Santa Catarina

Santa Catarina, a dryland farming community on Farm Road 755 six miles south of La Gloria and twenty miles northeast of Rio Grande City in Starr County, was first settled about 1809 as a part of the Kelsay Ranch. By the mid-1960s the community had twenty residents and a filling station, a grocery, and a cotton gin. In 1970 its population was forty-five, but its last store closed in 1978. Though in 1990 the Texas Almanac reported a population of forty-eight at Santa Catarina, a 1991 local report noted that only two families lived at the community. In 2000 the population was fifteen.