A Boot Collector Feature
A bootmaking family that crossed the border to escape civil unrest in the early 1900s, and has been building handmade boots in the same corner of South Texas ever since.
The Rios family's bootmaking roots trace back to 1853 in General Terán, Mexico. In the early 1900s, civil unrest in Mexico pushed the family north across the border into the Lower Rio Grande Valley, where they settled near what became Mercedes, Texas, and continued the trade that had already been in the family for generations.
The company that grew out of that move has stayed a hands-on, skilled-labor operation rather than a fully automated one — boots are still built by individual artisans rather than an assembly line. Today Rios of Mercedes runs two factories employing roughly 110 workers, and its boots reach major retailers like Cavender's and Boot Barn along with international markets in Europe and Japan.
Handmade construction with real attention to detail, from a company whose founding story predates nearly every other name in this series — a bootmaking lineage that started in Mexico more than a decade before the Civil War and simply kept going after it crossed the border. Mercedes itself grew into a small bootmaking hub well beyond this one company, home over the years to independent makers like Cavazos Boot Factory and Camargo's Handmade Boots, along with nearby Raymondville's El Vaquero Boots, whose founder spent much of his career at Raymondville's own, now-closed Rios Boots — a different company despite the shared name.
More than 170 years of bootmaking, carried from General Terán across the border to the Rio Grande Valley, and still going.