South Texas at Work: Recognizing a Maker Economy

By Andrew M. Anguiano Chair, San Antonio CPG CEO/Co-Founder Southside Craft Soda

San Antonio and South Texas have been making, distributing, and trading goods across borders for generations. Today, a new wave of product innovators is carrying that legacy forward. Investing in this ecosystem isn’t optional—it’s essential to the region’s long-term economic growth and resilience..

Part I: South Texas Is a Maker Economy

South Texas is often described by what it lacks: lower incomes, underinvestment, brain drain—an “emerging” economy that never quite arrives.

What is less often acknowledged is what the region has been doing consistently, for generations: building real businesses. Long before South Texas appeared in economic development reports or investor slide decks, it functioned as a productive, self-sustaining maker economy—not one built on speculation, but on tangible goods, services, and cultural exchange.

This economy stretches across what urbanist and researcher Dr. Antonio Petrov calls the South Texas Triangle—the interconnected geography linking San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Laredo, the Rio Grande Valley, and northern Mexico. But the Triangle is more than a region on a map. It is a lens for understanding how business and culture flow across borders. It gives shape to what outsiders often dismiss as “hinterland.” Within the Triangle, goods, labor, capital, and ideas move with a fluency that often outperforms formal markets. This is not an emerging economy. It is a mature one, operating outside the instruments that usually attract investment.

Within the South Texas Triangle, making is not a trend. It is infrastructure.

I came to understand this not just through research, but by doing. As founding executive director of Southside First, I worked alongside Dr. Petrov to challenge how San Antonio—especially its South Side—was framed in economic development. The issue was never a lack of activity. It was a lack of recognition.

That recognition gap becomes clear when we look at how businesses are formed. Enterprises in South Texas are often labeled “informal,” but that term reflects observer bias, not operational gaps. These businesses are fully functional systems, built on trust, proximity, and resilience. They start in homes, kitchens, garages, flea markets, food trucks, pop-ups, family partnerships, and neighborhood storefronts. They grow through reputation, necessity, and cultural fluency long before they intersect with formal capital.

Seen through the Triangle, this is not marginal activity—it is the dominant mode of business formation. The logic here differs from what most investors, banks, and funding institutions recognize. It favors durability over speed, relationships over visibility, and steady growth over explosive scale.

I encountered this mismatch firsthand while pitching angel groups. South Texas has always relied on traditional funding—bank loans, retained earnings, family capital, and local investors—to build durable businesses. The challenge is that the dominant investment language has shifted toward rapid scale, compressed timelines, and institutional-ready structures. Against that lens, businesses built on operational depth and cultural fluency often appear underdeveloped—not because they are, but because they are being read in a different grammar. This is not a failure of investors, but a mismatch between evaluation tools and place-based realities.

Innovation exists here, but it rarely announces itself in venture capital terms. It shows up in adapted recipes, hybrid business models, informal supply chains, and culturally resonant brands that spread because people trust them.

Building Southside Craft Soda was not about launching a startup—it was about responding to what was already visible: a region producing, branding, distributing, and selling at scale, largely outside the frameworks formal capital understands. I saw the same logic in my wife’s business, Mission Crafts Chandlery, a retail concept rooted in local culture.

The lesson is clear: the issue is never whether South Texas can produce investable companies—it can and does. The issue is whether investment frameworks know how to recognize, translate, and engage what already exists.

A pattern emerges. South Texas excels in culturally anchored, place-based industries—sectors where proximity, identity, and lived experience are advantages, not constraints. Consumer Packaged Goods are the clearest example, turning culture into measurable economic value. But the logic extends to retail, restaurants, hospitality, entertainment, cross-border services, and other culture-driven enterprises: they translate culture into commerce and community into demand.

History bears this out. These companies did not scale in spite of South Texas—they scaled because of it.

Fritos was born in San Antonio, transforming a regional snack into a national brand. Pace Picante Sauce leaned into South Texas identity rather than erasing it, becoming a billion-dollar brand whose success helped catalyze lasting civic and economic transformation. H-E-B built one of the most respected grocery companies in the country by understanding regional tastes, investing locally, and developing deep supplier ecosystems rooted in place.

This vintage H-E-B in Brownsville, from the 1940's, reflects more than retail history — it’s part of how South Texas built a maker economy. From its beginnings in 1905 and early expansion into the Valley in the 1920s, H-E-B helped local producers reach regional markets long before the term “ecosystem” existed.

More recently, Siete Foods—founded by a family from Laredo—translated culturally authentic Mexican-American food into a national platform, culminating in a $1.2 billion acquisition by PepsiCo.

These are not exceptions. They represent a civic lineage of scaled makers that has existed here all along.

Siete Foods, founded in Laredo, is part of a new generation of makers turning culture into commerce—scaling family-rooted products through modern distribution while staying true to where they come from.

South Texas is also one of the most powerful consumer markets in the country—young, brand-loyal, and culturally influential. Latino purchasing power in the U.S. now exceeds $3 trillion, and South Texas is not a peripheral participant—it is a cultural engine. National brands understand this. What they have been slower to do is invest meaningfully in businesses that emerge organically from this culture.

Despite its durability, much of the economy operates without the connective tissue that allows value to compound. Growth happens—but often in isolation. This is not weakness. It is unfinished infrastructure.

South Texas is not an emerging economy. Through the Triangle, it is a functioning maker economy that has rarely been evaluated on its own terms. That misunderstanding sets the stage for the next question: how do we support what already works?

Part II: How South Texas Builds Businesses—and How to Support Them

To understand South Texas, start where businesses begin: not in pitch decks or accelerators, but in kitchens, garages, church parking lots, family warehouses, and borrowed storefronts. These businesses start with work already happening—products selling, customers returning, money changing hands.

Building a maker economy takes more than ideas—it takes shared knowledge. San Antonio CPG has created programming that connects early-stage CPG founders with operators who’ve already scaled. Pictured: Rigoberto Gonzalez and Jose Luis Heredia, CEO of La Regia Tortilla Factory, passing on hard-earned experience.

They are often called “informal.” In development economics, that means activity outside formal systems—cash-based, undocumented, hard to measure. But in South Texas, that misses the point: these businesses are operational before they are formalized, disciplined before credentialed, prioritizing cash flow, trust, and continuity before scale or exit strategies.

Seen this way, these are not marginal businesses—they are the dominant mode of economic formation. The recognition gap exists because their logic differs from what investors, banks, and economic development programs are trained to read. Innovation exists—but only systems that translate it into legible frameworks can unlock capital.

Supporting South Texas businesses does not require inventing a new economy. It requires aligning resources with the one already in motion, in layers:

Founder Translation, Not Replacement Founders are already building. The goal is to help them translate operational success into governance, financial reporting, and succession planning—without stripping control or culture.

Local Capital as the First Signal South Texas has patient, locally generated wealth—family-held, entrepreneur-built, and accumulated from regional enterprises. Properly structured, it anchors governance, signals confidence, and reduces perceived risk for outside investors.

Coordinated Traditional Financing Banks, credit unions, and CDFIs can support businesses across stages when working together—through shared underwriting, blended capital, and clear handoffs. Debt itself is not the problem; misaligned debt is.

Economic Development as Traction Amplifiers Grants, incentives, and technical assistance are available, but they work best as traction amplifiers—boosting businesses already generating revenue, creating jobs, and meeting demand.

Outside Capital Adapting to Place Outside investors succeed here by taking a long-term view, holding minority stakes, sharing in revenue, staying flexible on governance, and partnering closely with local operators—mentoring them with their experience and stabilizing returns, which creates durable value and reduces risk.

Shared Infrastructure Instead of Isolated Scale Shared production, distribution, compliance, and back-office systems reduce friction and improve margins. Infrastructure is leverage, not overhead, and public agencies and schools can help by offering expertise, training, and operational support.

Metrics that Reflect Reality Success in a maker economy is durable: jobs created, skills transferred, brands retained, ownership preserved, supply chains deepened, and new wealth generated that benefits the entire region. These outcomes compound value over time.

Founded in 2024, San Antonio CPG brought together founders, operators, and industry leaders to share knowledge and support one another. That first Meet-Up (Pictured) marked the beginning of a growing maker community focused on visibility, scale, and opportunity for local brands.

Supporting South Texas businesses is not charity—it is disciplined, place-aware strategy. The economy does not need to be invented; it needs to be recognized, translated, and aligned with capital and policy willing to meet it on its own terms.

The work ahead is not asking founders to change—it is asking institutions to expand how they see. South Texas is not an idea waiting to be tested. It is an economy already at work, producing tangible results for the region and its communities. 

About Andrew M. Anguiano Andrew M. Anguiano is co-founder and CEO of Southside Craft Soda and, with his wife Marcie, own Mission Crafts Chandlery in San Antonio. He is founding chair of San Antonio CPG, a founding board member of Arboretum San Antonio, and an advisory partner with the civic-minded startup Acequia Ventures, bringing a hands-on, founder-operator perspective to building authentic, culturally rooted brands.