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…
Alisa Gonzalez and her husband Benjamin took their recent high school graduate to get settled at Texas A&M University last fall and made a poignant observation. College Station has fan stores a many featuring all sorts of A&M Aggies gear, be it t-shirts, caps, sweatshirts or bumper stickers. The Edinburg couple thought of their university back home. They knew it had nothing comparable to promote the Vaqueros of the University…
Rey Esquibel has worked his way up to the top leadership post at the Rich’s frozen foods manufacturing plant in Brownsville. Esquibel says his “fingerprints are all over” the 130,000-square-foot facility on east 14th Street. His work ethic matches that of the 400 employees who work at the facility. Rich’s Brownsville plant is located just blocks away from what is known in the city as the four corners intersection where…
Jackie Valdez‘s photographs feature the faces of the Rio Grande Valley. There are teenage girls wearing cowboy hats enjoying the sights and sounds of the Rio Grande Livestock Show in Mercedes. High school bands marching down streets in parades and across football fields make up another colorful portion of her South Texas portfolio. Freshly graduated students in portraits look hopeful and happy in Valdez’s portrait work as they look off…
Rene Rodriguez’s students are huddled around representatives of Rio Grande LNG, a bit wide-eyed and asking plenty of questions. Rodriguez is an instructor with the building construction technology program at Texas State Technical College in Harlingen. Rio Grande LNG representatives had just concluded a presentation on campus regarding their facility, which is currently under construction at the Port of Brownsville. The first phase of the $18 billion-plus liquefied natural gas…
Pam Le has a story to tell of a mother who came to the United States at age 17, knowing no one and speaking only her native Vietnamese. Hoa Le is the daughter of a U.S. serviceman she never met and a Vietnamese mother who died when Hoa was only eight years old. Coming to Houston through a sponsorship program, Hoa Le went about building an American life that would…