I spent Memorial Day Weekend visiting my friend Sari in San Antonio. We drove from there to Brownsville, at the very southernmost tip of Texas.
We dropped off her aunt Rosa to travel further south, to a relative’s ranch in Monterrey, and the two of us spent a few days exploring Brownsville, Matamoros, and even, very briefly, the spring-break destination of South Padre Island. She used to be a reporter for the paper there, and so is very connected – and we got to catch up with folks from the Mexican consulate, the economic development commission, and the paper.
Brownsville is beautiful – it’s so close to the water that the air is always full of low, oceanic clouds. The streets have cracks and cobblestones. Tourists flock to South Padre Island, a beach-and-condo-coated island awash in T-shirt and seashell shops. You get to the island by hurtling across a long freeway bridge, that turns into a parking lot when you try to leave.
(Lots of interesting Jewish dynamics in this part of Texas, too – I was assured by everyone I met that Israelis run all the T-shirt shops and Mexicans the seashell shops on SPI, and even told by one person that the T-shirt shops were “laundering money for Israel.” I didn’t have time to be offended by this before it was explained to me that cartel-based money laundering is so prevalent in those environs that no one means anything particular by it.)
Sari also took me to see the old Jewish cemetery in Brownsville, next to the much larger town/Mexican/Catholic cemetery. The Jewish cemetery is surrounded by a wall and has better groundskeeping – the graves are spaced, the grass is cut. It looks like a postage stamp of excessive order on an envelope of a larger, overgrown graveyard. We talked about the origins of separate graveyards, and how religious customs can come off as racism sometimes.
Border Patrol cops were ubiquitous. On the drive down, we passed an enormous detainment camp for immigrants who are being deported. Sari and I walked down the beach to the end of the United States, to the Rio Grande and the border, where you can look across the water to Mexico. We saw people swimming and fishing in the water on both and all sides, oblivious of – or in defiance of – the national dividing line.
We met with a farmer who’s arguing with Homeland Security about them putting “the wall” across his land – issues of compensation, of the land losing its value, of them not knowing what kind of a wall it’s going to be. The whole operation seems disorganized, but it moves forward anyway, despite its lunacy. As one of Sari’s friends said to us this weekend, “If you build a sixteen-foot wall, they’re just going to get a seventeen-foot ladder.”
After all, building enormous walls is always such a great political move. With the upcoming election and (hopeful) change in political parties, this idiotic wall may yet not happen. But they continue to move forward, trying to buy up land at less than its value and impact the livelihood of small Texas farmers.
This farmer, whose name I won’t mention (because we didn’t tell him we’d be writing about him) was as pro-enforcement and conservative as you can get. He doesn’t want any illegal immigration happening on or around his land. But he’s also a practical man who makes his living farming, and he knows the wall’s
a) not going to work
b) a terrible idea.
c) not going to work.
On a less political note, the food was amazing. I ate the best huevos rancheros I’ve ever experienced in my life, at the Toddle Inn. We were greeted as old friends at Captain Bob’s, a self-run fishing operation and sea food restaurant. Bob is also the purveyor of a local blog. Brownsville is blog-crazy, both for politics and for gossip – everyone we met was talking about the comments on such-and-such’s blog.
I loved it – the community, the people, and the landscape – and I hope I get to spend more time there soon.
