Travel Story:..."Brownsville Is Not New Orleans"...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

BROWNSVILLE, Texas | Once there was a way, as the song says, to get back homeward. We hate to rip off such a well-known song lyric, but, well, it applies to this story. Homeward, in this case, being a place from yesteryear. Or someone's recollections of a better time here along the passive Rio Grande.

We say passive because that's what this history-filled waterway is today, although it wasn't always as resigned to a lamblike sort of quiet.

To hear some local people, Brownsville used to be the First New Orleans, a scrappy, noisy, excitable, wild-and-hairy-adventures-by-the-day kind of place where men were men and women were for men.

Today's Brownsville is nothing like that.

It is a struggling hometown to some 200,000, or so, luckless, under-achievers who really have done little to bridge this city into the 1980s. Any semblance to the Real New Orleans is nowhere to be found. A few cheap Mexican-themed cantinas does nothing for the city's modern image except tie-in to neighboring Mexico and not the Cajun Country a bit to the north and east of here.

You can walk into a local cantina and smell Mexico, not, say, etouffee or crawfish pie. 

Here, it's the grating, wailing, often-repetitive, push-button accordion sounds of Ramon Ayala on falling 14th Street and not those of Doug Kershaw whipping out Diggy Diggy Lo on Mardi Gras in the lovely French Quarter. Or even some weekend troubadours offering a lame version of All Along The Watchtower and not Fogerty throwing out Jambalaya.

No, don't come here looking for the past.

Proud locals will tell you this is a most historic town, but we say they should go to the Texas Hill Country for that. A line of old, abandoned buildings vacated decades ago is not exactly cherished history. Old theaters where once the movies of Gary Cooper and Elvis regaled the dominant Mexican population are hardly worth keeping if they're not going to show Top Gun or Oppenheimer.

Why not raze the sonsabitches and build a new commercial attraction?

History? As hometown celebrity Kris Kristofferson might say about here, "History's just another word for nothing left to lose."

Brownsville is not a very clean community. Even its residents bemoan the state of their streets and the trash in downtown alleys and neighborhoods such as Southmost and Las Prietas. Would New Orleans icon Fats Domino play in Brownsville? Well, maybe if he hadn't died in 2017, although we believe he largely stuck around NOLA, as New Orleans is best-known, in his later years.

No, lads, you have to pinch your nose when out and about in Brownsville - the Harlem of The Valley.

Is anyone at City Hall doing anything to move things around, to somehow improve life in town? You drive in and you see a load of people scurrying about, always bound for a nearby taqueria or discount store. You get out of your vehicle downtown and it's a sight for newcomer Honduran eyes, at best.

There should be a plan for change, major change.

People working city government get paid extremely well, perhaps much better than they should be. But all the citizenry is getting is daily lip service and the status quo - the status quo being maintaining what Donald J. Trump would quickly call "a shithole".

And it's not as if anyone would come here and then go back home to write a "slam job," but there really is no major attraction here. An annual celebration of the Mexican Charro is it, Baby. And even that gets a few more boos every year. It's become boring because it's the same predictable roll-out that once worked-up emotions but now hardly excites anyone.

Horses? You've seen one horse and you've seen them all. Charro garb? Looks good in thin women, never on portly, mustachioed Mexican males.  

Innovation is what that festival needs, which fits in with what we'd say also applies to the city as a whole. Everyone knows few people from Harlingen and McAllen on the western end of the Rio Grande Valley ever look to hardscrabble Brownsville for shopping, dining or fun. They'd rather stay home, Brownsville's history as uninteresting as fog.

The old city remains an unsolved riddle.

And that's the tragedy of the Town That Time Forgot...

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