Memphis native reluctantly embraces Valley as her home

As the plane made its final descent into the city of palms, Rebecca Sweat looked down at her family's new home and considered buying a return ticket.

"The pilot said ‘Welcome to McAllen.' I looked down and it was the storage unit on Business 83 that said, ‘Don't Mess with Texas,'" she recalled.

"I gotta get a plane back to Houston," she thought.

Her father had transferred to a Reynosa maquiladora from the family's suburban Memphis home in 2003. Sweat, a senior in high school, stayed behind with her mother, Yvonne, until that flight in 2004.

Thousands of families like the Sweats have flocked to the Rio Grande Valley in recent years with the rampant growth of the area's maquiladora industry. Often they were given no choice as employers dumped American manufacturing facilities for cheap labor at Mexican factories.

The change was sudden and abrupt. Some have struggled to adjust to the Valley, which was nothing like the America they knew or the Mexico they imagined.

"I didn't want to come," Yvonne Sweat said. "I really didn't want to come."

Instead of moping, the Sweat women embraced their new home. Yvonne joined the Maquiladora Wives Asso-ciation, a social group of sorts for women like her.

Despite her initial recalcitrance, Rebecca slowly embraced her home the few weeks she would visit each year on holiday from Washington University in St. Louis.

"It was difficult at first because home kind of moved," she said. "When I was in college - all my friends when they were at home for break, they went to their bedrooms ... and everything the way they left it."

Sweat recalled all this sitting behind her desk in an office at the University of Texas-Pan American where she is the marketing director for the athletics program.

An enthusiastic and ambitious professional, Sweat is now more enmeshed in the social and business circles than life-long Valley residents. Working first for the Business Times and then with Social Life, two local publications, Sweat met powerful people and began to care about her new home.

She joined Leadership McAllen and other similar groups.

"It was nice weather and palm trees and Mexican food and a completely different way of life," she said. "I wasn't really thinking I would ever settle down here."

She did.

She quit Social Life in late 2007 on a whim. She had studied public relations in college, aiming to work in the professional or collegiate sports industries.

"Either I go to grad school or I gotta find a sports job," she recalled thinking before she quit. "As long as I have the comfort of the paycheck, I'm not going to fight for it."

Two weeks later she applied for the gig at UTPA.

Now she's involved in just about every aspect in sports marketing, from charity work to coordinating cheerleaders, announcers and other behind-the-scenes work at games.

She doesn't really miss her former Tennessee home. Of course, her ambition will likely take far from the Valley but as for that return ticket, it's apparent that she never bought it.

"McAllen will definitely always be a place that I'll want to go back home to because I'm still always going to have friends here," she said. "I'll be interested in how the city is growing."

Sean Gaffney covers business, the economy and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4434.