DEL RIO, Texas — Lupita De La Paz is a Del Rio, Texas, girl at heart.
“I’m going to be 37 years old. Born and raised, I’m first-generation American,” De La Paz said. “My parents are from Little Ranchitos in Acuña, Coahuila. They would probably hate that I said that but if you blink your eye you passed the town already.”
De La Paz is the director of an arts program called Casa De La Cultura and she says everything is different growing up in a border town.
“The culture itself, the language, you get a lot of people that speak Spanish, you go deeper into Texas and Spanish [is] probably not as common as in a border city,” she said.
Another very common thing in the border town is a lot of migration and lots of folks seeking asylum. De La Paz offers a helping hand by volunteering with a coalition in Del Rio that helps asylum seekers who have just been released by immigration.
“We actually help them purchase their tickets by purchasing their tickets, so by purchasing their tickets, they have their money, they have their funds, if they contact their relative to get the funds,” De La Paz says. “We set them up with a bus ticket or a plane ticket so they can go to their final destination.”
If the migrants aren’t able to get the funds on time, the coalition has tents with double doors set up, but De La Paz says that is the last resort.
Gov. Greg Abbott was recently in Del Rio where he discussed a lot of border initiatives, one of which involves reallocating $1 billion in funds for border security. Abbott also announced that Texas will build its own border wall with Mexico.
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Abbott said there used to be a commitment to secure the border.
“Now the commitment is everybody that wants to come in is going to be allowed to come in, and change is needed,” Abbott said.
De La Paz says that’s not a solution to a deeper issue.
“Let me put a fence, let me put a wall here, and this is not going to fix all of our problems. So I think that’s what needs to be understood, spend your fieria [money] on this but what are we really fixing?” she said.
