A recent television report referred to Enrique Camargo as “The Last Bootmaker” in Mercedes.

Camargo’s custom boot shop has been a mainstay in Mercedes on 2^nd Street/Business 83 for decades. Where there were once about 10 individual bootmakers, Camargo told KRGV-TV he’s the last man standing in Mercedes when it comes to solo shops.

“What I know I do and they can’t take that away from me,” he said in the interview.

There are, in reality, hundreds of boots made daily in the city and then shipped out across the country and world from Rios of Mercedes Boot Company. Rios has the classic bootmakers that make everything by hand from start-to-finish along with assembly-line type of manufacturing that utilizes some of the hands-on techniques.

Camargo and Rios of Mercedes each in their own ways can tie their boot-making heritage back to the family of Zeferino Rios. Camargo learned from the masters who learned under the tutelage of Zeferino. Rios of Mercedes is named after the father of boot making in the Rio Grande Valley.

“He was a tough old guy,” said Trainor Evans, the patriarch of Rios of Mercedes, of Zeferino, from whom he purchased the company in the mid-1970s. “He didn’t mince words. He had one way of making boots and it was the right way.”

The cowboy/western heritage runs strong in Texas. Some cities in the state claim to be the birthplace of the cowboy or say their community is where the west began. Mercedes needs to make no such claims. The outsized boots that dot the corner of intersections and roadways in Mercedes make statements of their own in saying the city “is known as the home of quality boots,” Evans said in a 2109 interview.

Continuing & Expanding Traditions

Camargo keeps at it at his 2^nd Street shop, teaching an understudy after losing the man he called “my right hand,” a brother who recently passed.

Saying he still loves to draw and design, Camargo described himself in the TV story as “a creator” who has no plans to stop making boots.

“As long as your hands are good and you can keep your eyesight,” he said of continuing his craftsmanship.

The continuation of quality boot-making in Mercedes is connected to the city’s western heritage going back to its founding in the early 1900s. The beginnings of Mercedes in 1907 are tied to what one local historian called “the original cowboys.” They worked the ranches of the Spanish and Mexican land grant recipients, said Dr. Beatrice de Leon Edwards. And so it was that when Midwesterners began coming to what is now the Rio Grande Valley in the early 20^th Century, they needed agricultural and livestock shows to highlight the region’s heritage and possibilities.

It would mark the beginning of what is now the Rio Grande Valley Livestock Show, with the first such shows beginning in Mercedes in 1913.The first official edition was held in 1939 in downtown Mercedes. Years later, it would be moved to its present location adjacent to Expressway 83. The rodeos and other events related to the annual livestock show gave further fodder for the Mercedes bootmakers and the craft they were developing in the city.

In the most recent edition of the RGV Livestock Show last March, the rodeo competitions were for the first time broadcasted nationally on a cable television channel. It gave further exposure and another platform to declare Mercedes as good a city as any in Texas to be one of the capital of cowboys, boots and the great Western traditions of the United States.

• Ric Cavazos