Los Indios, Texas. Transmigrantes companies are big business in Los Indios where Central American immigrants fill up buses and other vehicles with used clothes and toys and take them back to their home countries. (Sergio Chapa/Borderzine.com)

Space commerce, oil discoveries, Central American transmigrantes and a spiffy new highway along northern Mexico are transforming the Brownsville-Matamoros corridor

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BROWNSVILLE-MATAMOROS – Our nine-day journey started in the southernmost tip of Texas just east of where the Rio Grande River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Cameron County is home to more than 406,000 people and is one of four counties that make up the Rio Grande Valley. It’s a beautiful part of the border, one filled with great natural beauty. But there are also bleak industrial landscapes mixed in with rich farmland and neighborhoods both rich and poor. Mexico’s bloody drug war and kidnappings have definitely taken its toll on American tourism south of the border in Mexico’s State of Tamaulipas.