Writing Archive

Welcome to Mexas!

"Texas Colonias County Map," HUD Colonias Quick Facts

"This region, frequently disputed territory in the past, has emerged as neither fully American nor fully Mexican" (Richardson xii). In Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados: Class and Culture on the South Texas Border (UT-Press, 1999), UT-Pan American professor Chad Richardson compiles interviews and surveys from his Borderlife Research Project, begun in 1982. More than any other work I've read, this study captures the unique cultural wash of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, my homeland.

Identifying the true border checkpoints in the Mexican and Texas interior, Richardson proves what I felt intuitively about the Valley and border Mexico: That this region taken together exists as a nether space of neither Mexico nor the U.S., standing rather as a zone of fluid transition and hybrid identity. The book's title recognizes some of the many borderland characters that inhabited my childhood, from residents of the unincorporated and ignored colonias to the children who sell gum to survive on the streets of Matamoros and Reynosa. "Here, highly diverse groups mix, mesh, and mash into a kaleidoscope of cultural and social combinations" (3).

And my memory is nothing if not mixed, meshed, and mashed. I remember the chicle vendors calling me "gringo" as I stumbled in broken Spanish across the border to hit Mexican discos as a teen. I remember the roaming dogs and trash heaps in my Tío Jorge's colonia, where he built a house over the years and slowly helped forge a community on the fringes of enfranchisement. "[T]he fulfillment of the American dream of homeownership" came with a price: problems with drinkable water, pesticide drift from nearby fields, floods, vulnerability to crime, and the neglect of city services that we all take for granted. Just one house could include "a mixture of citizens, legal residents, quasi-legal 'guests,' and illegal residents" (51).

And I can't ever forget the morning my Grandma made her special "atole" (really, instant Quaker Oats) for my sister and me while telling us about an article she read in ¡Alarma!. "The parents fed their kids rat poison in their oatmeal to collect on insurance money, and los pobres just fell asleep on their desks at school that morning..." I thought for sure I'd die that day because Grandma poisoned us!

(According to Wikipedia, "¡Alarma! (Spanish for Alarm!) is a Mexican magazine that specializes in graphic pictures of deformed babies, obese people, traffic accidents, murder victims, etc. as well as pictures of scantily clad women." They didn't mention the stories about Virgen sightings, Thalía's underpants, riots, gay-love-triangle-killing-sprees, babies born without brains along the Río Bravo, and narco-Satánico massacres. In the days when Grandpa crossed regularly, he'd bring back copies of ¡Alarma! and lurid novelas that would sit around for me to pick up and peruse eyes all-a-goggle. Guess where I got my cruel sense of humor and taste for trashy movies? Reading ¡Alarma! on the hood of a car at the Mexican drive-inn movies before the feature while eating tacos from the concession stand...)

Richardson's book talks about the Blaxicans and white cholos — African Americans and Anglos who Mexicanized, moreso than many Mexican Americans ... myself included! — and the Central American refugees trapped at Casa Romero by 1980s immigration policies. I remember Reagan saying the Sandinistas were a two-hour drive from my house, and I scratched my head while looking at a map.

"To make matters worse, Mexicans who visit the area call local Hispanics pochos, an unflattering reference to their inability to speak standard Spanish" (121). And, in turn, we now call them fresas. For others still, we're all the same, reminding me of a joke — "Did you hear about the Latin Lover?...he's just a fucking Mexican."

Tex-Mex? Some of my friends went beyond that, beyond Spanglish even, into the realm of word poetry, becoming bricoleurs of the broken tongue. "Like many waves of immigrants before them, they and their children keep some of Mexico, take some Anglo culture, reject a lot more, and come up with some of their own. Neither Mexican nor Anglo, they have carved out a cultural niche that is unique in United States society — Mexican American, while being neither Mexican nor fully American" (182).

Now, when midwestern Mex-enthusiasts and super-subaltern activistas laugh at my longing for a real flour tortilla, I wish them a mouthful of barbacoa and Big Red — cow brains and carbonated, blood-red sugar-water — mixed with the savor of South Texas sweat, the trademarks of my authentically inauthentic Valley culture, something they'll never have and never understand but can only affect with a visit to Pilsen in threadbare thrift-store prole gear. I'll let them be the real Mexicans, because I learned long ago not to worry about such borders.

Like when we helped a primo cross, wearing the cloak of a shit-kicker Stetson and affected drawl, under the password primeval of "Yessir, 'merican citizen, yessir!"

As one of Richardson's interviewers put it, "'Being Mexican American ... is like being pulled in a tug-of-war" (241). And sometimes, I'm pulled back to the Valley in heart and mind, to the home I'll never recover and the soul of it that I'll carry forever.