Some traditions take surprising forms.
While most people head home to celebrate Thanksgiving, a group of former Peace Corps volunteers from Austin and Houston leave home to work in Mexico for the holiday. Since 1988, a dozen Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, or RPCVs, have spent their Thanksgiving vacations working on construction projects in the Rio Bravo, a Tamaulipas border town just south of Mercedes. There they get to work at El Chorizo colonia, a long, sausage-shaped district that borders the railroad tracks made up of shacks built of scrap wood, tin and tires. Some of the jerrybuilt dwellings have neat gardens and grass growing down to the dusty road bordering the tracks. Others have fences made of pallets or rusted bed springs.