The Valley Wants In: Creators at The Texas/Mexico Border

The last time I was in McAllen, it was not this busy. Cranes are everywhere, and so are the construction crews building all sorts of things: restaurants, banks, and apartments. The telltale signs of either a boom or looming gentrification, depending on your cynical worldview. The cranes aren't a mirage; in 2025, McAllen logged roughly $507 million in residential and commercial construction, a 40% jump from the year before.

Sitting at The Gremlin, one of the few bastions of punk-rock outsider mentality — but with higher-end food options — as I crunched down on my chicken sandwich, people never stopped coming in for dinner. And I get it. The Brussels sprouts are that good.

I'm not just talking my own book here, either. In 2024, a chef running a taqueria out of Mission — no press setup, just great tacos — beat out finalists from Austin and San Antonio to take home the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Texas, the closest thing the food world has to an Oscar. Two years later, a Valley pitmaster landed on the semifinalist list for the same title. This isn't a border town eating well by accident. It might be the best food scene in the state, and it's only getting louder about it.

Driving through the streets of the Rio Grande Valley (or RGV), you'll see many closed stores, but then, a block away, there will be something brand new. Rick's Pet Shop looks shuttered from long ago, while a new ramen spot appears to be making a fast buck.

"The Valley," as it's called throughout Texas, isn't a place easily put into a singular box. It's a complicated region sitting at the crossroads of multiple cultures: roughly three and a half to four hours from San Antonio, across the Rio Grande from Reynosa, Mexico, but existing in its own space, where many locals don't feel completely defined by either Texas or Mexico.

For an outsider, that distinction can be easy to miss. Spanish and English bleed into each other casually. Mexican traditions sit alongside the Texan passion for football, country music marries Tejano, and brisket straight from the smoker goes on fresh flour tortillas with salsa and eggs for breakfast. All the other cultural markers people associate with Texas show up too, without anybody treating it as a contradiction — just part of the cultural nuance particular to the Rio Grande Valley. Down in this region, families have roots stretching across both sides of the river, and the border can feel less like the hard dividing line imagined in national politics than something people have lived with their entire lives. The food, music, slang and rhythms of daily life belong specifically to this patch of South Texas. You can drive through farmland, strip malls, taquerias and new luxury developments within minutes of one another.

The Valley isn't half of one thing and half of another. It's its own thing.

Nobody articulated that condition better than Gloria Anzaldúa, the Rio Grande Valley-born writer whose work turned the borderlands themselves into a way of understanding identity: "To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras — be a crossroads."

The Valley is not what you think it is. It's not all the stereotypes of cartels and coyotes hiding people in car trunks, waving past checkpoints with a smile. There's big money down there. The Port of Brownsville says private investment across the space, energy, manufacturing, and shipbuilding sectors now tops $60 billion. Rio Grande LNG alone is a $36 billion project, while Saronic Technologies is planning a $3.2 billion shipyard expected to employ 10,000 people.

And then there's SpaceX. The company continues to expand its footprint around Brownsville and Starbase, buying 54 acres on South Padre Island and developing nearly 40 more acres for heavy industry, while the newly incorporated city of Starbase is seeking to annex more than 7,000 acres in Cameron County.

It Ain't All Carnitas Down Here; Sometimes It's Water Usage Rights

As I drove past the rows of palm trees and the building with the ballerinas painted on the sign — it catches my attention every time I pass it; I'm a sucker for a Degas/Renoir-style ballet dancer painting — I wondered how the boom of social media was affecting an area so singular in its attitude, expression, and identity against the larger Texas narrative.

All over the world, people are discovering places through their feeds, so why would the Valley be any different? In 2025, 61% of travelers said they used social media for travel inspiration, nearly double the 35% who said the same thing just two years earlier. And 73% said an influencer recommendation had affected a travel booking decision.

So I took the five-hour ride from Austin down to the Valley. I wanted to know how the Valley was changing and how the people see themselves in the context of the future.

One sign of how seriously the Valley is taking that shift: Social Fest, a marketing and creator-economy conference now heading into its second year, returns to the McAllen Convention Center November 12–13. I'll get to the dude behind it.

But "creator" in the Valley doesn't necessarily mean somebody showing off restaurants, clothes, or whatever TikTok has decided you need to buy this week.

Joshua Moroles runs a marketing agency, but his public-facing content is much more concerned with what's happening beneath all that growth: water quality, data centers, surveillance cameras, pollution, and the environmental pressures accompanying billions of dollars in new development.

@joshmoroles

"I'm not an influencer. I'm not any of those things," he told me. "I'm just a guy, a concerned citizen."

His content started with a basic question: Why are so many people in the Rio Grande Valley sick? From there, he began digging into water reports, air quality, and development projects, trying to translate complicated local issues into something people scrolling through their phones might actually stop to understand. He deliberately avoids attaching himself to a political party because, as he sees it, "as soon as you pick a party, you just excluded half of the people that you're trying to reach."

"I feel like I have a calling, an obligation to the people that live here because I look around, people look like me," he said.

Bring the Internet Down Here

If Joshua Moroles represents the Valley using social media to talk to itself, Yaw Sam would like the rest of the internet to get its ass down there.

@yawwsam

I met Sam for lunch at Muelle 37, where whatever serious conversation I thought we were going to have about the creator economy was immediately overshadowed by a table full of seafood that absolutely fucked. Sometimes you learn more about a place over lunch than you do sitting beneath fluorescent lights asking somebody for their five-year plan.

Born and raised in Ghana, he moved to the United States about a decade ago and landed directly in the Rio Grande Valley. He went through the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) and eventually started marketing agency Brand Geniuz, and now teaches social media and e-marketing at the university.

Social Fest is the clearest expression of how he sees his adopted home: not as a peripheral border market waiting for the larger creator economy to notice it, but as a place that can become a destination in its own right. This year's event, themed "The Year of the Creator," brings in more than 60 speakers — including Keith Lee and Aaron Parnas alongside RGV-based creators — plus the inaugural RGV Creator of the Year Award. As I devoured my towering ceviche, I was doing my best to stay focused on the conversation, but it was a challenge. The RGV should be a food destination like Lyon is in France. There are no bad meals unless you're hitting the local drive-thru for whatever cancer burger the Clown is currently schlepping that week.

The idea came after Sam and his partners kept traveling elsewhere for marketing conferences and asking an obvious question: Why the hell didn't the Valley have one? So they built it. The inaugural Social Fest drew more than 1,000 people and 55-plus speakers, blowing past organizers' original expectations.

And there is something deliciously defiant about the project. Many of the speakers Sam recruited had never visited the Valley; some didn't even know where it was. The national media, Sam has said, has a certain perception of the RGV, "but that's not reality."

As Rio Grande Valley poet Esteban Rodriguez once put it, "It can feel like you're living in a world apart." That separation is geographical, sure, but cultural too. For Sam he sees the RGV as something developing, not stagnant; the eventual goal is bigger than another successful convention: "We want the RGV to be the destination for it."

Which is a funny inversion. For generations, ambition in places like the Valley has often meant leaving for somewhere bigger. Sam bets that the internet might finally make somewhere bigger come here.

New York, but Make It Brownsville

Seated at Para Palmilya, I met up with local creator JRam, who bounces around the cities of the Valley showing off the food, shopping, and people who make the place what it is. We clicked immediately.

@jramsworld

JRam isn't an import or a returner — she's a native, born and raised in Brownsville, and her content stays close to home: shopping, food, the lifestyle stuff that doesn't show up in a pitch deck about port investment. She's convinced her hometown is on the verge of its moment, not because of SpaceX or the shipyards, but because more people are finally noticing how good downtown Brownsville actually is. First Fridays, the monthly downtown gathering, has become something close to a personal cause for her.

Like almost everyone I talked to, she eventually came back to the same thing: the people are what keep her here. Across all three of the people I've met in the Valley, the central heartbeat feels the same: This place is changing. We love it, but we have to understand the moment we're in. People are paying attention to us, and for once, it's not a documentary crew hovering at the gates, looking for some bad hombres.

But for JRam, loving the Valley doesn't mean pretending it's perfect. She described it as a bubble, one where people don't always get the opportunity to travel or experience cultures outside their own. That can make the place feel closed-minded, she said, but she also sees that changing as new people and new cultures move into the region.

"There are people here who want something different," she told me. "I want more eyes on the Valley, but I also want people to see the world through my content."

People moving to Brownsville for jobs at SpaceX have found her on social media and slid into her DMs to ask for advice about their new home. She tells them the practical stuff: you're probably going to need a car, yes, it's hot as hell, and if nothing else, you're going to eat ridiculously well.

But you have to learn the Valley.

For JRam, that means finding the communities already there rather than arriving and expecting the place to rearrange itself around you. "The Valley supports each other," she said. "The community shows up if you're willing to pour into them."

That protectiveness comes out strongest when she talks about Brownsville. She loves its walkability, its First Fridays, and the feeling that, for the moment anyway, she's still in on a secret. She once did a photo shoot downtown and, as she put it, felt like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City.

No Cosmo, though.

She was drinking mimosas.