The American-Mexican-American-Mexican Town of Rio Rico



International borders can be weird. If you are in Detroit and go south, you end up in Canada (see the comments under this post). Rivers are like that. Near the mouth of the Rio Grande River, the water flow meanders widely, and in 1906 a private irrigation company simplified one of those meanders by cutting a channel across it to shorten the river, essentially changing the US/Mexico border and leaving the American residents of the village of Rio Rico in flux. When that was discovered, the government was like, no big deal, and made the irrigation company pay Rio Rico's residents some money. They were still US citizens, but over the years the oxbow lake left by the re-channeled river dried up and eventually no one knew where the boundaries were. The village made the most of their status during Prohibition, but the anomaly was rediscoverd in the 1960s, which led to further chaos. It's quite a story. -via Damn Interesting


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