabriela, settle beneath a mesquite as grand as the storyteller in Zamora O’Shea’s narrative and explain the ongoing and never-ending battle against guinea grass. It too is a relic of past designs, introduced more than 100 years ago for use as cattle feed. The effort failed, but the invasive grass came to dominate the land. Looking out on the river, Gloria says, “This all used to be cypresses.” Indeed, the buildings in nearby Saliñeno, a centuries-old village, were constructed with ancient cypress.

Silence. A green heron. “Is that a caracara?” someone murmurs. “Looks like it,” comes the reply.

Gloria, a board member of the Friends of the Wildlife Corridor, and her daughters are stewards of habitats across the Valley. But her beginnings were much like mine, going out to the ranch, joining her husband on a hunting trip. Eventually, she notices a vividness in the brush: a vermilion flycatcher, purple martins.

What do you call this, I ask, waving at the lush riverfront habitat they work to restore. “It’s truth,” Gloria says. “It’s reclaiming the truth of what the land is and who we are.”

In the evening, I push open the metal gate to the Rancho Lomitas Nature Preserve near Rio Grande City and salute the dying sun while green jays hop through the branches for their evening mealtime. There is a feeling of aliveness right outside the window as I bed down in a cabin rented out by Toni and Benito Treviño. The latter possesses a knowledge of flora and fauna that has made him something of a legend. When we first met, he twisted together strands from a plant to demonstrate how rope was once made.

Benito confirms the rumors that he recently cultivated his 1 millionth seedling for reforestation. Nearly 200 years after Berlandier stared at the night sky, Benito is studying his work. Like Berlandier, who practiced morphology—the interconnectedness of life—Benito maps out the species.

“What do you see when you look out,” I ask. “Science? Poetry?”

“Culture,” he says.

He devotes himself to studying the endangered species of the region, plants and shrubs, vegetation often dismissed as weeds. He tells me little is still known about their pollinators, their lifespans. Then, seeming to articulate my journey of peering into the brush, he turns to me and says, “There’s so much we don’t know.”

I encounter the next chapter in the story of the orchards in a native plant wonderland flourishing on the 6-acre lot in Harlingen belonging to Dr. América Beatriz Gonzales and her husband, Salvador Salinas. América grew up in the world Emory had envisioned, the daughter of a contractor who rented out the services of his heavy machinery to harvest crops, and she became a pediatrician.

The sorghum that once grew is gone, replaced by scarlet sage, bush sunflower, Texas sage, and side oats. Salvador, a historian, tells me, “They came out—the coyotes, the hawks, pigs, tons of birds.” Now, América’s father’s tractors are used for restoration.

After I depart, it starts occurring to me that I never knew how Jesse became involved in birding and restoring landscapes. You know someone long enough, you just assume you know everything important about them. With time we had become old buddies in familiar roles, and asking feels like prying because the question is really about who he is in the world beneath his role.

Jesse mentions the Rio Grande Valley as a crossroads of people and biodiversity, ancestors who lived along the river for centuries. Within all that beauty, he was busy mowing and trimming, working to sustain an image of beauty imported from elsewhere. “Meanwhile, there was nature doing these incredible things and I’m missing it,” he says. He was too busy, focused on the routine, disconnected. Then he decided to be part of the “spectacular,” he says. As he is talking, I look upon my old friend and behold the wise man he has become.

I see it all now, like Zamora O’Shea’s mesquite, decades passing—the little girl I once was, riding in the bed of the pickup truck, the visits home. Like my grandmother and tías, I drive by now vacant houses. I still travel through the landscapes of memory, but what I see is vitality all around, in myself and in lifelong beloveds. I have arrived somewhere more vivid than any picture.