Guest Column

Sustainable Development of Intellectual Capital in the U.S. Rio Bravo/Rio Grande Borderlands

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca and Gilda Baeza Ortego

Abstract:

While the U.S. Rio Bravo Borderlands is currently suffused with economic development, there has been a growing concern that the region suffers from intellectual flight or a brain drain that ultimately impedes the objectives of economic development and characterizes the region as an intellectual wasteland. This paper assesses that proposition from social and historical perspectives and posits recommendations for sustainable development of intellectual capital in the U.S. Rio Bravo Borderlands.

The expression ‘Intellectual flight’ conjures up for the mind a gaggle of endangered rara avis winging its way north from the U.S. Rio Bravo Borderlands towards some safe sanctuary far from the madding crowd, some place where the rara avis can thrive. The expression ‘brain drain’ concretizes that flight significantly, painting a better picture of the ebbing intellectual capital of the region. By "intellectual capital" we mean a trove of intellect that challenges the knowledge base of the region in its transit from survival to transcendent awareness. Economic development is the handmaiden of survival; intellectual capital is coin of the introspective realm in its expansion towards cosmic consciousness.

In other words, economic development takes care of the body; intellectual development nourishes the mind. The latter frees us from the monotonous rigors of automata.

That the U.S. Rio Bravo Borderlands has been characterized as an intellectual wasteland may have more to do with the clash of cultures in the region than the absence of intellectual capital per se. This does not to mean, however, that there is no dearth of intellectual capital in the region. Both in the days when the region was the northern frontier of the Spanish empire in North America and since it has become the southwestern borderland of the United States, intellectual capital in the area has been, more often than not, characterized as nominal. Until the advent of colleges and universities along the U.S. borderlands with Mexico like the University of Texas at El Paso, Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, Texas A&M International University at Laredo, the University of Texas–Pan American at Edinburg, the University of Texas at Brownsville, Texas A&M University at Kingsville, and Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi, the acquisition of higher education required matriculation elsewhere in the state or country by residents of the area. The upshot was that many residents of the U.S. borderlands with Mexico who sought higher education elsewhere chose to remain "elsewhere" when they finished their studies. Some did return, but the ratio of those who left and those who returned was lop-sided, adding to the perception of intellectual poverty in the region. For those who had acquired advanced university degrees the pickings were greater elsewhere than in the U.S. Rio Bravo Borderlands.

This kind of geographical apostasy not only left the region gasping for intellectual succor but discouraged intellectual ingress as well. This is not to say there was no intellectual capital at all in the region. Here and there glimmers of intellectual activity were manifest. Most of it in the efforts of newspaper publishers who not only sought to report the news of the region and the nation at large but also sought to elevate the intellectual aspirations of those who bemoaned the absence of intellectual capital by publishing poetry regularly and some fiction as it made its way to the editorial offices of newspapers willing to publish those transom efforts. Most poetry and fiction were published, as Lynn Perrigo explains, "by visitors [outsiders] who came to find a locale and motif and then departed," among them Mark Twain and Bret Harte (398). Others included Helen Hunt Jackson, Gertrude Atherton, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Ambrose Bierce. In Texas, there was William Sidney Porter (O’Henry), Mollie Moore, and Eugene Manlove Rhodes (who actually lived in New Mexico). The most popular periodical of the time (post-1848) which regularly published these writers was the Overland Monthly published in San Francisco but read widely throughout the U.S. Rio Bravo Borderlands.

Lest this enumeration suggest that the intellectual activity of the U.S. Rio Bravo Borderlands was a phenomenon only of Anglo Americans after the acquisition of the Hispanic Southwest in 1848, let me point out that intellectual activity in the northern marches of the Spanish enterprise in America (later, Mexican territory after 1821), was evident everywhere in the Spanish and Mexican settlements that dotted the territory subsequently dismembered from Mexico per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. By the time of the U.S. War against Mexico (1846-1848), a war which luminaries of the time like General Grant, Walt Whitman, and Thoreau anathematized, the Texas and New Mexico Rio Bravo Borderlands boasted high levels of intellectual activities in cities like San Antonio, El Paso, and Santa Fe. Lynn Perrigo summed it up this way: "Through its long history the Old Spanish Southwest has experienced invasion by one group after another, who have contested each other in a struggle for existence. All have left their cultural imprint and a numerous progeny . . . ." (384).

In the period between 1848 and 1912, that painful period of transition for the "conquest generation" of Mexican Americans, Texas and New Mexico made great strides in public education, albeit principally for Anglo Texans and Anglo New Mexicans. Still, that effort vetted the development of intellectual activities in the Rio Bravo borderlands. Not until the latter part of the 20^th century would education become an asset of Mexican American intellectual capital. Since then it has become a given for the intellectual development of the Rio Bravo borderlands regardless of ethnicity. And though Texas, in particular, is still struggling with the form and function of its public education system, overall that system has become more inclusive.

Higher education in the Rio Bravo borderlands has become the beneficiary of that inclusiveness. Texas and New Mexico had a multiplicity of state supported colleges and universities that until the 1970's educated principally Anglo Texans and Anglo New Mexicans. Since then, however, that string of colleges and universities along the Texas-New Mexico Rio Bravo borderlands has received special legislative attention in order to boost the intellectual wherewithal of the region by focusing on the needs of the Hispanic population of the Rio Bravo borderlands as well. While the historical divisions that pronouncedly marked the Anglo-Hispanic divide in the Rio Bravo borderlands began to blur in the latter part of the 20^th century, intellectual equity has still favored non-Hispanic Texans and non-Hispanic New Mexicans. Intellectual opportunities have dwindled in the area for both Hispanics and Anglos. However, in a time of diminishing resources, Hispanics feel the greater brunt of those diminished opportunities. For them there are greener pastures elsewhere, though reports indicate that many of them would opt to stay in the Rio Bravo borderlands if opportunities were greater. In more recent times there has been a marked increase of both Anglo and Hispanic professionals in law, medicine, and public education. Higher education is still a contested area. This all bodes favorably for the increase of intellectual capital in the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands. Despite this amelioration, there is a public perception of wholesale brain drain and intellectual flight from the region.

While not entirely true, there is nevertheless a persistent trickle of brain drain and intellectual flight from the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands. But that situation is not as disproportionate as public perception has made it out to be. The situation can be likened to the proposition about progress–two steps forward and one step back. True, there are no cities along the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands like Dallas, Houston, or San Antonio, but in far west-Texas coupled with Juarez, Mexico, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, the El Paso Metropolitan Population Area begins to rival its non-borderlands urban competitors. So too the Laredo Metropolitan Population Area is emerging as a contender, though to a far less extent than the burgeoning Valley region of South Texas which in the last thirty years has doubled in population. The three hot-spots of population growth along the Texas side of the Rio Bravo borderlands of the U.S. and Mexico are thus, El Paso-Juarez-Las Cruces, Del Rio-Eagle Pass-Laredo, and Brownsville-Harlingen-McAllen-Edinburg, the latter growing at a much faster rate than the other two.

For Steve Murdoch, the Texas state demographer, this population growth augurs significant change for the state, not just because that population growth represents an increase in the Hispanic population of Texas but because that population growth of Hispanics in these three population hot-spots is, as Murdoch sees it, oozing northward into the heartland of the state. According to Murdoch, by the year 2040 demographics will favor Tejanos by almost 3 to 1. Sixty-five percent of the state’s population will be Hispanic and only 25 percent will be Anglo. This particular demographic phenomenon will color the intellectual perspective not just of the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands but of the entire state, and eventually the entire Southwest.

It appears that demography may be destiny. As of now, however, the effect of that demographic destiny is lost in state planning for the future. Few state and regional plans of the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands reflect Murdoch’s prognosis. In the extreme, there are some planners who see this situation comparable to the Dutch boy who attempted to stop the leakage of water through a dike by plugging up with his fingers the holes as they appeared in the dike. In the face of feeble attempts to stem the population tide, especially in the area of the Rio Bravo borderlands, intellectual capital will require re-calibration. For example, what is now considered intellectual fare on NPR’s South Texas Public Radio–that large chunk of "classical music"time daily–may need to give way to cultural tastes in music that are at odds with Public Radio’s perception of what to provide for an emerging intellectual wave whose musical tastes may diverge profoundly from the classical music fare of the dominant Anglo population.. This does not spell the end for classical music. Far from it. These changing demographics indicate simply a need to think outside the box. To consider alternative perspectives to emerging dynamics. There is always that tendency to solve social irruptions from the perspective of traditional approaches espoused by the dominant class.

Perhaps the question of brain drain and intellectual flight from the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands may be only a lexical matter. What kinds of brains are being drained from the region? And what kind of intellect is fleeing? We’ve mentioned the increase of both Anglo and Hispanic professionals in law, medicine, and public education. By and large, however, brains and intellect are equated with science in the former and "finer things" in the latter, principally the creative arts such as literature, theater, and music. It appears thus that the reality of brain drain and intellectual flight from the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands may be overpowered by perception. This is not to say there is no intellectual deficit in these areas. But there are intellectual assets here long overlooked.

A scant 45 years ago (1960), in assessing Texas and our Spanish Southwest, Lynn Perrigo reviewed the cultural advancement of Texas in little more than 15 pages of a 500 page tome. All of Perrigo’s references detailed only Anglo contributions to the cultural advancement of Texas. The Tejano foundations of the state and Tejano contributions to its cultural development were absent. It was this absence of Tejano cultural production in text after text that gave rise, in part, to the Chicano Movement throughout the Southwest and in particular in the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands. Out of the Chicano Movement emerged recognition of Mexican Americans as a long-standing intellectual community with literary roots stretching back over the centuries. What appeared to be a paucity of Hispanic intellectualism was really a figure-grounded perspective of the Hispanic population by the dominant group. Unfortunately, this figure-groundedness is still part of the perplex. Marco Portales, professor of English at A&M College Station, calls this the lack of visibility (1).

Along the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands, this lack of visibility is particularly acute. The Southwest in general, though, receives high marks from Keith L. Bryant, Jr. In Culture in the American Southwest (2000):

The Southwest experienced enormous cultural growth and maturation for two decades [1960-1980]. Rapid urbanization and seemingly unending economic expansion spawned major new institutions and the revitalization of older museums, symphonies, and theaters. Individual artists, writers, and architects produced a cornucopia of works that spoke about and to the region (276).

What fueled this cultural renaissance, according to Bryant, was a "receptive business climate and the presence of cultural resources," enticing "corporations to abandon th Northeast and Midwest and move their headquarters to the Southwest" (276).

The influx of professionals and corporate executives, and their spouses, fueled the drive for greater achievements in institutional culture. New opera houses in Houston and Dallas, bold new art museums across the region, and rising ballet companies symbolized the rejuvenation of the cultural renaissance. In architecture, literature, and theater, southwesterners won prestigious awards and critical recognition. The culture became universal in goals and international in modes and themes, but its roots remained southwestern. The region became a national pacesetter as it sent novels, orchestras, operas, and plays into the mainstream, and its architecture became the subject of international acclaim for its vivacity and daring (277).

The architectural critic, Ada Louise Huxtable opined that "a city, in its most real sense, is its buildings" (cited in Bryant, 277). In other words, urbanization and economic development spurred the growth of "culture" in the Southwest.

The key, thus, to sustaining intellectual capital anywhere in the Southwest is consistent economic growth. But Bryant notes that in the Southwest that capital is imported concomitant with the ingress of Anglo professionals and Anglo corporate executives. We see thus intellectual capital defined from the perspective of the white cultural elite. Like Perrigo before him, except for a passing reference to the San Antonio Artist Mel Casas, there are no references in Bryant about the cultural production of the indigenous population of Hispanics historically residing along the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands.

One of the most significant surges in the development of intellectual capital in Texas was NASA’s decision in 1961 to locate the Manned Spacecraft Center at Clear Lake, Texas, just south of Houston. That decision was based on NASA’s study of Houston’s "scientific and industrial potential" (Oates, 164). That decision alone brought a spate of aerospace related enterprises to the Houston area, creating a climate for expanded cultural venues. Rice University and the University of Houston were the prime beneficiaries of these new intellectual domains. One of the benefits of locating NASA in Houston "was a prompt exchange of brainpower" (185).

In the same vein, a spaceport in South Texas, many residents of the area argue–including Hispanics, would augment the intellectual capital of the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands just as the Manned Space Center did for the Houston area. Additionally, a consortium approach to the educational needs of the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands, particularly in the face of scientific and industrial expansion, would maximize curricular resources and cooperative research to support the scientific and industrial potential of the region, a potential that includes a trans-national labor force and the tendrils of NAFTA. Unfortunately there is still a limited literature about the symbiotic potential of the U.S.-Mexico Rio Bravo borderlands that includes Mexico as a full partner. The reasons for that limited literature are myriad. But in the realm of intellectual capital, those reasons are immaterial.

Much earlier than the United States, Mexico addressed the borderland "problem" by initiating in sixteen border communities a massive Programa Nacional Fronterizo (PRONAF). Of all the Mexican border cities, Juarez was the major beneficiary of the 149 million pesos invested in the project, receiving almost 30 percent of the total. In Juarez, the PRONAF program built "a large shopping complex . . . a beautifully designed Museum of Art and History, a convention building, and various hotels, motels, and restaurants (Martinez, 117). PRONAF show-cased Mexican progress in the arts, architecture, and cuisine.

While the principal objective of PRONAF was tourism, the project improved the quality of life for the Mexican residents of Juarez and environs and increased American shopping and tourism as well along the entire Mexican Rio Bravo borderlands. Martinez adds that "these facilities . . . decidedly improved the appearance of Juarez and . . . provoked positive foreign notice as well as native pride" (Ibid.).

In a luncheon talk at a recent conference in South Texas, Dr. Ray Keck, President of Texas A&M International University at Laredo, emphasized the need for a cultural infrastructure along the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands in order to stem brain drain and intellectual flight from the region. He iterated the need for museums, symphonies, theaters, parks, walking paths and other cultural venues as necessities for the retention and recruitment of intellectual capital. One wonders to what extent these necessities may actually foster retention and recruitment of intellectual capital. For the problem, it seems to us, is not one of cultural necessities but the inculcation our students receive about the value of these necessities in attaining a superior improved quality of life. The dysphoria engendered by these inculcations produces serious behavioral problems abetted by velleities of expectations.

Does the fact that these necessities exist in Dallas, say, mean that they ought to exist in Laredo and other communities along the U.S.-Mexico border? We are not arguing against these necessities. But a quality of life is not achieved by replication alone. Does a community without a McDonald’s restaurant provide a lesser quality of life than a community with a McDonald’s?

To affect the kind of change needed to sustain the development of intellectual capital in the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands, an entirely new paradigm is required. Temporal terms such as "borderlands" may need excision. To assess the real significance of the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands and the intellectual capital therein, a whole new spatial dimension posits a whole new construct of considerations. A post-modern approach in reconceptualizing the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands may help us detraditionalize time-weathered obstacles in our search for sustainable development of the region. Here we may have to choose between the stability of tradition and the imperatives of post-modernity. These opposing forces always vie for our loyalty.

From the mutual antagonism and respective incompatibilities, the new identities and innovative meanings of becoming modern are pushed against old identities and established meanings, which are, at the same time, pulling toward being traditional (Heelas, et al, 109-110).

At heart, the dilemma of sustainable development along the U.S. Rio Bravo borderlands, especially the sustainable development of intellectual capital, may have more to do with the quality of life than traditional or post-modern considerations.

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Dr. Ortego y Gasca is Emeritus Professor of English, Texas State University System–Sul Ross and is currently Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in English and Bilingual Studies, Texas A&M University–Kingsville Email: felipeo@usawide.net  or p-ortego@tamuk.edu

Dr. Baeza Ortego is Professor and Director of the University Library at Texas A&M University–Kingsville.

Presented at the Hawaii International Conference on Social Sciences, co-sponsored by the East-West Council for Education, the Asia-Pacific Research Institute of Peking University, and the University of Louisville–Center for Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods, Honolulu, Hawaii, June 13-16, 2005.

                            WORKS CITED

AcuZa, Rudolfo. Occupied America: The Chicano Struggle Toward Liberation. San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972.

Bryant, Keith L., Jr. Culture in the American South-west. College Station. Texas A&M University Press, 2001

Calderon, Robert R. Mexican Coal Mining labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880-1930.College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000.

Heelas, Paul, Scott Lash & Paul Morris (Editors). Detraditionalization. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

Martinez, Oscar J. Border Boom Town: Ciudad Juarez Since 1848. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975.

Oates, Stephen B. Visions of Glory: Texans in the Southwest Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1970.

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. "Brands, Bandits, and Ballads: Eiconic Images of Tejanos in the Literature of the Borderlands," Journal of South Texas, South Texas Historical Association, Fall 2002.

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. "The Minotaur and the Labyrinth: Chicano Literature and Critical Theory," Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, Spring 2001.

Perrigo, Lynn I. Texas and Our Spanish Southwest. Dallas: Banks Upshaw, 1960.

Portales, Marco. Crowding Out Latinos: Mexican Americans in the Public Consciousness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

Copyright © 2005 by the authors. All rights reserved..

March 28, 2005