Talarico brings Frontera Tour meet-and-greet to Del Rio Monday
Talarico’s border tour stopped at Memo’s Restaurant, where Del Rio voters had a chance to press a Senate nominee on water, security and cost-of-living concerns.
James Talarico brought his Frontera Tour to Memo’s Restaurant on East Losoya Street, turning a Del Rio lunch spot into a border-county test of a Democratic U.S. Senate campaign. The Monday meet-and-greet ran from 3 to 4 p.m. at the Calderón family restaurant, a San Felipe Creek landmark that has operated since 1936.
The stop was one leg of a roughly 750-mile tour through Texas border communities, including El Paso, Marfa, Alpine, Sanderson, Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Laredo, McAllen and Edinburg. Talarico’s campaign has framed the tour around issues that land hardest in border counties: border security, water infrastructure, health care, job creation and the cost of living.
Those concerns fit Val Verde County’s numbers as much as its politics. The county had 47,586 residents in the 2020 Census and an estimated 47,835 on July 1, 2025. It covers 3,144.7 square miles of land area, making it the seventh largest county in Texas by total area, and 81.6% of residents identify as Hispanic or Latino. The U.S. Census Bureau also estimates that 19.0% of residents under age 65 lack health insurance.
Water is likely to remain one of the most immediate local tests for any candidate who asks for support here. The Texas Water Development Board says Val Verde County’s groundwater and surface water resources are intimately connected and sensitive to future development. City of Del Rio planning materials say the city supplies water to about 15,509 retail connections serving roughly 46,500 people, and in July 2025 the water board approved $16.15 million for Del Rio water system and treatment plant improvements. Drought.gov has also listed impacts affecting cattle and hay acreage in the county.
The setting mattered as much as the message. Memo’s normally opens Monday through Saturday, with lunch hours from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and dinner service from 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., making a 3 p.m. campaign stop a brief interruption in the restaurant’s regular rhythm. For Del Rio, it also placed a statewide Senate race inside a familiar local room on East Losoya Street.
That race is scheduled for November 3, 2026, with Talarico and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton as the major-party nominees. Paxton defeated John Cornyn in the Republican primary runoff, setting up a general-election contest in which Democrats see Paxton as vulnerable and border stops like Del Rio as a chance to reach voters who are usually asked to listen to national arguments instead of local answers.
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