FOR ONE WEEK OUT OF THE YEAR WE LOVE YOU MEXICO

By Juan Montoya
For the better part of every year we build walls to keep its people out, increase the number of armed guards between the border, call it a failed state, speak of its politicians with disdain, and warn our citizens to avoid going there.
But for the five Charro Fiesta "holy days," it suddenly becomes our good neighbor to the south, the source of a wealth of cultures, we praise its customs, adulate its cuisine, its women, and celebrate the image of the virile male harking back to its agrarian days.
Yes, it's Charro Days again.
And in the current climate of building up Fortress America to keep out the hordes of unwashed masses and control our southern border, it has become nigh schizophrenic to at the same time celebrate our proximity to Mexico as the torches and hammers of Mexican-American workers are clearly heard and seen finishing building the Border Wall to keep Mexicans out.
Gone are they days of "paso libre," when Northern Mexico residents were allowed a free pass across the river with only the promise that they would return aftyer the celebration. That came to a stop when immigration authorities discovered that many of them didn't and went on to become upstanding local citizens. Others went further north.
But for these five high days, locals make believe that they love their neighbors.
There is no mention of the hundreds of students in the local school district whose only justification for attending the free public schools is a borrowed address in Brownsville, the traffic jams at local schools mornings and afternoons as cars with Mexican license plates line up to pick up their kids, complaints of so-called "anchor babies," the abuse of the medical and social services delivery systems by people plainly from across the Rio Grande, or the haughty animosity from some well-to-do Mexicans toward border "pochos."
People on both sides are suffering from the violence that now plagues the southern side of the river and occasionally spills over into the Rio Grande Valley as gangs settle scores with rivals on South Texas streets, business in Mexico markets, plazas, and commercial districts comes to a standstill while still others relocate to Texas to avoid extortion and official high-handedness.
There are several families in Brownsville who are still hoping that their sons, who disappeared more than a year ago while ostensibly going to get a good deal on cars in Matamoros, will somehow reappear alive. There are others who get phone calls from people in Reynosa who pretend to be long-lost relatives and make arrangements to meet them in Mexico.
This year, the annual love-fest between our good neighbors in the south and the people of Brownsville will be a slightly harder sell because we have just finished burying a local boy killed by the Zetas on the San Luis-Mexico City road while he was working for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service. Right about now we're hoping the government to the south will demonstrate that it really means it when it says that it cherishes the relationship between our two cultures and deliver the killers to justice.
It is patently unfair, of course, to hang this albatross around the neck of the Brownsville-Matamoros annual fiesta. But in this very unusual year, things tend to be mixed up and roiled so that one thing in inevitably tied to the other.
The commerce of Brownsville and South Texas has become the beneficiary of the ills and violence plaguing our neighbors in Matamoros as the commercially active Mexicans place their investments on our side of the river. That alone is worth celebrating in these austere times.
But while Matamoros residents look bemusedly on our anglo charros with their fake moustaches and pot-bellies drooping over their laboring braided leather belts, those of us on this side that invited them over the charco to participate in our decidedly commercial annual celebration should be thankful any of them are here at all.