La Junta Is Ancestral Ground

The Oldest Continuously Cultivated Land in North America Cannot Be Walled

Before there was a border, there was a river.

Before there was Texas, before there was Mexico, before there was the United States, there was La Junta de los Ríos — the meeting place of the Río Grande and the Río Conchos.

For thousands of years, people planted here. They irrigated from the river’s seasonal floods. They built villages of adobe and earth. They traded with distant nations. They buried their ancestors in this soil. They crossed the shallow ford at El Polvo not as trespassers, but as relatives moving along an ancient pathway.

Historians recognize La Junta as the oldest continuously cultivated land in North America. Long before Plymouth, before Jamestown, before St. Augustine, this floodplain sustained agriculture, ceremony, and community.

This land is not symbolic. It is living continuity.

And today, it faces the construction of additional border wall infrastructure under sweeping waivers of environmental and cultural protection laws.

What is being treated as an open corridor is, in truth, an ancestral homeland.

El Polvo: The Place of the Conch

El Polvo — known historically as Tapacolmes — is one of the original villages of La Junta. Archaeological layers dating to 1200–1400 AD reveal the presence of Patarabueye and Jumano peoples whose lifeways centered on this river. Spanish records describe the mission San Pedro de Alcántara de los Tapacolmes at this site, built atop a much older Indigenous village.

“Tapacolmes,” meaning “place of the conch,” refers to the shell fragments and fossils that surface from the earth — reminders that this ground holds deep time.

The site sits at an ancient ford. Redford carries its name from this crossing. El Polvo and its sister community, El Mulato across the river in Chihuahua, were once part of the Hacienda Purísima de Tapacolmes y Terrenos del Mulato. The river was not a dividing line; it was a connector.

Local preservationist and Jumano descendant Enrique R. Madrid has dedicated his life to safeguarding this place. His words guide us:

“Investigating the history of such sites as El Polvo or areas such as La Junta de los Rios requires […] knowledge of the language, historical research and oral histories, an intimate knowledge of the people and their local customs and beliefs, and first-hand knowledge of the environment.”

This is not history that can be read from a distance. It must be walked. Spoken. Remembered in the language of the people who belong to it.

Madrid’s work ensured that El Polvo was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a State Antiquities Landmark. Yet designation alone does not protect spirit.

The land still requires guardians.

The River Is a Living Relative

For Indigenous peoples of La Junta, the Río Grande is not a resource. It is not scenery. It is not infrastructure.

It is a living spirit.

The river has carried seeds, stories, trade, migration, and ceremony for millennia. It nourished fields that have been cultivated continuously longer than any other known agricultural landscape in North America. It has held grief and joy in equal measure.

When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo drew a border along the river in 1848, it did not divide an empty wilderness. It cut through an ancient community.

Families who had crossed freely for generations suddenly found themselves on opposite sides of a line. Yet culture endured. Ceremonies endured. Language endured. The river endured.

What walls threaten now is not only land — but relationship.

Sacred Ground Under Waiver

Construction in this region is authorized under federal determinations waiving foundational environmental and cultural protection laws.

These are the very laws designed to prevent the destruction of sacred sites, burial grounds, endangered habitats, and historic landscapes.

La Junta holds:

• Prehistoric village remains layered across centuries

• Mission-era architecture built atop Indigenous settlements

• Burial grounds and ancestral resting places

• Ecological floodplains that sustain desert life

• One of the last remaining community access points to the Río Grande in this stretch of Presidio County

To waive protection here is to suspend memory.

It is to move earth without listening.

The Oldest Cultivated Land in North America

Let this be spoken clearly:

La Junta de los Ríos is the oldest continuously cultivated land in North America.

For thousands of years, Indigenous agriculturalists adapted to flood cycles, engineered irrigation systems, cultivated corn, beans, squash, and other crops, and built trade networks that reached the Plains and deep into what is now northern Mexico.

This was a center of civilization.

When we speak of La Junta, we are speaking of a cradle — not a corridor.

To wall this place is to wall a lineage older than the nation-state.

Ancestral Responsibility

People of La Junta for Preservation speaks as descendants, as caretakers, as those entrusted with sacred sites such as Cementerio del Barrio de los Lipanes, and as stewards of El Polvo.

The preservation of this land is not nostalgia. It is obligation.

Enrique Madrid’s life work reminds us that safeguarding La Junta requires language, oral history, cultural memory, and first-hand knowledge of the environment. It requires intimacy with place.

Walls are not intimate with place.

They are interruptions.

What Must Be Done

We call for the protection of El Polvo and all sacred sites within the La Junta region.

We call for the preservation of the Río Grande as a living lifeway, not a militarized barrier.

We call for continued and safe community access to the river for ceremony, education, and stewardship.

We call for recognition that this landscape is not vacant, not disposable, and not without guardians.

The ancestors planted here. The river still flows. The responsibility is ours now.

A Prayer for La Junta

Creator of river and desert, Ancestors who planted in this floodplain, Grandmothers and grandfathers whose footsteps remain in this soil—

May we remember that this land is older than any border drawn upon it. May we listen before we move earth. May we protect what cannot be rebuilt.

Let the river continue to carry memory. Let the fields continue to breathe. Let the crossing remain a place of relationship, not division.

Give us courage to stand for sacred ground. Give us humility to serve it well. Give us strength to protect what was entrusted to us.

May La Junta remain whole. May its story continue. May we be worthy of the ancestors who planted here.