For anyone writing about the Valley
We are building an events app for the four counties. That is not what this page is about. This page is about the material we had to assemble to build it: what recurs here and when, what the words mean, what we can prove, and what we are still checking. Take it — what is ours is the checking, and we would rather you used it than repeated something you found on a listings site.
What this is
What is here, and what is not
What we can give you. The Valley events year, month by month. What each of the annual festivals is and roughly when it falls. What a jamaica, a pulga, a charreada, a tardeada and a quinceañera actually are, in enough detail that you will not get one wrong — that is the word list. Why so much of what happens here never appears online. And live bridge wait times from CBP, with the caveats that make them readable.
What we do not have, and will not produce for you.
Photographs. We have none at all — not a library, not a handful. If you need images of the Valley, we are the wrong door, and we would rather tell you now than after an email.
Specific dates, prices or opening hours. Not for any event, ever. Annual events move, organisers announce their own dates, and a wrong date sends somebody driving a hundred miles for nothing. We publish the season and we send you to the organiser.
Attendance numbers for festivals. We do not have a sourced one for any event here, and an unsourced attendance figure is the easiest wrong number in regional writing to start and the hardest to stop.
How many events, organisers, parishes or halls there are. Nobody has counted. We are going to, and when we have, it will be on this page with its method attached.
Anything we are still checking. If a claim is not confirmed, it is not on this site and we will not give it to you privately either. What we will give you is the question — see what we are checking.
The standard
How we decide what goes on this site
One rule: every claim carries a source, or it does not publish. Not a hedge, not a “reportedly” — it does not appear. Our generator drops any sentence carrying an internal “needs checking” marker before the page is written to disk. There are 104 such sentences right now, written and stored and not on this site. That number is generated from the content itself rather than maintained by hand, because a count nobody recomputes reads as current long after it stops being true.
We do this because we got it wrong twice. We published a page about a travel show in McAllen that does not exist, and we kept a motorcycle rally on South Padre Island for eleven years after it moved to Corpus Christi and changed its name. Both came to us the same way: a plausible listing that existed only on sites that copy each other. We now treat aggregator listings as evidence of nothing.
The same applies to our own working documents. Both of those false events were sitting in our own internal plan, in a table headed verified. An internal document is not a source either.
Three things follow. We publish the season, not the date — if you see a month here, it is a window. A “needs checking” label is not good enough for a claim about a real business — a caveat does not survive a screenshot, so the claim comes out entirely and the question goes on a public page instead. And we would rather be short than wrong: ten confirmed annual events is worth more than fifty copied ones. We paid for that lesson.
Using it
If you use this
The facts are yours. A season, a figure, a distance, the fact that jamaica season peaks in October — take it. Facts are not ours to license and pretending otherwise would be both unenforceable and rude. If you want to link to us so your readers can check it themselves, we would be glad, and that is the whole of the ask.
The writing is ours. Quote a paragraph with our name and a link, the way you would quote anyone. If you want to reprint a whole guide, or translate one, write to us — the answer is usually yes, and it is quicker than you expect. Please date the copy and link to the live version: we correct these, and your readers should be able to find the corrected one.
Our name and logo are not part of that. Use them to identify us, not to suggest we endorsed you.
If we got something wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say when. That offer is worth more to you than any licence.
Contact
Ask us
We are in Rio Grande City. Write to [email protected] and a person will answer — not a form, and not an autoresponder. If you are on deadline, say so in the subject line.