Progress?
PROGRESO, TEXAS, AND PROGRESO, TAMAULIPAS
WE WERE ALMOST AT PROGRESO WHEN WE CALLED BILL AGAIN. He was waiting in the parking lot off to the right of the bridge, a protected parking area made for day visitors. We pulled in a few minutes after the call and found him standing beside his car, phone in hand, and ready to cross the bridge on foot. He was easy to spot—he was the only person in sight besides the parking attendant. He approached our car and was ready to walk across the bridge the second we got out. I apologized again and told him what we had just been through.
He understood and said as we walked briskly toward the gate, “We’ll have no problem going into Mexico. No one will ever check your passports going in, so hopefully we’ll be on time. I really think you’ll find this guy interesting and I didn’t want to lose our minutes with him.” We were some of the few on foot, very different from what he had experienced in the past, he said.
“This used to be a busy spot for Winter Texans to come to buy their prescriptions and eyeglasses. But it’s dead now.” As we walked across the empty river bridge, I looked down on the swollen waters and asked him why the river is called Bravo in Mexico and Grande in the United States. He replied with the adage, “Grande para ellos, bravo para nosotros; bravo para nadar!”—Big for [the U.S], but menacing for [the Mexicans]; menacing to swim!
Of course none of us wanted to keep Progreso’s most prominent businessman waiting, but luckily we got to the restaurant where we were to meet a half hour before him. I was relieved my forays had not required further apologies. We had just gotten our drinks when a tall, attractive, and neatly dressed man of about forty walked into the restaurant, greeted us with a big smile, and insisted on buying us lunch. He spoke to us in Spanish: “My name is Alfonso Treviño Salinas, welcome to Progreso!”
Then he talked about the town, the construction company he owned on the Mexican side, and his work with the Chamber of Commerce. While we waited for our food, we asked Señor Treviño about the challenges of conducting business on the border. His points were lecture-ready.
“Tourism and economic interchange have plunged in recent years,” he said. He cited four main reasons why: first, the new restrictions requiring passports for everyone crossing from Mexico into the United States, including U.S. citizens; second, the security issues that make Americans skittish about going to Mexico; third, the outbreak of swine flu—a disease that had been traced to a large American-owned hog facility in Mexico in 2009; and fourth, the international economic crisis, which had caused everyone to lessen their spending. I was writing it all down in my version of shorthand—Spanglish shorthand.
Papel picado flags and the military outpost south of the border crossing at Progreso.
“Everything is very fragile economically,” he said. “Though this small town is as tranquil as it ever was, business has declined drastically. Today all the services, eyeglasses, dentistry, a pharmacy, restaurants, and gift shops within four blocks of the borderline are open but empty. They’re waiting for customers, but fear has driven the tourists away.”
He acknowledged that drug trafficking in some areas had skyrocketed because of corruption and lack of law enforcement, but he didn’t place all the responsibility on Mexico. “Of course we have to fight all of this,” he said. “But we have to do it together. It affects both sides.” He shifted to the root causes of border corruption: first there is poverty, caused not by culture, but by international politics and economics, he said. Macroeconomic strategies cause people at the microeconomic level to have to be creative to find jobs. All this leads to migration. And when people are neglected, they can turn to crime, which is encouraged by demand for illicit drugs. But the problem is bi-national, he said. “The U.S. sells Mexicans arms and the U.S. consumes the drugs. We’re neighbors, and we have to work together.”
I brought up the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it looked to me as if the initiative had boosted trade for some but had displaced many workers on the Mexican side even as it caused Mexican farm commodity prices to plummet. I was pretty convinced, having heard that tale many times from farmworkers, but I wanted to hear a Mexican businessman’s opinion. Mr. Treviño’s reply was surprisingly succinct: NAFTA had helped the largest U.S.-based companies, but as far as he could tell, it had done nothing at all for his small town or any of the rural areas nearby.
Impressed with his candor, I asked about SB 1070, the law that had just passed the state legislature in Arizona that summer. News reports had said many Latinos were fleeing the state, damaging Arizona’s reputation, at least among immigration reformers, and its economy as well. Still I didn’t know how it would be viewed from the Mexico side. The answer came fast. “The law is a violation of civil and human rights,” Mr. Treviño said. “We have a moral obligation to protest that law. It brings down the dignity of all human beings. Human rights must be a significant part of the free interchange of economic goods. Anything less would be immoral. We have to start with equality.” I’m sure he didn’t speak for every capitalist in Mexico, but his own business community had elected him as their spokesperson. I was struck by how different he sounded from the U.S. Chamber’s neo-liberal perspective that holds the position that any barrier to trade has to come down even as they encourage the walls to prohibit human beings to go up.
Bill had interviewed Mr. Treviño for his online periodical, self-proclaimed as the “largest Internet-based paper on the South Texas border,” a couple of times before, and they also had conversed on other occasions, becoming friends. They launched into several topics they had discussed before while Hope and I listened. One topic I asked both to clarify was the “Tejanos de Invierno”—Winter Texans. They said they are people who move to Texas seasonally for the climate, but also to take advantage of the lower Mexican prices for everything from food to pharmaceuticals. That interchange had been the economic lifeblood of Progreso, Treviño said.
After lunch, as we stood on the sidewalk shaking hands with Mr. Treviño and thanking him one last time, Bill pointed with his chin to an outdoor table at the neighboring restaurant directly behind me. “There are some Winter Texans now, why don’t you ask them what they think?” I turned to see a foursome of white retirees—apparently two married couples—having lunch.
Their outdoor table was covered with the makings of fajitas. They were drinking margaritas and sharing a laugh when I approached with Bill and Hope walking behind me. They welcomed us and asked us what we were doing in town, and so I told them a little about our border trip. That got them started. They said they had been going to Progreso for years, that they loved the food and shopping there. They bought all their pharmaceuticals and their eyeglasses there, and even had their dental care done in town. The four, originally from Kansas, couldn’t have been more quintessentially upper-middle-age, middle-class, white American in dress, mannerisms, and talk—the opposite of the bohemian types you see in some remote places. But they acknowledged they were some of the few heading to the border then, which made them seem like adventurous pioneers. “How could you get others to follow suit?” I asked. “Be good examples,” they replied. “All we can do is keep on coming back here.”
I looked southward as we prepared to go. Red, green, and yellow decorations, signs for tourists and patients in English, and professional dentists’ and doctors’ shingles were everywhere. One could still walk across the bridge without showing a passport, eat a good meal, get prescriptions filled without a wait, get one’s eyes examined, and buy new frames all before the sun went down. There were no lines at all. The businesses were all ready for the hordes. But the four Midwesterners eating at the sidewalk café were it.
Looking back to the north, beneath the festive streamers perhaps left over from the “Day of the Tourist” the town had held back in March, I saw helmeted and flak-jacketed Mexican soldiers dressed in camouflage standing beside an armored truck with its large barrel aimed northward. The gunner’s head peered over the hatch on top. I hadn’t really thought about the military presence on the way in, but from the southern side they looked ready for an attack. I knew they were there to guarantee everything remained safe, but all I felt when I saw the tough young men in green was how far we were from a solution to our border problems.
How twisted it had all become, except when it wasn’t. In a narrow focus, margarita glasses still sweated on the sidewalk café tables and the tortilla chips and salsa still were limitless for the few who were brave enough to go. The service was still attentive and the food cheap. The piñatas and flags still swayed in the wind at the stores. You could still buy all the legal drugs and best dental care and eyeglasses that Mexico has to offer, and everyone there needs you to. In a wider focus, tourists and armored vehicles and machine guns don’t seem to mix so well.
We started walking northward, waving good-bye again to the four Kansans still enjoying their meal, and headed back across the bridge. We passed through the empty gate and exchanged greetings with the American officials. The customs agent on duty scanned our passports. When we told him we had nothing to declare, he said, “Thank you” and let us pass. We reentered the United States almost without breaking stride.