Cavazos, a soft-spoken man who goes by Fred, lives in a modest one-story house south of the city of Mission, in the mostly sleepy, traditionally agricultural border region known as the Rio Grande Valley. Cavazos’s house, still adorned with a fading sign for what was once the family store, lies east of a rural five-lane highway; across the road is the roughly 70-acre plot hugging the winding Rio Grande, where the family rents out parcels to tenants who use the space for boat access and weekend barbecues. This land was purchased decades ago by the cousins’ grandmother, a Mexican-born woman who raised money for the land by selling tamales and chicharrones from a horse-drawn wagon. Later, when the family used it to grow cotton and watermelon, she would cook huge pots of chicken, rice, and frijoles for the Mexicans who would cross the river for a day or two to help on the farm. Cavazos uses a wheelchair now, but he told me when he was a boy, he would visit the river with his father, who showed him how to fish for catfish and bass, digging out a wet spot to gather worms and cutting off a scrap of bamboo to make a rod.