![]() ![]() The retired port-of-entry chief strums corridos on a nylon-stringed guitar. The district attorney is known to fish on the Rio Grande. ![]() The per capita annual income is $7,233 and the unemployment rate often tops 30%, but Starr County’s Latino majority is free to run its own show-no Anglo oligarchy to flatter, no corporate fat cats to kowtow to. ![]() Pavement and plumbing may be scarce, but nearly everyone owns a home. It has been portrayed, most often, as alien and irredeemable: the narco-capital of the U.S.-Mexico border, Texas’ Little Colombia, a danger zone that only “Rambo would love.” Yet the level of violence hardly reflects those labels or even approaches that of the big cities whose demand for drugs brings across the supply. ![]() Wedged into the arrowhead of Texas’ southernmost tip, just before the Rio Grande’s final plunge into the Gulf of Mexico, Starr County is a puzzle of ambiguities and extremes-the poorest county in the nation and a priceless relic of the Old West. All that is good about life on the border, and all that is bad, and all that just is, seems fiercely amplified here, like the miles of wild olive trees, their toxic fruit cloaked by ivory blossoms. ![]()
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