Don't Look Now, But San Benito's On The Hoof...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

SAN BENITO, Texas | It's still seen as an annoying, unwanted stepchild to residents in neighboring Brownsville. On a map, it's a town this side of Harlingen on the highway, US 281 South. Big Hair country crooner Freddy Fender was born and raised here. No one else. Well, maybe one or two others who made it.

That's what the rest of the Rio Grande Valley thinks of this tiny, dusty, sleepy community of some 25,000 residents. No one else in San Benito is worthy of a conversation. Lately, the criticism in Brownsville is that San Benito has taken to favoring Anglo names for their newborns. A name such as Rockford Galvan is not rare in town, although a Russian name or two also have surfaced.

A Vitaly Ramirez occasionally joins Rockford Galvan in commenting on Brownsville blogs, usually in response to some negative story about San Benito.

Who knows when that began, although it's not as if it's an issue to criticize or even discuss.

A dude to talk about is San Benito Mayor Ricardo Garcia, or Rick Garcia as he prefers to go by. Garcia won reelection recently while receiving a rare and whopping 62% of the vote. No one in Brownsville's recent history can say that, can they?

Garcia, shown in photo at left wearing a baseball cap (with Mayor Pro-Tem Pedro Galvan at his side), visited with his constituents the other day at a gathering hosted by the San Benito Chamber of Commerce at...the city's new Starbucks, which is near the city's new Olive Garden restaurant. This was noted by a spokesperson for the chamber: [ Thank you so much to Starbucks for hosting us and to our businesses and citizens of San Benito for a wonderful turnout to Coffee with Mayor Rick Guerra and Pedro Galvan, we loved having so much feedback on how San Benito is growing in great directions. ]

San Benito growing in great directions is not a sentence you'll hear in most all of the Rio Grande Valley's other cities and towns. They see San Bene, as it is best-known in Brownsville and nearby Harlingen, as still being some, under-achieving hick town chock-full of abandoned buildings filling its depressing downtown, buildings long-vacant and likely best suited for demolition.

Indeed, its reputation is one yet to be defined, actually.

What is San Benito these days? Is it really growing? Is a new coffee shop and Italian-food restaurant enough to say things are looking good and better? In San Benito, it is enough. More than enough. But it should be said asked, other than the aforementioned musician Freddy Fender, what else does San Benito count as major success stories. Fender (real name was Baldemar Huerta) was not Kenny Rogers or Kris Kristofferson (a son of Brownsville) even in his heyday with the Austin-based Texas Tornados.

Back in the early-1960s, San Benito High had a football superstar in running back Jim Helms, a tough kid who made the all-state squad and later played for fabled Coach Darrell Royal's Texas Longhorns. He's also in the RGV Sports Hall of Fame.

It is his and Freddy Fender's names that always pop into a conversation about San Benito residents who did well.

Of late, however, it has been cheap politics taking the lead here.

Talk in town goes to bad people at City Hall, even worse people on the schoolboard and law enforcement shenanigans that sort of blow the idea things are looking "up" in San Bene. The little town may not like the bad press it gets in bigger Brownsville and from time to time in the Valley Morning Star newspaper based in Harlingen, but those, too, are growing pains.

Rick Garcia, the mustachioed mayor, may change that impression. He is, after all, the most popular dude in town.

We don't know if Mayor Garcia ever ran the football down another team's throat, like Jim Helms, or sang about wasted days and wasted nights in a noisy, beer-fueled honky tonk, like Freddy Fender, but perhaps every one of his fawning constituents thinks he can...

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