For Alejandro Oyoque, the City of Alamo Museum’s curator of collections, there’s one definite upside to President Donald Trump’s impending visit to Alamo on Tuesday.
He says maybe — finally — people will stop mistaking Alamo, Texas for the Alamo.
Oyoque says at one point a geographically challenged family from Florida showed up at the museum.
“They said ‘Where’s the Alamo?’ and I said ‘This is Alamo,” Oyoque remembers.
The family was not pleased to learn that they’d overshot their vacation destination by over 300 miles.
“Her jaw just dropped,” Oyoque said.
Although Alamo has seen its share of important politicians and celebrities drop by, Oyoque says he’s not aware of any other sitting president coming to South Texas with Alamo as the key destination. Regardless of politics, he says, it’s important.
“It puts us on the map,” Oyoque said. “A lot of people from up north know McAllen, Harlingen, Brownsville, but they don’t know the little cities.”
Donald Trump is far from the first sitting president to visit the Rio Grande Valley, but his proposed visit certainly stands out from the tone of other presidential tours.
Although President-elect Warren Harding celebrated an Armistice Day in Brownsville in 1920, the first sitting president to tour the Valley was Dwight Eisenhower in the fall of 1953, at least that can be gathered from local newspaper archives.
Ike was in town to dedicate Falcon Dam.
“Deeply tanned and looking fit,” the president was met at the airport in Harlingen by a military band before touring the Valley standing up in an open red convertible, met by “young people in fancy costumes” lining the roads on the route to Sharyland.
“Bougainvillea blossoms were strewn before the procession in several places and in Pharr three young women carrying baskets of flowers startled both the President and his Secret Service guards by running into the middle of the street and tossing flowers into Eisenhower’s car,” a contemporary article reads.
Ike was briefly startled, but shortly after went back to smiling and waving at the 70,000 people lining the road to Sharyland estate.
The president spent two nights there, visiting with a local boy who survived polio, accepting a pair of custom-made boots from a Mercedes company and meeting with the president of Mexico.
The Mission Chamber of Commerce presented Eisenhower’s press secretary, Jim Hagerty, with a waist high Mexican burro that he tactfully donated to a boy’s school.
“An elephant, yes; a donkey, no,” the paper quotes Hagerty quipping.
The Mission Chamber of Commerce has no plans to present current press secretary Kayleigh McEnany with any livestock during Tuesday’s visit.
Ike lunched with the Mexican president on the pivotal day of the dam dedication, hitting totalitarianism in the speech and praising the dam as “a lesson in the way neighboring nations can and should live: In peace, in mutual respect, in common prosperity.”
The next sitting president to visit the Valley was Lyndon Johnson, who toured it as a disaster region in the wake of Hurricane Beulah in 1967.
With an estimated 100,000 people impacted by the storm, Johnson surveyed the Valley by helicopter, seeing from the air a flooded land, many of its residents left homeless and destitute.
LBJ pledged $2.5 million in disaster aid to the Valley.
“There was not a great deal I could do personally by coming here,” a contemporary article quotes Johnson saying. “I wanted to let these people know that their government cares for them and I wanted the people across the river (in Mexico) to know that we care and that this is a compassionate government.”
Richard Nixon had a less serious trip to the Valley in 1972, coming down to speak with local youth and meet with local leaders.
Although he was greeted by a mostly enthusiastic crowd, a contemporary article noted that in the crowd there were also “several long haired youths also held up small signs reading “Nixon Go Home.”
Nixon proved his deftness as a non-partisan piano player in Rio Grande City, surprising an audience of students by noting that it was the 45th birthday of Eligio “Kika” de la Garza, U.S. representative for the 15th District and a member of Nixon’s opposition party.
Nixon had a piano brought out and played the congressman a couple of verses of “Happy Birthday.”
Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, who currently holds de la Garza’s seat, called President Trump a traitor in a release Monday in response to news of the president visiting the Valley after the insurrection of the U.S. Capitol.
A story covering Nixon’s visit noted the president hewed a straight non-partisan line, telling the youth “the future of the country is much more important than what our party label is.”
Ronald Reagan would visit Texas Southmost College in Brownsville while on campaign in 1984.
The stump speech, mostly about the economy, was met by the crowd chanting the president’s name.
“I look at all of you today, and I think of the people I met this morning as — just a little while ago here, in touring this campus,” Reagan told the audience according to a transcript of his speech. “And it’s just so clear that the people of Brownsville are a marvelous mixture of pride and enterprise, and you have a lot to be proud of here in your city.”
Almost 15 years later, Bill Clinton would visit the Valley to once again tout education — and do a little fundraising.
“I remember when President (Dwight) Eisenhower came in 1953,” Congressman de la Garza said the day of the visit. “And today I saw a bunch of people saying, ‘I remember when Eisenhower came.’ That’s very important, because (Clinton) is planting seeds that will grow 30, 40, 50 years down the line.”
More of those seeds would be planted in 2006, when George W. Bush visited Anzalduas County Park to lay out his new immigration plan.
Greeted by both fans and detractors protesting the border fence, Bush used the two-hour stopover visit to tout his five-point immigration plan.
“There’s an important debate facing our nation, and that debate is, can we secure this border and, at the same time, honor our history of being a land of immigrants,” he asked.
Bush’s answer was an emphatic yes.
President Trump last visited the Valley in 2019, where he touted the wall, along with blaming Democrats for the government shutdown, for illegal immigration and for not supporting the federal law enforcement alongside him throughout this three-hour, two-stop tour.
