Ochoa

Ochoa is on Farm Road 170 and the Rio Grande, six miles southeast of Indio and ten miles northwest of Presidio in southwestern Presidio County. It grew up around the ranch of Esteban Ochoa, son of Juan and Isabel (Leaton) Ochoa and grandson of Ben Leaton. Juan Ochoa II, tracker and scout for the Eighth Texas Cavalry, was born at Ochoa in 1894. Early in the 1900s Ochoa had seventy-five families and was a prosperous farming community. Like the other farming communities along the river, it went through an agricultural revolution when irrigation and cotton growing were introduced to the area in 1914. Esteban Ochoa hired about 100 Mexican refugees to dig an irrigation ditch to supply water for his farm and those of his neighbors. The community operated a school by 1911, when Jessie Head was hired to teach. In 1936 Ochoa had a church and a store. Its school remained open as late as 1945. At the end of the 1980s Ochoa received mail through Presidio.