Archive

There are cookouts and then there’s Smokin’ On The Rio. The Mercedes-based event, with its full name of Smokin’ On The Rio State Championship BBQ Cook-off, has become a yearly […]

By the early 1900s, the Rio Grande Valley was ready for a makeover – and Mercedes would be right in the middle of it. After over 100 years of living […]

As Dr. Barbara Baggerly-Hinojosa sees it, great leaders are trained, educated and formed through study and practice, and not born with the great traits of leadership. The Waco native and […]

Before there was the Rio Grande Valley Livestock Show and the beginnings of the community that’s so closely tied to it, there were the vaqueros, “the original cowboys,’’ as a […]

Jodie Oliver Martinez walks up to his historic home on south Missouri Avenue in Mercedes and cautions a visitor on taking the final step up to the over 100-year-old house. […]

Sitting in one of her two businesses at the outlet mall in Mercedes, Ashley Nicole Werbiski marveled at how she turned a degree in criminal justice into a photography studio […]

Trainor Evans recalls his conversations with Zeferino Rios, the father of boot making in the Rio Grande Valley, a craftsman who opened his first shop in Mercedes in 1929 and […]

The boots of Mercedes reside in the National Archives in Washington D.C., a gift to a president from the son of a Mexican immigrant. It was October 1953 when President […]

Into the Woods By Eileen Mattei From the deck at Estero Llano Grande State Park in Mercedes, I watched approximately 2,000 black-bellied whistling ducks in Ibis Pond as they looked […]

By Eileen Mattei The sign outside reads Mid Valley Nursing & Rehabilitation. “I see it as a hotel,” said Alice Roel, the Licensed Nursing Facility Administrator for the Mercedes facility. […]