During the summer of 1939 hundreds of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from Houston, Austin and a number of smaller towns in Texas packed their belongings, climbed aboard buses and trucks, and headed south to Matamoros, Tamaulipas, across the Rio Bravo from Brownsville, Texas. 1 They had been planning for this move since the Spring, when Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas sent Ramón Beteta and Manuel Gamio to their towns to offer them free land if they were willing to dedicate themselves to the hard work of clearing it and farming cotton on it. The colonists were met at the border by officials of Mexico’s Secretary of Comunications and Public Works, which was building an enormous irrigation zone in the hinterland around Matamoros. After a long day of digging their vehicles out of the mud, they arrived to their new home, the Campamento “18 de Marzo”, soon to be known as “Valle Hermoso,” or Beautiful Valley in English.

60 years later I made a similar trip, looking not for a homeland where I could build a prosperous future, but for the material I needed to write an anthropology dissertation about the post-World War Two political economy and culture of cotton production in the Mexican borderlands. But when I got to Valle Hermoso, now an agricultural town of more than 50,000, I felt in some ways as if it were still 1939. Festooned on the municipal palace were huge reproductions of photographs depicting