How South of the Border Keeps Going After All These Years

Here at South of the Border on a mid-March Saturday, a man who had part of his arm amputated by an alligator in Florida the week before poses cheerfully with a concrete statue of a dinosaur. The dinosaur is also sans forearm. 

Across the street, a family with two children and a teenager from Lumberton poke around the statues: a jackalope, a brontosaurus in a sombrero, a gorilla beating its chest and wearing a South of the Border T-shirt. 

Out front, another family piles out of a minivan with Ontario license plates. “This is super cool! You can climb to the top of the hat!” shouts a kid, gesturing at the sombrero-topped tower across the park. The family snaps pictures, then noses their minivan toward the gas station in the complex, through an archway created by South of the Border mascot Pedro’s bowlegs.  

Anyone who’s road-tripped along this stretch of I-95 in the second half of the 20th century likely has a memory of South of the Border, the Mexican-kitsch rest stop-cum-amusement park straddling the Carolinas. It’s hard to miss the sombrero looming over the longleaf pines on the left side of the road as you’re traveling south, or the billboards festooned with three-dimensional meat bearing messages such as “You never sausage a place!” 

But South of the Border is not what it used to be. In March, one could not, in fact, climb to the top of the hat: The stairs were closed and the elevator was broken. (It has since reopened, according to the family that owns the rest stop.)

The reptile lagoon, where curator Manuel Gonsalves tonged chicken into the mouths of sluggish gators, was open, but many other attractions were closed. Minigolf and the carousel were shuttered. Security cars nosed through the empty parking lots. One visitor described it as a “deserted fair.”

Like South Dakota’s Wall Drug or any number of quirky roadside attractions, South of the Border is an emblem of a bygone era of the American road, before air travel became ubiquitous. How it got here and how it persists—despite an aesthetic that seems out of step with modern sensibilities—is a recurring question for passersby and visitors.

“My daughter was asking why they have this place that’s based on Mexico, why they put it here between North Carolina and South Carolina,” said Abseo Villatoro, a carpenter from Delaware, who is half Mexican. He’d stopped at South of the Border in March with his wife and three daughters. “We don’t know why!”

Blame It on the Alcohol

South of the Border started with a simple business idea. In 1949, North Carolina’s Robeson County passed a law prohibiting the sale of alcohol. Alan Schafer, a South Carolina beer distributor, had the idea to set up a beer stand just across the border in Dillon County. The stand quickly transformed into a groundbreaking business venture.

Local legend had it that Schafer used his influence to ensure that I-95 had an offramp leading right to South of the Border; Schafer told The Washington Post in the 1970s that the exit was planned there anyway, but he acknowledged that he pressured Dillon County officials to keep the exit there after they proposed moving it to North Carolina. 

Schafer’s depot became the kind of kitschy fever dream that characterized the heyday of the American road trip: A fireworks shop. Minigolf. A geodesic domed hotel with flamingo statues guarding the entrance. That 200-foot sombrero-topped tower. Teens from the area worked their first summer jobs here; several locals mentioned South of the Border’s perhaps most famous young employee, former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, who declined to comment. 

“There are not that many of these kitschy places still around that speak to this earlier time of Americana,” said Nicole King, now a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who grew up in Conway, South Carolina, about an hour away from South of the Border and wrote her dissertation on tourism in the state.

It especially feels like an earlier time when you account for Pedro, the attraction’s mascot: a Mexican bandito caricature with a goofy grin and a sarape. According to official South of the Border lore, Pedro was born after Schafer started importing Mexican trinkets to sell at his depot. During a trip to Mexico, he met two men he brought to the United States and employed as bellboys at the motel. Ryan Schafer, Alan’s grandson and the current president of South of the Border, remembers these men: He said one was named Rafael, but people called them Pedro and Pancho, and eventually “Pedro” morphed into a symbol of the whole place. 

Alan Schafer told The Washington Post that a representative from the Mexican embassy had once complained that South of the Border promoted unfair stereotypes. Locals and visitors have also sometimes raised concerns about the rest stop’s portrayal of Mexicans, an odd image in a state with a fast-growing Latino population. “Pedro became an uncomfortable, quasi-racist symbol,” said Dale Rosengarten, a retired historian from the College of Charleston.

Ryan Schafer, who was born in 1976, said that from his perspective, the Schafers are selling iconography that’s already available in Mexico. “We didn’t invent Pedro,” he said. “We didn’t invent that character. Even the one they complain about the most, Pedro sleeping beside the cactus—I still go to Mexico, I go four times a year, that’s something they sell down there.” 

He and other family members have said the attraction has a progressive history. Alan Schafer hired Black, Latino, and Lumbee employees, they say. He served as a delegate at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. 

Alan Schafer told The Washington Post that he helped register Black people to vote and that the Ku Klux Klan followed around his beer trucks; Ryan Schafer said he remembers this too. He also said the KKK burned crosses on his family’s lawn in response both to his grandfather’s politics and the fact that his family was Jewish. Many Southerners at the time didn’t consider people like the Schafers to be white—although Rosengarten, who is part of the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina, said Jewish people have lived in the state for hundreds of years and their participation in the plantation economy granted them a path toward insider status. 

Rosengarten said the historical society got some pushback against including South of the Border in a project about Jewish history in the state because of concerns about Mexican stereotypes. “But not so severe that we didn’t do it,” she said.

As the 20th century wound down and the road trip’s importance waned in pop culture, so did South of the Border. “Even back in the 1990s, it was already a little shabby,” said Rosengarten, who visited during that decade to interview Alan Schafer before he died. 

The internet is full of conspiracy theories about drugs and other scandals taking place in South of the Border’s cracked and desolate parking lots. There’s no evidence that any of the conspiracies are true, but the attraction has seen robberies and fires, kidnappings, and a car repossession that ended in a shootout. Ryan Schafer said the main problem is drunken fights in the parking lot late at night, though he said mafiosos from New Jersey once showed up and tried—unsuccessfully—to get into Alan Schafer’s safe.

Things That Go Bang

Some of the visitors at South of the Border last month were locals. Dillon County, South Carolina, is a rural county, where 30 percent of residents live below the poverty line. There aren’t many jobs or activities in the area—“Other than South of the Border, it’s mainly just cornfields,” one employee said—so local high school students tend to find work here, and some locals come to hang out. 

Malcolm Purnell, a 25-year-old who lives less than 10 minutes away, said he comes over a few times a week to shoot pool and drink Blenheim Ginger Ale, which the Schafer family also owns. For many residents of the surrounding area, South of the Border has a campy appeal, an “allure” that King remembers from her youth. “It had a kitschy vibe to it. We’d drive by, walk around, checking out stuff like the dirty old man shop. It was a novelty to me and my friends,” she said. 

“When I got older and thought more critically about it, it became a complicated place,” King said.

Ryan Schafer said that they don’t keep official statistics on South of the Border’s visitors. The attraction was booming during the pandemic, he said, but numbers are back down. There’s just too much competition now, he said, with more motels in nearby towns and truck stops off nearby exits. Plus, he said, the attraction used to cater to the kind of wealthier American who could afford to travel. Asked whether South of the Border has seen its best day, he said, “Our clientele has also seen their best day.”

But for travelers from far-flung locales, South of the Border still has two things to offer, besides the snacks and restrooms you can find at plenty of other exits: nostalgia and fireworks. Many of Pedro’s guests that day described warm childhood memories of stopping here to break up the trek up and down the East Coast. 

“There were a lot more lights back then, a lot of candy and everything,” said James White, a 58-year-old from Delaware who was traveling back from Florida with his daughter, Vanity, 35. White used to come here every year with his grandmother and the whole family, and when Vanity was little, he brought her, too. 

His daughter remembered visits full of “nostalgia and goofy things.” “There used to be a really long line to go up the sombrero,” she remembered. “We’d stay at the hotel right across the way, before we’d get over here. It was so dated.” Sometimes, she’d run into the same travelers on the way home. 

The employees at South of the Border say it’s not always so desolate. It’s packed on the Fourth of July, for example, chiefly because of people buying fireworks. It’s something of a parallel to the theme park’s founding: Fireworks laws are stricter in North Carolina than in its neighbor to the south.

Josh Mcdougal had made an eight-hour pilgrimage from Tennessee with his fiancée and nephews to have fun and stock up. “I want to be prepared for the Fourth of July and New Year’s. I’m looking ahead,” said Mcdougal, who used to live in nearby Wilmington. 

Jake Jeffrey, a visitor from Maine in a Trump shirt, was browsing for bottle rockets. As he put it: “I love things that go bang.”