Los Dos Laredos (The Two Laredos)
The current President of the United States said this weekend that "we may have to close up our country" because "we can't allow people to pour into our country the way they're doing. You just take a look at that mess that's on television right now; it is a total catastrophe." Unless you're part of the President's unshakeable base and celebrated Loyalty Day last week instead of May Day, you know he's disconnected from reality, operates from "alternative facts," and prefers television, especially Fox News, to reading.
So he doesn't seem to understand that, according to the Pew Research Center, from 2009-2014, more Mexicans left the U.S. than entered; recessions and anti-immigration legislation like Arizona's 2010 House Bill 1070 and Alabama's 2011 House Bill 56 tend to do that. His racist and xenophobic campaign rhetoric and actual election win also served as a deterrent for immigrants and even tourists to come to the U.S (tourism losses are a reported $4.6 billion). The President probably also doesn't want to know that Obama sent 219,905 Mexican nationals back across the border in 2016, while the current President sent 151,647 last year, a 26% decrease. He obviously doesn't care to hear that he's wrong when he says "we really haven't [deployed troops to the border] before," since George W. did under Operation Jump Start (price tag $1.2 billion) and Obama did under Operation Phalanx ($110 million in 2010 alone). And most U.S. citizens don't know that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 "forbids using the military for domestic law enforcement outside military bases, leaving troops focused on conducting surveillance from ground stations and helicopters, installing fences and vehicle barriers and training." See, your eyes are already rolling back in your head because you probably have other things to worry about such as your student loan debt or Medi-Cal application rejection.
The deeper you look into it, the more you understand the current President's focus on the border and immigrants taking jobs is merely rhetoric and a huge waste of money meant to play to Americans' worst xenophobic fears. Mission accomplished. I think for many people in this country, like the President, our border with Mexico remains an abstraction. I've been to multiple border towns and crossed over in three of them––San Diego/Tijuana, Brownsville/Matamoros, and Laredo/Nuevo Laredo. I think the best way to understand the border and border towns is by examining America's favorite pastime, baseball/beisbol.
Laredo's minor league baseball team is called the Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos (The Owls of the Two Laredos), a Mexican League team that plays half their home games in Laredo and half in Nuevo Laredo. You might be, like, "Wait! What?" but you'd never bat an eye at a Canadian team playing MLB (go Toronto!; sorry Montreal) or the six Canadian teams in the "National" Hockey League (or that only 25% of NHL players are U.S.-born––the other 75% are taking high-paying American jobs we actually want. Ha ha. People also don't seem to care that 30% of MLB players are from outside the U.S.). Anyway, the fact that the Tecolotes play on both sides of the border or that their website is bilingual or that all the announcements at the Laredo games are in Spanish makes sense. In the two Laredos, people speak Spanish more often than English, though people easily switch between the two, and a border can't divide culture. Laredo is culturally as much Mexican as it is American, and, like all our border towns, thousands of people legally cross every day. Some U.S. citizens live in Mexico and cross over for work, and many Mexicans have something called a Border Crossing Card (BBC), which is a tourist visa that costs $160. In order to obtain a BCC, Mexican citizens must "demonstrate that they have ties to Mexico that would compel them to return after a temporary stay in the United States."
It's a well-known "secret" that people use these BBCs to cross and perform low-wage labor such as cleaning houses and working in warehouses in Laredo. It's the reality of border life, and to "close the country" would destroy all the border-town economies. During the three times I crossed the border this trip, I tried to imagine the U.S. President or some other xenophobic blowhard like Rush Limbaugh watching the fluid nature of the border's 3.5 million yearly crossings on this one footbridge alone. Their heads would explode because they don't know anything about it. To them, the border is a physical abstraction and political distraction, and building a multi-billion dollar wall would only be a monument to futility and stupidity.
Seeking distractions for Sidney, I took him to the Lake Casa Blanca International State Park for a picnic one day and to a Tecolotes game another. Sidney mentioned his dad ushered him to some Astros games when he was a kid, so I thought he would love minor league baseball as much as I do. He spent his time during the game pointing out which women had Coach bags, how much they're worth, and mentioning that he scored one for his wife at the store where he bought the bául. He said, "The enthusiasm people have for sports, I have for antiques and paintings and books. When I was young, the kids used to call me 'gay boy.'" Sidney told me that the majority of students at his Houston schools were Mexican-American, and they bullied him––the sensitive gringo––out of school twice.
As I said above, all the game announcements were in Spanish, and when a pop-fly sailed into the sky, people around me would yell, "Pesca! Pescala!" which can mean "Catch! Catch it!" but more creatively "Fish it!" I loved it. Any time there was a hit or good play, a handful of men in the crowd held up and cranked loud wooden noise makers, and the crowd yelled "Tecos! Tecos!"
Los Tecos and the noise-makers.
Sidney hates loud noise, and from his time spent in Jilotepec, Mexico, where stores blast music out front, promotional and/or political cars drive by blaring announcements from loud speakers, and gas delivery guys and sanitation workers holler or bang metal pipes to announce their presence, he has come to develop his theory that in Mexican culture people suffer from horror vacui, which is a Latin term in the art world meaning "fear of the empty." When he makes overreaching generalizations, I usually try to point to examples of the same thing in 'American culture,' whatever that means to you. While some of Sidney's observations are problematic, as are my own, we certainly aren't anywhere near Laredo's most despised gringa, Sara.
I don't think it's unfair to say Mexican culture is currently a little less sensitive to the objectification of women (watch a Spanish-language variety show or a weather report) or homophobia: case in point, the entertainment during the Tecolotes game. They have their main mascot, an adorable owl dressed up in a baseball hat and jersey. And they have a beautiful Latina woman with long-dark hair, who's made to be extra sexy with her Navy T-shirt knotted to expose her midriff and highlight her large breasts, and her tight navy running pants to hug her large nalgas. This is nothing you wouldn't see at any other U.S. sporting event.
But then there is "Monkey." This character is actually a guy wearing a gorilla suit, and he indicates he is perhaps a homosexual primate the way people would if they were in the third grade and didn't understand how offensive their behavior is: he bends his wrists, swishes his hips, and dances around on his tip-toes. He wore a sleeveless basketball jersey and shorts, but sometimes pulled the shorts down as if exposing himself. He ran up to the opposing catcher between innings, grabbed his head, and smashed his face into the catcher's mask as if kissing him. He walked a few feet away, and when the catcher returned to his crouch, "Monkey" held his hands out in front of him and simulated a thrusting sex act. He crazily shook his head at and frightened children holding onto the backstop netting, and he was basically going ape-shit wild the whole time.
Then came the between-innings footrace. Three men selected from the crowd needed to put an orange balloon between their knees and try to scurry down the first base line. Even though they already had the balloons in place, "Monkey" came over to assist each one, using the opportunity to rub his hands all over their crotches and butts, spanking them, and even fingering their culos. "Monkey" grabbed one of the contestants by the back of the head and forced his face down toward "Monkey's" crotch. Once the men began to hobble down the line, "Monkey" violently tackled them, one at a time, hooking one guy around the neck and driving his face into the grass. I looked at Sidney and said, "There's no way you could get away with this in the U.S." And then I realized that's exactly where we were.
So he doesn't seem to understand that, according to the Pew Research Center, from 2009-2014, more Mexicans left the U.S. than entered; recessions and anti-immigration legislation like Arizona's 2010 House Bill 1070 and Alabama's 2011 House Bill 56 tend to do that. His racist and xenophobic campaign rhetoric and actual election win also served as a deterrent for immigrants and even tourists to come to the U.S (tourism losses are a reported $4.6 billion). The President probably also doesn't want to know that Obama sent 219,905 Mexican nationals back across the border in 2016, while the current President sent 151,647 last year, a 26% decrease. He obviously doesn't care to hear that he's wrong when he says "we really haven't [deployed troops to the border] before," since George W. did under Operation Jump Start (price tag $1.2 billion) and Obama did under Operation Phalanx ($110 million in 2010 alone). And most U.S. citizens don't know that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 "forbids using the military for domestic law enforcement outside military bases, leaving troops focused on conducting surveillance from ground stations and helicopters, installing fences and vehicle barriers and training." See, your eyes are already rolling back in your head because you probably have other things to worry about such as your student loan debt or Medi-Cal application rejection.
The deeper you look into it, the more you understand the current President's focus on the border and immigrants taking jobs is merely rhetoric and a huge waste of money meant to play to Americans' worst xenophobic fears. Mission accomplished. I think for many people in this country, like the President, our border with Mexico remains an abstraction. I've been to multiple border towns and crossed over in three of them––San Diego/Tijuana, Brownsville/Matamoros, and Laredo/Nuevo Laredo. I think the best way to understand the border and border towns is by examining America's favorite pastime, baseball/beisbol.
Laredo's minor league baseball team is called the Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos (The Owls of the Two Laredos), a Mexican League team that plays half their home games in Laredo and half in Nuevo Laredo. You might be, like, "Wait! What?" but you'd never bat an eye at a Canadian team playing MLB (go Toronto!; sorry Montreal) or the six Canadian teams in the "National" Hockey League (or that only 25% of NHL players are U.S.-born––the other 75% are taking high-paying American jobs we actually want. Ha ha. People also don't seem to care that 30% of MLB players are from outside the U.S.). Anyway, the fact that the Tecolotes play on both sides of the border or that their website is bilingual or that all the announcements at the Laredo games are in Spanish makes sense. In the two Laredos, people speak Spanish more often than English, though people easily switch between the two, and a border can't divide culture. Laredo is culturally as much Mexican as it is American, and, like all our border towns, thousands of people legally cross every day. Some U.S. citizens live in Mexico and cross over for work, and many Mexicans have something called a Border Crossing Card (BBC), which is a tourist visa that costs $160. In order to obtain a BCC, Mexican citizens must "demonstrate that they have ties to Mexico that would compel them to return after a temporary stay in the United States."
Standing in the long line to cross the border into Laredo.
It's a well-known "secret" that people use these BBCs to cross and perform low-wage labor such as cleaning houses and working in warehouses in Laredo. It's the reality of border life, and to "close the country" would destroy all the border-town economies. During the three times I crossed the border this trip, I tried to imagine the U.S. President or some other xenophobic blowhard like Rush Limbaugh watching the fluid nature of the border's 3.5 million yearly crossings on this one footbridge alone. Their heads would explode because they don't know anything about it. To them, the border is a physical abstraction and political distraction, and building a multi-billion dollar wall would only be a monument to futility and stupidity.
Seeking distractions for Sidney, I took him to the Lake Casa Blanca International State Park for a picnic one day and to a Tecolotes game another. Sidney mentioned his dad ushered him to some Astros games when he was a kid, so I thought he would love minor league baseball as much as I do. He spent his time during the game pointing out which women had Coach bags, how much they're worth, and mentioning that he scored one for his wife at the store where he bought the bául. He said, "The enthusiasm people have for sports, I have for antiques and paintings and books. When I was young, the kids used to call me 'gay boy.'" Sidney told me that the majority of students at his Houston schools were Mexican-American, and they bullied him––the sensitive gringo––out of school twice.
Sidney at Uni-Trade Stadium before the game.
I don't think it's unfair to say Mexican culture is currently a little less sensitive to the objectification of women (watch a Spanish-language variety show or a weather report) or homophobia: case in point, the entertainment during the Tecolotes game. They have their main mascot, an adorable owl dressed up in a baseball hat and jersey. And they have a beautiful Latina woman with long-dark hair, who's made to be extra sexy with her Navy T-shirt knotted to expose her midriff and highlight her large breasts, and her tight navy running pants to hug her large nalgas. This is nothing you wouldn't see at any other U.S. sporting event.
But then there is "Monkey." This character is actually a guy wearing a gorilla suit, and he indicates he is perhaps a homosexual primate the way people would if they were in the third grade and didn't understand how offensive their behavior is: he bends his wrists, swishes his hips, and dances around on his tip-toes. He wore a sleeveless basketball jersey and shorts, but sometimes pulled the shorts down as if exposing himself. He ran up to the opposing catcher between innings, grabbed his head, and smashed his face into the catcher's mask as if kissing him. He walked a few feet away, and when the catcher returned to his crouch, "Monkey" held his hands out in front of him and simulated a thrusting sex act. He crazily shook his head at and frightened children holding onto the backstop netting, and he was basically going ape-shit wild the whole time.
Then came the between-innings footrace. Three men selected from the crowd needed to put an orange balloon between their knees and try to scurry down the first base line. Even though they already had the balloons in place, "Monkey" came over to assist each one, using the opportunity to rub his hands all over their crotches and butts, spanking them, and even fingering their culos. "Monkey" grabbed one of the contestants by the back of the head and forced his face down toward "Monkey's" crotch. Once the men began to hobble down the line, "Monkey" violently tackled them, one at a time, hooking one guy around the neck and driving his face into the grass. I looked at Sidney and said, "There's no way you could get away with this in the U.S." And then I realized that's exactly where we were.
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