In The Rio Grande Valley, Local Politics is Fun...But That's all...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

HARLINGEN, Texas | Chris Boswell had been mayor of this mid-valley city for 16 long and lonely years. Things hung low and residents fully believed Harlingen was as Republican as town as there was in the entire country. Everyone elsewhere in the Rio Grande Valley looked at it, pointed at it and, when the talk turned to politics, said the city was, indeed, a Republican haven.

Then came Norma Sepulveda, a neophyte politician with big dreams of sitting high at City Hall.

She filed to challenge Boswell...and she beat him.

Miss Sepulveda is a Democrat. We cannot confirm that Mr. Boswell, shown with Mayor Sepulveda in photo above, is a Republican, although he always acted like one. In itself, the job is supposed to be non-political - at least as far as a candidate having to declare party affiliation.

The campaign talk was of Harlingen seeking a new direction. It wasn't its perceived politics it wanted to change, but that's what Mayor Sepulveda offered, a new way of doing government things around here. So far, and she's only been in office 1 year, streets have been cleaned and paved, parks have been spruced-up, downtown businesses highlighted on the mayor's Facebook page (did Boswell ever go out to eat?). Mayor Sepulveda wants to see and be seen.

That's a major change for the mayor's office.

We wondered this: Do RGV cities and towns actually represent either the Republican or Democrat dogma? Subdued Harlingen was always thought of as a Republican stronghold, although perhaps only because of Boswell, who did nothing to change Valleyites' minds about his city.

Brownsville also just got a new mayor in John Cowen. He has been described to us as an Independent, but we wonder about that. Cowen strikes us as a born Republican. Unlike Mayor Sepulveda in Harlingen, Cowen has been Brownsville's Chris Boswell so far. He apparently does not want to be a very public mayor. We also have not heard of any major - or minor - infrastructure undertaking in Brownsville since he assumed office earlier this year.

To read bloggers and their reader commentary in town, Brownsville is a literal untended moonscape of potholes forever angering city residents. Every now and then, they are filled-in, but never fully-and-finally-patched. The lack of bus shelters has been another local bane, but Cowen has said nary a word about what he's doing about that. Something tells us Mayor Sepulveda would fix such a lack of public service from one week to the next. Same for new Mayor Javier Villalobos (shown in photo above, at right) in better-McAllen, where potholes are hard to find and where bus shaded shelters are seemingly everywhere.

Brownsville Mayor John Cowen (shown in photo below) has a great opportunity to do things differently, but will he? Voters recently granted him a $40,000 annual stipend. He's yet to earn it, in our opinion.

Some residents like to believe that Brownsville is a political Petri Dish, a city where entry into politics is very much like entering a Stripes convenience store or local tortilleria - no Big Deal. Others say Brownsville is not as political as it seems, in that the overwhelming majority never vote. Its population is said to be somewhere between 180,000 and 240,000. Politicians have won influential positions with less than 5,000 votes. Shameful is a word that comes to mind. Dumb is another. Anecdotes of weird politics abound in Brownsville, like the mayor who once deposited a $26,000 check not written to him into his own bank account (it was corrected). Or the mayoral candidate who, at a candidate forum, yelled at another candidate to pipe down and siddown!

Or the wife of a newly-elected city commissioner who also took the oath of office and placed her hand on a Bible along with her husband. Or the...(you get the drift). You go to Harlingen to calm down, to McAllen to dine and shop...and to Brownsville to buy two-tortilla tacos and drink a few tepid beers.

McAllen was somewhat surprised when Mayor Villalobos up and announced he was a Republican. The city is quite conservative, but he didn't have to do that. One of his first Republicanesque moves was to attack New York City Mayor Eric Adams for complaints the easterner voiced about the many migrants being sent to his city by pro-Trump Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

Mayor Villalobos laughed out loud in telling Adams he had handled many more migrants, which was a small fib, as migrants around here are "handled" by the U.S. Border Patrol and Texas state troopers. McAllen has a healthy mix of liberals and right-wingers, is what my friends tell me. There has been no discernible change in Life in McAllen since Republican Villalobos assumed office. As we've written before, it is a huge WTF! that Mayor Villalobos has adopted the Republican Party. He is originally from Crystal City, cradle of the pro-Mexican La Raza Unida Party of the late-1960s and 1970s.

Perhaps political affiliation in the Rio Grande Valley is not unlike an individual's preferred vehicle - the object of love being either the practical car for basic transportation or the expensive brand name just for show.

You think?...

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