Gene De La Garza, a Weslaco native who had previously gained attention in 2022 for spreading Rio Grande Valley pride through his “Puro 956” stickers, is once again showing love for his hometown in his newest project.
The 35 year old has spent the last five years working on a documentary detailing the Valley’s history, specifically, why the area was referred to as “The Magic Valley.”
In his documentary “The King and His Magic Valley,” De La Garza goes into detail about how white capitalists built a citrus empire in the early 1920s at the expense of the Tejano ranchers.
The idea for this project occurred after he stumbled across an article called “The Making of the Magic Valley.”
This left him fascinated and intrigued. After doing more research on the subject he eventually decided to put all the pieces together in a documentary.
He recalled finding many articles and newspaper archives that had advertisements from land developers and agricultural promoters trying to convince people to move to the Valley with the promise of year-round crops and cheap labor.
This led to many white Americans, primarily from the Midwest area, to make their way to the Valley.
“The main, main point and the main selling point was the cheap labor that they would get from Mexicans,” De La Garza said. “It blew me away every time that I would find something new. My computer is filled with articles that I pulled from newspapers.com and there’s so many articles you wouldn’t believe it.”
For De La Garza, this documentary isn’t just a stepping stone to becoming a serious documentary filmmaker but also a project that highlights some of the rich history, both the positive and negative of the Valley.
“It’s just important to me because it’s a story that’s here in the Valley,” De La Garza said.
One of the topics that really stuck with him were the injustices towards Mexican and Mexican Americans by the Texas Rangers and the impact of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
During that time Mexican and Mexican Americans were labeled as “bandits” by the Texas Rangers, white vigilantes and even the U.S. Army.
Various Mexicans were lynched during that time; however, the turning point was when Texas Rangers “gunned down” Antonio Longoria and Jesus Bazan, two citizens from Hidalgo County that were accused of aiding said bandits.
“It was just saddening to hear how much the Texas Rangers played a part in the Anglo dominance that happened here,” De La Garza said.
He added that many Mexican ranchers lost their land through legal and illegal means with many land and irrigation companies using land manipulation tactics to take over the land.
Many of the Tejanos in the area became workers on land they once owned.
De La Garza goes into more depth on the impact of the Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution at the time in his documentary and how it helped create a “perfect storm.”
He hopes that everyone who watches the documentary will not only learn more about the history of the Valley and why it was called the Magic Valley, but also encourage people to do their own research on Texas’ history, which he believes has “a lot of missing chapters.”
Now, as he releases the documentary for free on YouTube, he can’t help but feel accomplished.
“I would get good dopamine hits every time I would finish a section. … Sometimes there would be a lot of mistakes along the way that kind of turned into beautiful mistakes because they ended up being better than I initially planned,” De La Garza said.
Although the project itself took about five years to complete due to the learning curve that came with each step of the process and other personal ventures, De La Garza knew this documentary would be worth the effort.
“It was fun honestly, I really enjoyed first off the research and the writing and just being able to learn the foundations of putting a story together,” De La Garza said. “The editing process and just being able to learn how to do motion graphics and figure things out on my own, it was basically that I just did everything on my own, that’s why I took so long but it was fun.”
De La Garza added that he already has other projects he hopes to work on in the future that will explore local, regional and global topics.