On a cool September morning, Pamela Rivas picks me up at my hotel in a light beige F-150 driven by her 24-year-old son, Ivan. Country music plays softly on the stereo. We’re in Edinburg, the Texas border city where they now live, but we’re headed west. A 60-year-old registered nurse, Rivas is taking me to see the land where she’s from—a property she’s spent nearly 15 years fighting to save from border wall construction. It’s a fight she’s just won.
As we drive Highway 83, the land subtly shifts: elevation rises; riverbanks steepen; the brush country starts to roll. After just shy of an hour, we turn south onto the only road to Los Ebanos, the unincorporated town of a few hundred residents where Rivas lived until the second grade. We’re flanked by fallow fields when we see our first Border Patrol SUV, garish in its green and white, parked beside the shoulder. Rivas and Ivan grow heated: When we leave, they predict, we’ll be pulled over and questioned by some combination of law enforcement ostensibly looking for smugglers. It happens every time, they say.
We reach Los Ebanos. Named for its abundance of Texas ebony trees, the town is nestled in a bend in the río such that water surrounds it, Mexico surrounds it, on three sides. A few quaint casitas, a ballpark, a catholic church. Outside one house, Rivas’ cousin waves. Then, the town cemetery looms, well-maintained and brimming with bright flowers and American flags. Generations of Rivas’ family are buried there, including a Mexico-born grandfather, shot and killed in a property dispute near the graveyard in 1923.
