An hour from the nearest gas station on the thorny shores of the Rio Grande is a crumbling adobe village. Out the front doors spread barren Mexico without a trace of society in sight. Behind are a red, mushroom-capped rock and then a towering hill with cliffs cut by a gaping canyon. A whitewashed house with vacant windows is there, so is a low, rectangular store with a surviving awning made from barbed ocotillo branches. But the edifice that screams of what should be seen in places like this is the derelict church with its round topped windows and roof—climbing skyward in rising undulations to where a lonely cross carves into the atmospheric blue. Though looking hard at the cracked adobes, what peeks from the veneer of mud looks strangely like plywood and chicken wire. It looks and it is. The village that is a visage of the ideal southwestern tableau is a creation of Hollywood and not history. It is El Contrabando and home to movies like The Journeyman, Streets of Laredo and Gambler V, not to forget the Brooks and Dunn music video for My Maria. Oh, and the name, that is based on history--after an old smuggling route through area canyons.
