Meet the women who run Girl Scouts in Rio Grande City and Roma

2025 FRONTeras Magazine Vol. 1 No. 4 Issue

Once a month, Girl Scout leaders pack into Jesse's Enchanted Place in Rio Grande City, and Jesse Peña feeds them while they plan how to move mountains with limited resources and unlimited opinions. Tonight, there's chicken picada on the menu.

Girl Scouts of Greater South Texas spans 26 counties and connects 17,000 girls with nearly 4,000 volunteers. The Rio Grande City/Roma service unit represents seventeen troops within that sprawling network. Each troop requires a leader and a co-leader, and many bring additional parent volunteers. Some nights, Jesse's place looks less like a restaurant meeting and more like a town hall.

Tonight's agenda centers on cookie season starting in January 2026. Every troop leader needs cookie training, which sounds simple until you're coordinating seventeen schedules, seventeen opinions, and seventeen unique circumstances.

Service Unit Manager Joanna Barrera leads the meeting while Secretary Irvette V Mendoza documents everything. Treasurers Lisa Margo and Roxanne Cantu report the numbers. Then, Cookie Product Manager Jessica Garcia takes the floor to explain the madness about to ensue. Fall product sales were successful, but they pale in comparison to the chaos of Thin Mints season.

Girl Scout cookies are a culture. Nearly 700,000 girls across the country sell 200 million boxes annually, generating around $800 million in revenue through what's called the largest girl-led entrepreneurial program in the world. In Rio Grande City and Roma, seventeen troops participate in that machine, and getting everyone signed up for training means navigating work conflicts, childcare complications, and the reality that these women are already stretched thin.

Cookie sales fund camping gear, badge supplies and experiences these Valley girls wouldn't access otherwise. Training seventeen leaders means those experiences happen.

The official agenda takes maybe half the meeting. The rest belongs to the networking machine these women have built. They swap activity ideas and trade badges their girls didn't use. Someone brings extra materials for another troop to borrow. Phone numbers and addresses get exchanged. They laugh, they vent, they put their heads together to come up with new ways to challenge their girls. Resources flow between troops because nobody has enough to operate alone.

They leave one by one, some to cook dinner, others to run errands. Next month they'll do it again. The month after that too. No one pays them to be here. No one forces them to teach girls how to sell, to lead, to build confidence. They do it because they're building futures that last longer than cookies.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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