The Characters of Laredo
After a few days in Laredo, I asked Sidney, "How many people in the shelter do you think suffer from mental illness?" He answered immediately: 80-90%. I originally thought my book project would be framed around our country's lack of properly treating and taking care of those with mental illnesses because I assumed Sidney was somewhere on the low end of the autism spectrum disorder scale, but he's never been diagnosed, and I'm no doctor. Sometime last year, he did undergo a county psychiatric examination, and they concluded the obvious: he doesn't suffer from schizophrenia or any other psychosis. Ironically, they gave him a month of free rent in the Hotel Bender, an extremely run-down building filled with what he called "all sorts of low people."
As we moved through the town, sat in plazas, and ate in the shelters, Sidney pointed out local homeless characters and their nicknames, claiming some have severe mental illnesses while others were borderline. There is "Birdman," who spends his entire day feeding the pigeons; the "Tree Guy," who waters the trees not by pouring water on the ground, but by throwing it up into the branches and leaves; and "Goat," who bullied Sidney, and whose mode of locomotion is rolling on the ground like Lotan Baba in India. Goat's antics went so far (I'll save them for the book), he eventually got sent off to the "nut house" in San Antonio.
Not to be confused with Goat is "Cabrito" (little goat), a sinewy Mexican day-laborer whom Sidney says is a "radical alcoholic." I met Cabrito swaying and cussing in front of the Salvation Army as we waited for lunch on a hot afternoon, blue jeans tucked into dark brown work boots, light-blue-and-white plaid shirt unbuttoned enough to expose his hard chest. "Sandro" (a person I'll talk about below) said Cabrito has stumbled drunk and been hit in front of the Salvation Army twice by cars and "shot over the moon, but they can't kill him. He's got nine lives." Cabrito's hands and arms are so marked by hard labor and his accidents, I had to take a picture.
Meet "Sandro": "I don't want to be racist, but I hate Europeans." This is one of the first things Sandro said to me. Born in 1957 and later nicknamed by his mom for the Argentine Elvis––Sandro de América––he told me he's from a Native tribe in a village called Cerralvo, located outside Monterrey. He's given himself his own nickname, "Triple A," because he's an atheist, anti-government, and anti-social ermitaño (hermit). "Europeans said they came here to escape taxes, but they brought the same thing here; they've been taking from us for 500 years." His anger toward 'Europeans' is exacerbated by the I.R.S. letter he received while I was in town. "I've been paying them for seventeen years, and it never goes away." He showed me the letter: the I.R.S. kept the entire $1,006.00 of his withheld earnings last year, and says he still owes $5659.15. "By next year, they will add more interest and penalties, and it will never go away," he said. "Welcome to the land of freedom and opportunity."
Sidney interjected, "It's organized crime." I laughed. They both said in unison, "It is."
Sandro is tall, slump-shouldered, has a broken left front tooth and hair that's more pepper-than-salt. He was probably handsome when younger, and he still carries that confidence. Although he's been homeless for five years, he currently has a Mexican girlfriend in Nuevo Laredo, for whom he has a laisse-faire attitude: "I tell her she never needs to explain anything to me. Why bother? Woman is the mother of lies. If she wants to mess around or leave Sandro, then go. It's a one-way ticket; you only get one chance with me."
The Hotel Bender.
Not to be confused with Goat is "Cabrito" (little goat), a sinewy Mexican day-laborer whom Sidney says is a "radical alcoholic." I met Cabrito swaying and cussing in front of the Salvation Army as we waited for lunch on a hot afternoon, blue jeans tucked into dark brown work boots, light-blue-and-white plaid shirt unbuttoned enough to expose his hard chest. "Sandro" (a person I'll talk about below) said Cabrito has stumbled drunk and been hit in front of the Salvation Army twice by cars and "shot over the moon, but they can't kill him. He's got nine lives." Cabrito's hands and arms are so marked by hard labor and his accidents, I had to take a picture.
Cabrito has nine lives but only two hands and elbows.
Meet "Sandro": "I don't want to be racist, but I hate Europeans." This is one of the first things Sandro said to me. Born in 1957 and later nicknamed by his mom for the Argentine Elvis––Sandro de América––he told me he's from a Native tribe in a village called Cerralvo, located outside Monterrey. He's given himself his own nickname, "Triple A," because he's an atheist, anti-government, and anti-social ermitaño (hermit). "Europeans said they came here to escape taxes, but they brought the same thing here; they've been taking from us for 500 years." His anger toward 'Europeans' is exacerbated by the I.R.S. letter he received while I was in town. "I've been paying them for seventeen years, and it never goes away." He showed me the letter: the I.R.S. kept the entire $1,006.00 of his withheld earnings last year, and says he still owes $5659.15. "By next year, they will add more interest and penalties, and it will never go away," he said. "Welcome to the land of freedom and opportunity."
Sidney interjected, "It's organized crime." I laughed. They both said in unison, "It is."
Sandro is tall, slump-shouldered, has a broken left front tooth and hair that's more pepper-than-salt. He was probably handsome when younger, and he still carries that confidence. Although he's been homeless for five years, he currently has a Mexican girlfriend in Nuevo Laredo, for whom he has a laisse-faire attitude: "I tell her she never needs to explain anything to me. Why bother? Woman is the mother of lies. If she wants to mess around or leave Sandro, then go. It's a one-way ticket; you only get one chance with me."
Sandro and Sidney contemplate love and pizza at the Salvation Army shelter.
This warehouse brags about the source cities of its ropa usada:
New York, Pensylvania [sic], Virginia, and Washington [D.C.].
Inside another warehouse
(note the massive bundles, which is how they're shipped by train, in back).
Mount Ropa Usada.
I don't know if Sandro's girlfriend was ever a maquiladora worker, those who worked in the American factories that flocked to Nuevo Laredo after the NAFTA agreement in 1994, but since many of those factories fled in the past 15 years––following the capitalistic thirst for ever cheaper labor in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, and China––she participates in the same trade market to which several unemployed maquiladoras now congregate: ropa usada (used clothes). These used clothes, shipped from as far away as New York and Virginia, fill massive warehouses concentrated near the rail yards in east Laredo. Sandro's girlfriend crosses over the border a couple times a week to sift through the mountains of used clothes, which sell by the pound. Sandro says she might buy three nice shirts for $.40 a pound, take them to Nuevo Laredo, wash them, and sell them for a total of $3.20. "That's two dollars and sixty cents profit on ever forty cents invested," he told me. Forget Cheaper by the Dozen; in Laredo, clothing is cheaper by the pound.
New York, Pensylvania [sic], Virginia, and Washington [D.C.].
A forklift removes ropa usada from this truckload in the back of
a warehouse called La Amistad (Friendship).
(note the massive bundles, which is how they're shipped by train, in back).
People sifting through Mount Ropa Usada.
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