Texans have dinner at Rudy's Country Store while television screens around the restaurant air ceremonies to commemorate the ten year anniversary of September 11th and NFL's Sunday night football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Jets in Laredo, Texas, September 11, 2011.
Laredo, Texas
“Are you here for the convention,” the woman with pink and bronze hair asked me at the hotel in San Antonio.
“No,” I replied, “Which convention?”
“The hairdressers’ convention.”
“Do I look like a hairdresser?” I asked.
“Well no,” she said, “but you might be an educator.”
An educator!? By which I guess she meant a speaker. (I am only a tonsorial expert in the persistence of beard dandruff and encroaching baldness.)
But it was entertaining to watch the horde of hair-stylists, each head a major professional statement, standing in line to get into the convention as I drank my coffee yesterday morning and read the Mets box score. It’s nice to be back in America. I was awaiting the arrival of my first official Traveling Companion, Turk Pipkin, who ventilates an enchanting mixture of dyspeptic hilarity and world-class humanitarianism.
When he arrived, still 6’7″ but minus the long, braided white ponytail by which I used to know him, Turk launched into a rant about the sadness of Laredo. “I can’t imagine going down there and not going across the river to Nuevo Laredo, but nobody goes there anymore,” said Turk, who used to cover Mexico for the The Texas Monthly. The Mexican side was where all the fun was—like the famed Cadillac Bar—and the food, and, well…all the other stuff. But the gringo tourist trade has disappeared because of fears over the Mexican drug violence. There was no wait and next-to-zero traffic heading across the Lincoln-Juarez bridge over the Rio Grande toward Mexico. (There were extensive lines, of course, heading from Mexico to the US) “The truth,” Turk added, when we stood at the bridge this morning, “is you’re more likely to die of boredom here than of gun violence.”
This was not an uncommon theme among the residents of Laredo—more than 96% of whom are Latino. “Nobody comes to Laredo because of its beauty and charm,” said Hank Sames, the Anglo owner of—he claims—the oldest (100 years) auto dealership in Texas, “but this is a town of great opportunity.” It is a port town. The largest cargo port on the Mexican border. The economy is just fine—many American manufacturers unload trucks here and distribute the goods—especially auto parts, furniture, circuit boards—that come from Mexican factories just across the border.
“I think the future is really bright,” says Larry Friedman, a downtown realtor who has just had lunch with Sames at a Mexican Sushi place called Madre Sushi. “A lot of companies are finding that labor costs in China are rising and that it’s easier to build and ship right across the border.”
And the drug gangs? No problem, both say—although neither has been across the river in five years and both are eloquent in their nostalgia for the days when they could just walk across, get a good meal and have some fun. Indeed, there is a palpable sense of loss here, especially in the Latino community, which, until recently, saw the border as a scratch, not a barrier. “We grew up colorblind here,” said Sames, who described himself as a Libertarian. “You were smart or dumb, nice or not. It wasn’t until I got to college in Austin that I saw Hispanics discriminated against. I was shocked.”
Yesterday, the local leadership of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) sponsored a screening of Turk’s new documentary, Building Hope, a lovely piece about how Turk’s NGO, The Nobelity Project, built a high school in rural Kenya. Turk wanted to show it to high school kids, and the LULAC leaders promised 30 but produced 0, and so the local board of directors—plus the local school superintendent, an enormous African-American man named Marcus Nelson—were corralled as guinea pigs.
After the film ended, there was a round of applause—and a round of envy: the enthusiasm for education among the Kenyan kids, and the community spirit involved in building the school, was long gone from the streets of Laredo. “Our community has a 50% dropout rate, and we have some absolutely wonderful new school buildings,” said Tricia Cortez, who works for an environmental non-profit. “I wonder why we don’t have that feeling of ownership that those people you worked with obviously have,” she said to Turk. “I wonder if when you give them everything, do they start to feel entitled, does it take away their drive?”
According to the Texas Education Agency, Webb County, home of Laredo, had an annual dropout rate of 1.2% in the 2009-2010 school year for grades 7 through 12. Some research has shown, however, that the official rates are vastly under-reported. TEA did report that out of dropouts across Texas in 2009-2010, 59% of them were Hispanic. — KS
Earlier, as expected, the LULAC board had unpacked its grievances—Governor Perry’s education cuts were gutting the schools, No Child Left Behind was a disaster for poor kids and so forth—but the laundry list seemed, well, perfunctory. (Although Perry’s ridiculous education cuts are far too real.) Now, though as they began to talk about the values of their community, the conversation grew intense, emotional and a funny thing happened: they acknowledged that they were doing okay financially on this side of the border, but they expressed a yearning for their families on the other side, with their closeness—the memories of food and music and grandma, and church, and strict moral codes, came flooding out.
Too much money was the problem, one man said. No, not that, Tricia Cortez said, something else. Too much…what? Certainly, too much rather than too little. “Information?” I suggested. But no, that wasn’t it, either.
I left them grappling with it. And I’m grappling with it. I had similar conversations on last year’s road trip. But it was particularly moving to hear it here, on the edge of the country, in a community where Anglos were an overwhelming minority and yet the Mexican-American majority are about as American as you can get. There is something missing in Laredo, and in America.
ps–I’ll have music playlists in the days to come, but not today because Turk, photographer Lynsey Addario and I spent the ride down from San Antonio blabbing…but I will say that the first song my ipod shuffler chose when we set out was Taj Mahal’s Further on Down the Road (I will accompany you).
And I’d like to thank the reader who pointed out that Jeep does not make a Pathfinder, Nissan does. I knew that. I just got confused: we had to change cars at Hertz because the Nissan didn’t have a GPS…but my sporty charcoal Liberty Briquette has one. Turk even got it to work. Hasta manana…
Correction: An earlier version of this post said that Tricia Cortez works for the Laredo school district.