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Tuesday, March 17, 2026

Los Transmigrantes

We first encountered the phenomenon at Presidio, Texas, a border town, after seeing several 'wagon trains' of used pickup trucks towing other used pickup trucks on the highways of West Texas. On the outskirts of Presidio we saw several barracks-like hostels/hotels advertising themselves for "transmigrantes". This led us to learn more about what we had been seeing on highways throughout West Texas, New Mexico and Colorado this winter. The transmigrantes are Hispanic guys, often with root in Guatemala, who buy up small cars and Japanese pickups all over the American West...you'll often see one battered Tacoma towing another, the beds of both crammed with car parts and pieces. Some of those below, spotted at Van Horn, Texas, had been traveling from Oregon, and they were all headed for Guatemala, where there is a big market for hard-used cars trucks and parts. At the transmigrante hotels/ hostels in border towns like Presidio, the drivers do paperwork and gather into groups---call them wagon trains--for the perilous journey down through Mexico and into Guatemala. There's safety (maybe) in numbers. Of course no one in the rest of the world wants hulking gargantuan fat cat US Trumptrucks--the two below are freight haulers only.

Sunday, March 15, 2026

Ford Rangers. Marfa, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Ford's once upon-a-time wheelbarrow, and a good-looking, useful truck. Compare to the ludicrously massive macho-braggadocio trucks so common in Texas now, with their cowboy movie names--the Ram Laramie Edition, the Ram Longhorn, the Chevy Texas Edition, the Ford Raptor. Those bodybuilder trucks seem to us a signal of what has gone terribly wrong in this country