Santa Teresa, once a sleepy New Mexico town along the U.S. Mexico border, is now one of the state’s booming development hot spots. The town is located 40 miles south of Las Cruces, New Mexico’s second-largest city, and just across the border from computer and electronics manufacturing giant FoxConn. Also nearby is Union Pacific’s $400 million rail hub, a work in progress that will span 2,200 acres on the U.S. side of the border.Commercial carriers frequent the new roads surrounding Santa Teresa in order to escape congestion on the traditional route from Juarez to El Paso. The border area also attracts Mexican companies that have moved north to escape the drug violence of the country’s interior.

Santa Teresa’s future appears bright, particularly given that thousands of surrounding acres remain open and undeveloped. New Mexico’s economic development secretary Jon Barela says he and other politicians “are very bullish on the future of Santa Teresa.” In the last 15 years alone, 50 companies have moved to the area, creating as many as 2,000 jobs. Union Pacific’s rail hub will also bring hundreds of jobs to the town, casting Santa Teresa as an inland port of entry for cargo from Mexico and other Latin American countries as well as shipments from Asia.

Economic development adviser Jerry Pacheco said that Santa Teresa’s recent boom illustrates the U.S.’s “inching toward that vision long ago of this being a true bi-national community…It has taken this long for all the pieces to come together.”