Brickmaking was one of the pioneering non-agricultural manufacturing industries in the lower Rio Grande/Rio Bravo corridor, and a precursor of the binational, cross-border maquiladora industry that came to identify the U.S.-Mexico border economy in the aftermath of the Border Industrialization Program [BIP] launched in 1965. Through research beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to the present, Scott Cook has sought to fill-in these blank pages on the binational handmade brick industry and its competitive situation in the Texas market.