Any Texan can tell you it’s sometimes hard for people who have not spent time in the state to understand just how big it is. It can take anywhere from 10 to 16 hours to drive across the Lone Star State, and Texas is also home to five of the biggest 15 cities in the nation.
But quite a lot happens outside those big hubs, and Katy Vine of Texas Monthly is among those tracking the cultural hotspots you might not hear about as often. One of her recent quests took her to McAllen, where she explored the city’s underappreciated creative scene, starting with a place called Tropicasa.
“For years, I’d been hearing about the McAllen counterculture scene,” Vine said. “There was this death metal scene in the ’80s and a punk scene … and I was just sort of wondering what was going on there.
“And one of my colleagues, Dan Solomon, is from McAllen, and he just showed me an Instagram post of Tropicasa. It kind of has a lot of different functions. It’s a vintage clothes shop. It’s a vegan mini-mart. It has, I think, a radio station that plays out online. It has a lot of different roles in the Valley.”
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A lot of the places Vine visited as she explored McAllen had to do with clothes and fashion.
“Pedro Rodriguez, who runs Tropicasa, was telling me about how there have been so many vintage clothes stores just popping up in the past couple years,” she said. “There are a lot of people who will come down to his store and spend, for wholesale purposes. A Japanese group will come through and spend $500 to $2,000 quarterly on trips just at his store. And then they’ll go to other places.”
Vine said McAllen is full of places often called rag houses — or the pacas, which is Spanish for bales like bales of hay.
“There’s a whole lot of these places around, these giant warehouses that sell used clothes,” she said. “They’ll sell them by the pound. One that I visited on Pedro’s recommendation was Tres Dimensiones. It’s a 50,000-square-foot warehouse. And you can buy clothes for 40 cents a pound.
“People were climbing these mounds of clothes that were as big as a single-story house. The woman who ran it said they get 250,000 pounds of clothes a week. It’s a lot. There are places around the state where you can get bulk clothes, but not nearly like that.”
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Vine said she was struck by the creative uses of space she saw in McAllen businesses – how many places are doing multiple things at once.
“Going to Depósito: El Nopalito, which is a wine store, but they also would have a coffee shop inside and have zines and pop-up DJs,” she said. “Tiscareno, which is mostly a bridal shop up front, but they also do designs in the back run by Manuel Tiscareno. His partner, Zachary James, runs an art gallery in the back called Run Pony Run.
“It just seems like there’s this infusion of energy happening down there. It was just really exciting to see it, because I know sometimes you’ll go to a spot and it’s sort of in limbo, it’s in between creative spiking, and it definitely felt like there was an energy spike happening right now.”
For folks who want to be better at spotting flourishing art scenes, Vine advises that you keep your eyes peeled.
“Sometimes you can drive right past something and not realize that an area is thriving. Sometimes for me, I’m a morning person, and what I had to really realize is a lot of this stuff doesn’t really start happening until later in the day,” she said. “I think just recognizing the medium-sized towns and the small towns that can really take off. And I’m not always sure why certain places will take off at certain times and not others, but it’s always fun to see it.”
