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 of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

“We thought there was a lack of options for students, alumni and the Valley to show their pride,” Gonzalez said of UTRGV, which she called, “a great thing we have in our backyard.”

Going about doing something about that led the couple to plan their own version of a fan shop. It would be a store supporting all things of the orange-themed Vaqueros. In addition to UTRGV’s sports teams, items support many of the university’s departments and institutions, like the medical school. After months of planning and building up sufficient inventory, the Vaquero Outfitters store opened on March 8 to much fanfare in Edinburg. The city’s mayor was there, as were UTRGV cheerleaders and administrators from the university’s athletic department.

“We want to put the orange out in the community,” Alisa Gonzalez said of UTRGV’s primary school color. 

Excitement Building

The store appears to be off to a good start, judging by the merchandise variety and the volume of customers.

Gonzalez’s store is well-decorated and arranged with a wide variety of shirts hanging on the racks by the hundreds. Orange and white caps and other products tout pride in the Valley’s 956 phone area code. The first wave of sports-themed merchandise promotes the current UTRGV baseball season and its local team. There’s also drinking glasses and coffee mugs as well as the ubiquitous outsized foam fingers to hold up at games. 

For now, the store’s focus is apparel and products of general appeal and not sports specific other than baseball. The university’s distinctive orange V logo with a green star in its midst (to honor its Pan American University heritage) is everywhere at Vaquero Outfitters. The UTRGV Edinburg campus is across University Drive from the store’s location in a busy plaza behind a Pizza Hut. 

“We’re seeing a lot of excitement from fans and students,” said Gonzalez, a graduate of UTRGV’s predecessor – UT Pan American.

Football Is Coming 

The excitement Gonzalez describes is sure to grow over the next year and beyond.

UTRGV will celebrate its inaugural football season in fall 2025. The university’s nascent football program has been much in the news recently with the announcement of a former soccer stadium in Edinburg being designated as the Vaqueros’ primary football home. The university’s leadership also recently announced its athletic programs are leaving the Western Athletic Conference to join the Southland Conference. The new conference will include more natural rivalries such as Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Incarnate Word University of San Antonio.

“We knew football was coming,” Gonzalez said. “Yes, football is big here, and there’s lots of excitement about having a football team, but the university has done such a great job of moving forward with lots of other things, like the medical school.”

Gonzalez is a former educator, which included eight years as an administrator. Her husband also owns a separate business in Weslaco. She has found the organizational skills she honed as a teacher and assistant principal have served her well in setting up Vaquero Outfitter. Experience in working through processes comes in handy since all of the merchandise in Gonzalez’s store must go through a multistep process that involves designs being approved by UTRGV and the University of Texas System.

It’s all worth it, she says, to “get the orange out there.”