Playing the long game in scaling up a business is a cumbersome process and often met with disinterest from would-be partners. Karina Saldivar’s Amor Y Pan in Brownsville was established as a successful health lifestyle market and bakery by 2024. Her business ambitions always extended outward beyond one location to getting her products on grocery store shelves. Getting to that goal via phone calls and introductory e-mails and receiving no…
The Brownsville Navigation District has awarded 34 graduating high school seniors the 2025 Port of Brownsville Scholarship, recognizing academic excellence, community service and leadership. Each recipient will receive a $1,000 scholarship upon enrollment at a college, university or technical school. Students were selected based on their academic achievements, extracurricular involvement, community engagement, work experience and a personal essay. Recipients represent 17 public and private high schools within the navigation district.…
Lemonade Day is coming to Brownsville on June 14, empowering today’s youth to be tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. Lemonade Day is a free, fun, experiential learning program that teaches youth how to start, own and operate their own business – a lemonade stand. The foremost objective of Lemonade Day is to empower youth to take ownership of their lives and become productive members of society – the business leaders, social advocates, volunteers and…
The Brownsville Chamber of Commerce hosts an exclusive opportunity on June 13 to learn about the future of the community at Friday with the City. The City of Brownsville is implementing a Road Capital Recovery Fee to help fund transportation infrastructure needs. The CRF is designed to support new growth and development. It aims to equitably distribute the costs of road improvements among developers who benefit directly from them. The…
Helen Ramirez was 29 years old when she first applied for a city manager’s opening. She recalled thinking that her chances were slim of actually getting an offer for the job. Ramirez did it for the experience of formally seeking such a job. And she saw it as the beginning of honing her pitch and building confidence that such jobs were within her reach. Fast forward to 2022 and Ramirez…
Rene Jackson is a La Joya native and a nearly 30-year veteran of the U.S. Army with an expertise in logistics and the transportation of goods and products. “Ammunition and missiles,” Jackson said when asked in a television interview what materials he supervised shipping. “We would bring in all of the support sustainment stuff for the war fighters doing the actual fighting.” Jackson would rise to the rank of lieutenant…
The Port of Brownsville is now 41st in the ranking of 150 U.S. maritime ports for waterborne cargo tonnage. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ most recent annual report, in 2023, the port’s waterways handled more than 11.2 million tons of cargo. This is a 23 percent increase from 2022’s 9.1 million tons, launching the port from 50th position to 41st in the nation. This latest ranking signifies…
Texas Southmost College welcomed representatives from its various industry partners to the ITEC Center on May 9 for the Business, Engineering, Architecture and Technology Industry Partner Meet and Greet. The event was TSC’s way of showing appreciation for the different industries who have contributed to helping enhance the various Workforce Training and Continuing Education programs, ensuring that students in those programs are learning the skills to fully prepare them once…
Thanks to the recent opening of two new Patent and Trademark Resource Centers at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Libraries, Valley innovators will no longer need to drive 300 miles to the nearest patent office in Austin to secure intellectual property protection. Community members with big ideas for new technologies, products or brands now have access to essential resources in their own backyards with these university locations in Edinburg and…
One Rio Grande Valley car dealer whose name is today emblazoned across the region got his start in a modest-sized store selling Buicks just blocks south of the courthouse in Edinburg. Bert Ogden sold cars as a side business before opening his first dealership in the 1960s. He would purchase used cars from upstate Texas sources, restore them to running condition, and then sell them in the Valley. The downtown…