Heriberto Reynoso is a high school graduate of the early 2000s and was the type of kid “building robots in my garage” when such technological skills were a bit rare among American youth. His parents wondered what he was doing, while at school, he recalls teachers that “didn’t understand what I was asking.” Reynoso was perhaps a bit ahead of his time at his high school in Brownsville. His technological…
Marisa de Leon was a child of music growing up, playing piano and then the viola in her high school orchestra. Music, she says, was her “safe space.” It was during her high school years when de Leon saw a “60 Minutes” report featuring the recovery of former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords from a gunshot wound to the head. In early 2011, Giffords of Arizona survived an assassination attempt in…
At age 21, Holly Hargrove had already earned a licensed vocational nursing degree to go with an associate of applied science degree in business management. The latter came from Texas State Technical College in Harlingen. The LVN nursing degree was achieved during Hargrove’s high school years at the Harlingen School of Health Professions. Hargrove has an appreciation for the healthcare field and is proud to have earned her nursing degree.…
The road to Isla Blanca Park being named USA Today’s Best Beach in Texas for 2024 began decades before when the South Padre Island park’s old pavilion featured a lean-to metal roof and an open view to the Gulf of Mexico. Isla Blanca Park for decades was the place for Rio Grande Valley families to gather with homestyle picnics. The venue provided a fun and inexpensive getaway. The amenities were…
The first time Lamar Jones saw his bottles of gourmet barbecue sauce lined up on the shelves of an H-E-B store he felt like a musician hearing one of his songs on the radio for the first time. “It was surreal to see it,” Jones recalled of that 2016 memory. “To see something I started making in my kitchen and then developing it to a brand being sold at H-E-B,…
Kathy Lueders hears the question often in her capacity as general manager of Starbase’s operations at Boca Chica Beach. “When are we going to Mars?” Lueders said to an audience recently in Harlingen on the Texas State College campus. “I don’t know exactly when but I do know that one day out of the Rio Grande Valley there will be a Starship going to Mars.” Lueders’ talk was titled “Space…
Jeanette Greider’s arrival as the South Padre Island Chamber of Commerce‘s new president came after a serendipitous turn of events in the spring of 2023. Greider’s lengthy career in media sales and management had recently come to an end when she decided to participate in a customer service seminar given by the SPI Convention & Visitors Bureau. Greider wanted to network with others generally connected to her field of sales,…
Isaac Smith felt more than the loss of business and the diminishment of revenues after a 2022 New Year’s Day fire burned his family’s 120,000-square-foot Matt’s Building Material store to the ground. “I still miss the old store,” Smith said recently, sitting in the new office of a shiny new 45,000-square-foot building where the original building sat for decades in Pharr. “I grew up in that store. It’s like losing…
The 900-foot-high KGBT tower just south of La Feria does more than just transmit television signals. The long-standing tower is held upright by high-tensioned guy wires and is visible for several miles in a wide radius around La Feria. At about 200 feet up, the KGBT tower houses a row of tile-looking squares that are providing what executives of VTX1 Companies call “the next generation of fixed wireless” Internet service.…
Weslaco’s city leadership in recent years has honed in on a consistent message amid the community’s growth across several key economic sectors. The days of local residents having to go to McAllen to shop and dine are over, they say. “We don’t have to leave Weslaco anymore,” said Steven Valdez, the executive director of the Weslaco Economic Development Corporation. “We can stay home.” A business and commerce identity independent of…