The City of Palms: Nineteen Sixteen's Twenty Thousand Soldiers

In nineteen sixteen, McAllen had a population of roughly twelve hundred people. By nineteen twenty, it had six thousand. The reason was not citrus, and it was not commerce. It was the United States Army.

The Mexican Revolution, which had been convulsing the country south of the river since nineteen ten, spilled north repeatedly. In March of nineteen sixteen, Pancho Villa's forces raided Columbus, New Mexico, killing eighteen Americans and prompting President Woodrow Wilson to send General John Pershing's Punitive Expedition into Mexico in pursuit. Along the Rio Grande border, the federal government stationed tens of thousands of troops to guard against further incursions. As many as twenty thousand soldiers from New York and other states were based in and around McAllen during this period.

The soldiers needed food and housing and entertainment. Local merchants built up quickly to serve them. The town's economy shifted overnight from a small agricultural depot to a garrisoned border post. When the troops eventually left, some of what they had built remained: hotels, restaurants, a more substantial commercial district, a rail infrastructure better equipped to handle volume.

McAllen adopted the nickname the City of Palms in nineteen forty, a quieter era, when the palms that settlers had planted along the streets had grown tall enough to shade the sidewalks. The name reflected a particular aspiration: a subtropical city distinguished by its greenery, by its mild winters, by the sense that you had arrived somewhere different from the Texas plains to the north. The palms are still there. So is the border, twenty miles to the south. Both have shaped everything that grew between them.