What is Amigoland?

What is Amigoland?

Originally Amigoland was a theme park which was proposed in the early 1970's near the Downtown of Brownsville, Texas. Situated at the end of the bridge which crossed into the United States from Matamoros, Mexico, it promised to be a place of fun and commerce and where two countries could come together to celebrate their uniqueness based on both geography and shared history.............and a bit of economic development. With more plans and talk than money in hand, the theme park never came to be. The site eventually was developed, becoming the Amigoland Mall, but was soon shuttered due to a bad location (cut off by railroad tracks and stalled train cars), a peso devaluation, and a newer competing mall which was better located. The once dead mall now finds new life as a satellite center to The University of Texas at Brownsville, one of the fastest growing universities in the Texas State System. While things didn't end up as originally planned (things seldom ever do), this piece of land which has bounced back and forth from Mexico to the United States several times, is still called Amigoland to this day.

What Amigoland to me?

To me Amigoland is many things. It is the place at the edges where the pages crumble and fray. It's the overlap where the lines stop becoming defined and things get sort of blurry. It's neither here nor there, with things getting all jumbled up and melting together. It can be a geography, it can be cultural or it can even be a state of mind. It is urban, suburban, and rural; It is in Mexico, the United States, and all the places in between. It is even in South Florida and anywhere else were Anglo-America and Latin America melt together to form one. It is everyone, everything, and more....which also makes it very hard to define. But it is the world in which I spent the better part of my life and it made me who I am today. And so I create this blog to explore, promote and enjoy Amigoland, one of the coolest places in the world!!!!