Original subtitles

- Hey, hey, hey!

- It's one of the most rugged and remote destinations

in the United States.

Everything out here will bite, poke, or freak you out.

Everything.

- People live in cubicles

and they're the king of their domain.

Out here, I mean, you ain't king of shit.

♫ - I took a walk through this beautiful world

♫ Felt the cool rain on my shoulder

♫ Found something good in this beautiful world

♫ I felt the rain getting colder

♫ Sha-la-la-la-la, Sha-la-la-la-la-la

♫ Sha-la-la-la-la, Sha-la-la-la-la-la

♫ La

- Stick around and tell your friends

from the border to the basin out here in West Texas.

Great to be here tonight.

- The dream of the American West was come out here,

get your own little piece of paradise,

you work hard, raise cattle.

You make enough money to look after the family.

- Sure, I'd love to cook you one.

- This land, it's really for one thing,

and that's producing livestock.

They've tried to farm it, it doesn't work.

And, you know, except for beautiful views,

that's what it can produce.

- West Texas and Big Bend, this area,

are you the platonic ideal of the Texan?

The American hero. Lone rider on a horse.

Big empty spaces. Mexican music.

Mexican food.

- This is still where the punchiest cowboys

in the United States are.

It don't get no rougher.

- I mean, we're 120 miles from the nearest Walmart.

40 miles to a tank of gas or a loaf of bread.

- Out here, pretty much everything is five hours away.

- And the property has been in the family

how many generations now?

- This is the fourth generation.

- Fifth. - Fifth generation.

My granddad came here in the '30s.

Bodie's family came out here in 1880.

- Not a lot of people who are left get to do this.

- The ranch is approximately 70,000 acres.

We don't use anything other than a horse.

No four-wheelers, no helicopters.

- Excuse me for saying so, that seems a little stubborn.

I mean, as far as practicality.

- He is so opposed to change.

- It's not all bad, is it? - No!

- I mean, these guys, they love it.

I mean, they get up every morning

and this is their office.

Bodie, he had his teeth kicked out.

- By? - A cow.

- Ooh. - And then he got in that chute

with the steer and knocked him all out again.

- Hey, hey, hey, hey! - Hey!

- Oh, there goes Evan. - She's about to rope.

- How old were you when you learned to ride?

- Oh, gosh.

- She had a horse when she was three.

- Three. - Yeah.

Evan shows horses all over.

She is top five in the world right now.

- In the cow horse, you have to show

how well your horse can do,

you know, different maneuvers and...

- Oh, here comes Levins. - How old?

- He's ten. Watch this.

Damn.

Is that hilarious?

- It's killing me.

- Way to go, Levin!

- Oh, sweet little hunter

My back into your side

- There we go.

- The cabrito that we're eating,

yesterday was a live goat.

- Oh, killer so graceful

- We like it spicy.

Jalapeños and onions and, you know, fresh tomatoes.

- If you got a bunch of gringos, it's perfect.

- How Mexican is West Texas? - This is where it is.

- On the other side of that mountain,

20 miles is the crow flies.

- Those flavors, those sounds.

- That's yours also, right? - Oh, yeah.

- I learned to talk Spanish

nearly before I learned to talk English.

- It's the good vanilla from Mexico.

- Old Mexico or New Mexico? - Old Mexico.

- Chuy's mother comes from Mexico.

- South of Ojinaga, right? - That's right.

- And how long you guys been riding together?

- Oh, me and him? - Yeah, you and him.

- 35 years.

- Yeah, it's an awesome way of life.

- Jalapeño cheese grits. - Nice!

- Of course, there are buttermilk biscuits.

- This is an area of Texas that is legendary for...

Whatever you might have thought

you were going to do here, nature wins.

- Always. - Always.

- Always. - It'll not rain for 20 years.

And you just stay as long as you can till it starts raining.

- Yep. - So how do you make a living?

- Basically, dig in.

- Work like hell and don't spend any money.

- Yeah.

- This table, right here, is filled with people

who truly care about the land and what happens to it.

- You just have to have the heart to stay

and want to stay and do it

and make something of it while you're here.

If you got a weak heart, you won't last.

- I mean, I'm graduating next year

and I'm going to go to college.

Go through law school, finish.

But I want to come back out here.

There are kids that are my age that will never see this.

Never have this, never be able to know people like this.

- And that's, I mean... - Priceless.

- Yeah, how can you say no to that?

- If you get to eat three good meals a day,

- and be happy. - Mm-hmm.

- Being happy is more important than anything.

Yeah!

- So, how else is the area changing?

I rode for three hours.

Some ghost towns, dead gas stations,

and nothing but nothing, and, you know,

suddenly we arrive in Marfa.

- And it's like, uh, "Would you like some bruschetta?

Some salumi," you know. Some $900 ponchos.

- That's right

- What... what's going on?

- Clearly, it's not the old, old family Marfa.

- You're everything

- Marfa has become a pretty distinct culture.

Tourist town, art town, cowboy town.

It's just got it all. You can get calamari.

In Marfa. Who'd a thunk it?

20 years ago, nobody even knew what the word meant.

- And it feels like

And it feels like

And it feels like

And it feels like

- This is the first bar I've ever been into where, uh,

the person next to me is petting a goat.

In here?

- Sometimes we got... - You got all types.

- Dogs come in without their owners.

As long as everybody behaves,

whether you got two legs or four,

everything's good.

- When it rains flew up in Memphis

Memphis make you see the scar

I was heading west through Dallas

- You've seen a bit of the world.

You've seen a lot of the world.

- I ran away from home a lot as a kid.

- Mm-hmm. - And by the time I was 16,

I got real good at it.

I went to Alaska, then I came back.

Joined the military. Cowboying, roughnecking.

- Running drugs and guns across the border?

- I did run guns south.

And the ATF knows. They got an open file.

- But what motivated you to get into the bar business?

- Well, every cowboy has a dream of owning a saloon.

- I did not know that. - Mm-hmm.

- It's been around for some time under various...

- Oh, almost a hundred years.

There's many different cultures

that come through here.

Hipsters, blue-collar city workers,

and I wanted everybody to be able to have a good time,

no matter who or what or where.

There ain't going to be but one intimidating

son of a bitch in my bar, and that's me.

You're seeing this town change in a lot of big ways.

- Mm-hmm. - Every single person

I've talked to down here is telling me the same thing.

That wall ain't never getting built around here.

- My ranch is on the river. - It's on the border.

We can't survive without the river.

And we can't survive without the people

on that side of the river.

- They can't survive without us. - Right.

- That and they're our friends for God's sakes.

Loyalty is a big thing in Texas,

and you ain't gonna build a fence between me

and my loyal friends.

- Every old school Anglo rancher I've met here

speaks Spanish fluently.

- Uh-huh. It's a mutual respect to speak a little Spanish.

And it's respect for them to learn a little English.

But you know as well as I do, if you go to Europe,

it's not hard to find somebody in France speaking English.

- Everybody. - They can...

- Yeah. - They don't mind.

They're not offended.

You know, Americans have a tendency to want to be

all butthurt about it.

But here, we're just not. It's... it's...

That's just being a good human being.

- Why is it so goddamn hard to be a good person these days?

- Right now in Marfa, it's 75 degrees.

Low tonight, only 61. Not that cool, honestly.

I'm David Beebe with you till one a.m.

It's time to go outside and look up at the stars

and enjoy the place that you live.

- This part of the state

was always called El Despoblado,

the unpopulated zone, which it never really was.

- Born and bred near here?

- Yeah, a couple hundred miles east. Not far.

- That's considered close around here.

- Close, yeah. - Yeah.

- The forest still makes me uneasy.

Surrounded by trees, I get uneasy,

'cause I can't see.

- Um. - I can't see far enough.

- Now, I guess unlike a lot of Texans

who take a rather romantic view of those early days,

you seem to view it in a darker prism.

- It is dark.

The story of Texas can get a little...

It gets a little too polished.

It was a conquest, and people forget that.

There were people here.

The Spanish and the Mexican authorities

wanted to exterminate the Apaches.

They created a society for the extermination

of the barbarians.

- So the classic Cowboy and Indian film

of scalp-hungry Indians, uh, was not really the case.

- Well, they took scalps too,

but they kind of learned from the Anglos.

And then when the Texans came in, it intensified.

If you were a rancher coming out here in the 1870s,

you better have a lot of guns.

- Because you were an invader. - Right.

- And the people you were invading

knew you were an invader.

- Oh, damn.

You know, if you look at the legend of this place,

you know, was it the history of violence

and the harshness of the landscape

that preserved it for so long?

- Yeah, West Texas stayed wild,

and it's still wild.

People lived in this landscape for 14,000 years.

Through all these different nation-states and empires

that have swept over them, they just... they persist.

- We're going to catch the arch.

The arch of light that is gonna just envelope

this motif right here,

that represents the place where the sun was born.

Welcome to the White Shaman site.

This is one of the oldest pictorial creation narratives

in all of North America.

The mural tells the story about the death of the sun,

the sacrifice that takes place

so that the sun can be reborn the next day.

I had the honor of having a Huichol shaman

come up from Mexico to this site,

and he started weeping.

And they said, "They're all here.

"All of our grandfather's grandfather's grandfathers,

they're all here."

- So here we are at Alpine, Texas,

talking about the beginning of civilization

on the North American continent.

The earliest evidence of human existence

in this area goes back how far?

- Almost 15,000 years.

The rock art in the Lower Pecos

and along the Rio Grande,

encapsulates not only their religion, but the cosmos.

Why you had constellations at certain times of the year

and where were they in relation to each other.

The seasons.

- Tony, sometimes I just want to scream

because people will say, you know,

"Well, did these people speak with a grunt?"

I look at these murals and I see sophistication

that we'd be hard-pressed with today.

- I think sophistication is an overvalued term.

Uh, well, what the hell do we mean by that anyway?

Well...

- I mean, still pretty much killing ourselves

with spears and rocks, of one sort or another.

- One of the important things you have to realize is that

these people have the same brain

that put a man on the moon.

They were in tune with their universe and their environment.

- Same brain, same brain.

- I would not be surprised if the Lower Pecos art

outlasts all of us.

All of our monuments crumble to dust immediately.

4,000 years later, White Shaman, still there.

- I think they're going to have a tough time of interpreting

what life was like on this planet.

They'll be left with Betamax copies of "Three's Company"

and, uh, you know, "Who's the Boss."

Who lived on this planet and what went horribly wrong?

Yeah!

- You know, if you talk about life-changing events

in any neighborhood, it's when the artists show up.

- When my father Donald Judd came to Marfa

in the early '70s,

it was a ranching community and an old railroad town.

- The legend is, of course, that he looked at a map

and was looking to the least populated area of America

and came out here.

- Is that true? - Yeah, that is.

I mean, he did a lot of looking for places that

had very few people, and very few trees and lots of space.

He had been working hard for so long.

And I think coming out to Marfa was this reward.

- Your dad was a giant of the art world

in New York with an enduring, huge legacy.

What's that like?

- The thing with my dad is, like, he was like a buddy

my whole life.

He was literally, like, my tether

to understanding the world.

- Oh, wow. - Look at this.

- There are people who make great food in Marfa

that didn't open a restaurant.

So this is the behind the scenes of yummy food

that people make in their homes.

Carmen's menudo and her blue corn tortillas.

- Nice!

Johnny Sufficool's mesquite bean flour empanadas.

Malinda's queso fresco.

- With chili's. - I love this, I love this.

- And Ophelia's tamales over here.

- Wow.

When your dad came to town with nothing but love in his heart

and a desire to make beautiful things,

he ushered in this entire new world with the invasion

of, you know, gourmet coffee or, you know, trained baristas.

How did he feel about that?

- I mean my dad made his own coffee every morning,

so he wouldn't be that into the fancy coffee available now.

But the people who come here now,

as long as they're contributing to being a good citizen,

it's actually a good thing that people are here.

- Dos carne guisada, tambian a chile verde.

- Chile verde? - Si.

- What are you having? - I'll have a barbacoa.

- Barbacoa taco.

Most of the better restaurant chefs,

you can find at least once a week getting their food here

even if they're making food down at their place.

- Unbelievable. - The gas station.

- In the morning, everybody's here.

It's all the border patrol guys. Like, all of them.

- There you go. - You have a great day.

- All the laborers in town, kids,

the people that work at the radio station.

It's like going to... yeah, like your abuela's house.

- So you're both multitaskers.

- You're a state employee a, uh... - County employee.

- County employee. - Elected official, yeah.

- Justice of the Peace? - Yes, sir.

- What does that mean? - I'm like the small judge

that reads you your rights when you go to jail.

- Also a musician?

- Yeah, a musician with Primo here.

- Where? The... the... - The radio station?

- I've been on the radio now for ten years.

Ten years, every week. And he's been on the radio now

- for, what, three? - Three or four years.

- Restaurant business? - I have a burger and taco

joint that's open on weekends.

- Burger time.

- A lot of multitasking around here.

- People tend to... - You have to.

- You have to.

- Yeah, I always say that every job here

pays ten bucks an hour whether you're the attorney,

or the barista, or the janitor.

So you're going to have to work a lot of different jobs

to make it because it's expensive to live here.

- Right. Look, this is a small town.

- 1,800 people. - It seems an unlikely place

to put in a spanking-new public radio station

that's heard all over Texas, yes?

- Well, that's exactly right.

I mean, your expenses for running

a 100,000 watt transmitter on the top of a mountain

that gets struck by lightning every three weeks or...

- It's pretty tough. - Yeah, uh-huh.

- But the station has support

from pretty much everybody here.

Everybody listens to the radio on their pickup truck.

The only other news source we have around here

is the local newspaper.

- What are the big issues?

What do people want to talk about?

- The issue is border trade.

And there's a lot of fear right now because the idea

of changing NAFTA.

- American parts assembled in Mexico come back here.

- Yeah, that's part of the NAFTA thing.

You can take it, have it here, take it over there,

assemble it, bring it back, there's no tax.

Assembling has been good for our community.

There's a mobile home factory called Solitaire.

You see them all over here, people buy them.

They take the stuff down there,

they assemble the homes down there,

then they bring them up the road...

You'll see two or three come up the highway today.

- And who's buying those things?

- Everybody who's working class.

The manufactured housing is the craftsman home

of the 21st century.

- It appears that Marfa, in particular,

is going to be a tourist and service economy.

There is money flooding in here.

It is an irresistible tide.

Is there money trickling down?

Is it spreading out into the community?

- We have jobs here. - You can get a job here.

It's not... as I said, everybody makes $10 an hour here.

But 25 years ago, we had nobody here,

- and it was a dying down, so... - Right.

- You got the cowboys, border patrol.

You got hipsters coming in from out of town.

New York artists wearing weird glasses and white pants.

Maybe we don't understand each other,

but we can all be in at the same place at anytime.

People here are nice.

Everybody wave each other. Todos.

- Ah.

- Thanks for tuning in, everyone.

You're listening to 93.5 KRTS, Marfa public radio.

Oh, dear friend, I know your secret

But I just can't keep it

Another night

- This is what the Mexican people end up living

once they leave their [indistinct].

The projects. The low-income housing.

- In the morning

You will pay for what you've done

- Hola, Ramona. - Como esta?

Dos burritos, por favor. De asado.

Mm-hmm, por favor.

Que rico.

Gracias, Ramona.

- You... You've been riding horses?

- Yes, you noticed. - Yes.

- The groan as I sit down.

Mmm, that is a serious burrito.

- No rice and all that. - Uh-uh.

- This is the real deal, man. - I love it.

Were you born... You were born in Mexico City.

- I was a fisherman in Alaska for 19 years of my life.

- Oh yeah? - In the Bering Sea.

- Now, is it Ado-bee or Ado-beh?

- Ado-beh. - Adobe.

- And you recorded a saying, "Adobe is political."

- Yes. You're going to start with that question.

- Yeah. I'm interested.

- Straw, clay, water, and manure.

That's what makes the adobe.

We make a flat surface here where we're going to put

the water and the manure on top.

Adobe building has happened all over the world

for thousands of years.

Here, historically, the adobe has been kept alive

by the Mexican and Mexican American populations.

The tradition of the adobe, it's barely alive

because of what's happening with the gentrification

in Marfa.

The Mexican American minorities are being displaced.

The people who have lived in adobes for generations

have to sell their homes because of the new taxes.

Taxes that are only in adobes, you know?

A lot of us, we also find discriminating.

We are at a critical point.

When I think about adobe,

it's probably the oldest, tangible representation

of the local, original culture that we have.

- Everybody, for generations, they have crossed

the Rio Grande back and forth by just walking.

The river was low and they would just cross,

go buy some groceries, and then go back.

- All right y'all, [indistinct] time.

Molly Ferguson from [indistinct] Presidio, Texas.

This is Marfa public radio.

- Very low crime here. - Yeah, I mean,

Ojinaga defies so many of the things

that people say about the border.

You know, my daughter spends a lot of time in Ojinaga.

My daughter, and, you know, some people it's like, "What?"

But, I mean, I don't... I don't go to sleep at night

wondering if she's okay, 'cause I know she's okay.

- She's at home. - Yeah, yeah.

The interesting thing about this restaurant is they don't

just serve your typical Mexican enchilada plate.

So a lot of kind of traditional recipes.

- Oh, I know they do meat here in a big way, yeah?

- Yeah.

So welcome to good old Presidio and... and Ojinaga.

- Other side of the river,

you are currently the mayor of Presidio.

- Yes, sir. - And you are former mayor of...

- Ojinaga.

- You know, when we talk about sister cities, that's serious.

- Oh, yeah. Yeah.

- It's almost like an arbitrary line through them.

- On the weekends, Presidio just kind of empties out.

You say, "Where is everybody?" It's 'cause they're here.

So, I mean that's kind of why... when there's talk about

a border wall, I was like, "Whoa, wait, wait!"

We're basically just one town here.

- Now, you can come over here.

Your boyfriend can't come over there?

- No. - Not yet.

- That... that's not too friendly.

What's up with that? And how come? Why not?

- A good person. - I'm a person, you know?

- So, you don't... - You would need a visa?

I mean, what's the problem that you can't go back

and forth for the day? Or for two days?

- No. We did the process and everything

for him to, at least, get a visitor s visa.

He went on a bus that took him to Juarez,

which is four hours away?

- Yeah... no, ten hours away. - Ten hours on a bus.

Okay, and then he had to wait in a line.

Four hours, like, waiting.

And then the interview took, like, two minutes?

- Almost, almost. - And they just put "denied."

- Denied? - They didn't even... denied.

- Meanwhile, you live right... - Yeah.

- Like, within a mile of each other.

- He has no bad record, nothing, you know?

And we're best friends, you know? And... and I wish

he could come over to my house and just see it, you know?

- The state of Texas is so much more diverse

than it used to be, and I think it makes it just...

- Better. - Much... oh, yeah.

And I know some people, that scares them,

and I don't... I think it's just a fear of the unknown.

It's not a fear based on anything concrete.

Here, we're all family.

- Salud - Saludo.

- This is Santa Elena Canyon.

Big Bend National Park,

the largest national park in Texas,

and it's named after the Big Bend in the Rio Grande.

We are surrounded by 1,500-foot limestone cliffs.

This slowly rows up and then the river just

cut through it for millions of years.

- Ready? - Whoa!

- It looks good.

- Doing a good job on the food.

- Cheers. - Thank you guys.

- Salud. - Salud.

- So, you're looking at Texas and I'm looking at Mexico.

- Yes. - 100% correct, yeah.

The cliffs on our left are Mexico

and the ones on our right are, uh, the United States.

I've been on several overnights where your clients

almost forget that, yeah, that's Mexico right there.

And they say, "Wait, is that Mexico?"

And it's like, "Yeah, it... it is."

- Looks exactly the same as that. - Yeah.

- We get people from all over the country,

all over the world, and some of them come in

hesitant or scared of the border.

- When they book the trip, they say, "Should I bring my gun?"

- Right. - But the neat thing is that

everyone I've taken out, you get to see this transformation

from being, like, terrified to thinking it's beautiful

to thinking they don't need a wall to thinking,

"I'm actually going to write a letter saying that

- we don't need a wall." - Right.

Does anyone ever bother to... I mean, are there, like,

scary gunboats coming up and down this river, uh?

- I mean, I think the border patrol technically does have

a hovercraft that they've used once and it was horrible.

- Park Service does too. - Yeah.

- They have helicopters. - For the record,

I don't understand why Mexico is made to be such an issue.

I mean, it's our second biggest trade partner aside from China.

- What about the Canadians? - They're actually pouring across

our borders and stealing our jobs.

- They are taking our jobs! - Find a non-Canadian comedian.

How many Canadians play hockey in the United States

for a U.S. team?

- Those are high paying jobs that Americans...

- They're stealing! - They're stealing them.

- They're stealing our jobs.

- I mean, there are so many avenues that the conversation

go to where violence comes from, where dangers come from.

- Well, even our small towns here.

I mean, crazy stuff happens everywhere.

- The world is made a better place by little bits at a time.

You can't just jam though it all in one year

and say it's fixed.

- You know, I've been to a few places

- where they do have a wall. - Yeah.

- Few things are uglier in the entire world,

of all of the places I've seen,

few things have been more of an indication

of an utter failure of otherwise smart people

to figure shit out.

Thank you for showing me this amazing, amazing...

I mean, just ludicrously amazing place.

- My son John was tall and slim

And we had a leg for every limb

- Ohh!

- But now he's got no legs at all

For he ran a race with a cannon ball

Timmy roo dun da, fadda riddle da

Whack fo' the riddle Timmy roo dun da

- There are a certain type of people who connect immediately

to the empty spaces.

- I can't spend much time on myself

If I'm alone in my apartment in New York

or on a beach with a hammock.

I'd like to think I'll be able to relax,

but I can't.

There's that enforced sense of humility,

'cause you really know how utterly powerless you are.

You're just tiny.