KNOWN AS A SUB-TROPICAL PARADISE along the Texas Mexico border, the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas was characterized as The Magic Valley by those promoting this expansive land of beauty, fecundity, and calm. Farming was long the Valley's economic force with water from the Rio Bravo/Grande sustaining a 320-day growing season. These photographs of my birthplace now have become a testament to a languid cadence of living supplanted by population growth, immigration struggles, proximate drug wars, maquiladora manufacturing, and tourism.