Growing up in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1980s, I had plenty of opportunities to explore. I was what’s now called a “free-range kid,” left to roam the outdoors as I pleased. Some days we didn’t come home until the streetlights came on. During weekends, summers, and breaks from school, my friends and I walked to local parks alone and spent our days pretending we were superheroes fighting off imaginary supervillains.
We would meander down the railroad tracks past civilization, living out our own Mexican American Stand by Me (without the dead body, of course). When we got BMX bikes for Christmas, we rode on “the jumps,” which were hard-packed mounds of dirt near the canal behind our neighborhood. On Saturdays, my cousins and I strolled alongside the Rio Grande and played at the abandoned pumphouse that had once provided water to the farmlands of South Texas.
This was before handheld devices, before endless streaming, in the era when television had an end time every night and the screen would turn to static “snow.” Now, my wife,
