Zapata: River, Community and People in Transition

Abstract

Texas' Zapata County borders Mexico for some hundred miles along the Rio Grande River. For more than two centuries descendants of the original Spanish settlers of the area have tilled the soil in this rural Latino community. Their history is the history of the river, its dry spells, and fl oods, bounties, and ultimately its dams. The following narrative is an ethnographic account of the transformation of Zapata from a farming and ranching community to a recreation and retirement community as a result of a treaty and the building of a dam and the social, cultural and economic transformation these set into play.Propelled by an international treaty between the United States and Mexico (Treaty between United States and Mexico 1944), construction of the first international dam between the United States and Mexico, Falcon Dam and Reservoir on the Rio Grande River, served as the catalyst that forever changed the river, the people and the community. The new reservoir's waters inundated homes, townsites, farms and...