BROWNSVILLE:...Where Poverty Is Undefeated...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

BROWNSVILLE, Texas | This falling birdhouse home to some 180,000 residents continues to be the poorest along the Texas-Mexico border. Poverty reigns supreme here, forever over-arching personal drive and ambition. There is some of the former and some say not enough of the latter.

But why is that?

Why is Brownsville so depressed. Its median annual income is $20,326, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 numbers. Yeah, you'd argue that twenty-grand goes a long, long way in a city with such close ties to Mexico. Downtown Matamoros is no more than a well-struck 4-iron south from downtown, across the Mighty Rio Grande.

The symbiotic relationship is key to the local economy. Many local residents do their shopping in Mexico, get haircuts over there, get their vehicles repaired, buy shoes and clothing for their schoolkids and dine at what is just about half-price when compared to Brownsville restaurant prices.

So, maybe an income of $20, 326 isn't all that bad.

But the federal government says too many Brownsvillians live below the poverty line. And like we said, twenty-grand isn't bad for a single person. But there are many families here, and, for a family of 4, the poverty line is $27,750, according to the Feds. A family of 6? You'd need to earn $37,190 annually.

Figures for other on-the-border towns aren't that much better than Brownsville's, although most are a little better.

Laredo comes in with a median income of $23,100

El Paso is at $24,071.

For Texas as a whole, the median income is $31,462.

This from a book I recently finished reading: [ The opening pages of The Other America set out the problem: There was a "familiar America" of postwar prosperity, of televisions and radios and automobiles and suburban homes, and then there was a shadowland - "another America" - of between 40 and 50 million people who lived in poverty. The poor might not be literally starving, as they were in other countries, but they were "maimed in body and spirit," their lives twisted and deformed by material lack, and their existence "invisible" to the broader society. ]

It would be too-easy to say the residents of Brownsville are a defeated lot. A lot of those long faces and slumping shoulders you see out there these days are really the result of summer's oppressive heat, is what we would guess.

But there is some accuracy to that as an observation of Brownsville's residents.

And City Hall does not seem to have the answers. More often than not, it has the problems. Its new mayor, John Cowen, has not exactly come out of the bullpen as some Al Hrabosky, the "Mad Hungarian" who terrorized Major League Baseball hitters in the 1970s and early-1980s.

Cowen has been rather quiet, more introverted than any of the other Rio Grande Valley mayors, some new to the job like him, but much more active.

The current chaos and disarray over at two of the city's economic entities, Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation (BCIC) and Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation (GBIC), is a prime example of the failures that dog Brownsville. Both city-appointed entities reportedly were designed to bring new business to town, from elsewhere or from within if qualified.

It never happened.

Big money went down the rathole and Brownsville got no jobs or no businesses. Some monies did go to existing businesses, but none that, say, brought better-paying jobs. Both BCIC and GBIC are still in existence. The question is: Why?

Any other city with better leadership would have cut its losses by abolishing both boards, re-framing the mission and starting over from scratch, with a fail-safe administration mission and better-educated boardmembers. As things stand, Brownsville is doing that, in effect insisting on future failures.

Perhaps the poverty thing is so ingrained here that no one gives it much thought. The city at the mouth of the Rio Grande is home to a population that counts 94.7% Hispanics (Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, according to the Census Bureau), and the thinking there likely being that this bloc of people is used to being poor.

Yeah, poor Brownsville...

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