BETTER BLOCK, DAY OF THE DEAD = SAME OLD, SAME OLD

By Juan Montoya
Tomorrow, after the razzle dazzle and hype of the New and Improved Better Block (mercadito no more) and Day of the Dead=Make a Difference Day blows away like yesterday's newspaper, the crackheads and prostitute (male and female) will wake up and wander through downtown Brownsville like cadavers looking for their next fix.
The storefronts will still be empty. The second-hand stores will feature the latest hand-me-down in winter wear to fend off the cold front, and the Asian dollar stores will do about the only business that is done Sundays in Browntown.
How many cheerleading squads do we have now?
There's All In, United Brownsville (aka Imagine Brownsville), the Brownsville Visitors and Convention Bureau (Wow!), GBIC, BEDC, CDCB, DVD, RGV, PCP, THC,etc. UTB's PR department will find yet another laurel to pin on Juliet Garcia. The ghost lecturers at the Arnulfo Oliveira Library in the future will tell the stories of how she was seen in the midnight hours walking across the Ft. Brown oxbow resaca shrouded by a whirling mist.
We even have an imaginary mayor who makes believe he will be able to get the city to use enough public funds to buy real estate to lure UTB to stay put in town and not go elsewhere. But now, with the rumored enrollment cap of about 7,400 students said to be set by the UT System Regents, there is really no need to buy (or take as a gift) that much land. A nice parcel somewhere off Alton Gloor of by Highway 100 will do. Or maybe they might just return to the old system of having Pan American set up a satellite university at TSC and forget about that headache.
We even allowed the federal government to built a wall to keep them out, or maybe it was to keep ourselves in. We bet that will really draw the historical buffs here.
In fact, if the folks over at the Brownsville Historical Association have their way, it'll be Day of the Dead daily. That's got a nice ring to it, doesn't it?
Those poor souls who were buried in the Old Town Cemetery will wail about their serenity being disrupted by gaggles of snowbirds in the guided tour that won't let a body sleep. They weren't buried there to be exhibited to historical tourists. Pinche Brownsville never lets go.
They will also be told about Dr. William Gorgas and his role in eliminating yellow fever with nice romantic touch about tending to his future wife and dissecting yellow fever victims at the old Ft. Brown morgue. The weasel wording on the granite monument in front of the library dedicated to the good doctor leads the reader to believe he courageously exposed himself to the disease in order to research its effects and met his future wife whose grave had already been dug out in the post's cemetery. Hidden in the verbiage is the fatc that Gorgas never discovered the cause of the fever but learned from Cuban Dr. Juan Findlay that the disease was water-borne, a fact thet the Walter Reed Commission accepted as the cause of the disease.
How far can this hype go on?
It's obvious that the old Brownsville our parents and grandparents knew will never be the same. It's nigh impossible since that Brownsville was fueled by agriculture. Now agriculture has been replaced by a service economy and commerce that has moved northward following the flight of Alton Gloor and his subdivisions along either side of the expressway. PUB and fueled that flight when it extended their utilities grid in subservience to Gloor's anticipation of making millions off real estate speculation. Bill Hudson just followed in his footsteps.
There is no longer any need for local farmers to pick up their laborers from the bus station downtown. If you want to buy anything that costs more than a dollar or buy clothing that isn't sold by the pound, you go north.
Few, if any people, live in the middle of downtown although most second fllors on buildings are empty. The farm hands who used to crowd into town every Saturday to purchase their weekly supplies of food, clothing are gone now. Everyone else goes to Walmart on Alton Gloor or to the HEB Superstores dotting the landscape. The only HEB downtown is the one that services the Mexican clientele on Elizabeth Street. But don't try to uses those bathrooms. They are constantly out of service. Anyway, they're from Matamoros and can hold it until after they cross the bridge.
The handful of brave souls who have plunked down their cash to set up clubs downtown had to run the gauntlet of expensive regulations and requirements by the city's bureaucrats can be seen standing just behind their windows looking dissolutely out into an empty street. Downtown, alas, has become just a place to walk through or drive to on the way somewhere else.
There will always be someone who will want to know about how Charles Stillman founded the town and platted the original townsite, how a monstrosity of a German car could have been (or might have been, or should have been b'God) the touring car of Mexican Dictator Porfirio Diaz, if it had ever been in the country during his reign there. Or how Lucky Lindbergh flew from here south with his mail and Amelia Earnhardt was in the crowd itching to fly da plane.
Sure makes for a good yarn, doesn't it?
We're instead content to dress up like Mexicans for a week, clebrate a purely commercial holiday, call it Charro Days and get it over with at one fell swoop.

The real history of the city, the one that deals with the constant struggle for power between the masses and the government controlled by the power elite is one that no one wants to hear. They don't want to hear about braceros, or victims of the murderous Texas Rangers who helped robber barons like Stillman, King, Kenedy and even a token turncoat like Yturria dispossess them of the only thing they had – the very earth they lived on. That wound still festers among the children of the long-gone ancestors.
Even the homegrown heroes like Juan Cortina, Catalino Garza, Gregorio Cortez, Ignacio Zaragoza and the like are given short shrift. Where are the historical reenactments most communities would hold to draw the lucrative historical tourist like the occupation of Brownsville by Cortina, the Chisholm Trail cattle drives, shooting up of downtown by Buffalo soldiers, etc.? Most cities would give an eyetooth to have that much history encompassed on such a small area as does Brownsville.
We're not even mentioning the Palo Alto and Palmetto Battlefields. We understand that Pct. 1 commissioner Sofia Benavides is putting together a committee to develop such a tourist draw at Palmetto Hill. After all, this was the place where the armies of two counties and two occupation forces clashed during the Civil War and immediately after it. Personages the likes of Rip Ford, Cortina, and the French, Confederate, Union and Mexican armies had at least two encounters there.
Yet, pass by there and all you have is a desolate wasteland. We wish her luck and will do what we can to help make something out what is today a very important historical nothing.
But wait! According to Gilbert Salinas, VP for the Brownsville Economic Development Council, all this will change when SpaceX starts firing rockets off the clay lomas off Boca Chica to go where no man has gone before. To infinity, and beyond, Salinas says.
Forget about history, he says. We'd want to see traffic along Highway 4 lined up for miles with its accompanying litter and souvenir hawkers gawking at a 15-second rocket shoot. Now, that's historical progress and development, pelado!    
If you go to the original Ft. Brown site and can negotiate your way past the Border Patrol trucks and Da Fence, you might actually see a mound of dirt and a cannon poking from the grass out there. That's the way we celebrate history around here, stranger. And we like it that way.
For the meantime, however, in order to justify having the likes of Ramiro Gonzalez, the city’s comprehensive planning manager and Rhiannon Cizon (what a handle), BHA program and education coordinator, grace our streets and government, we'll do what Reese's did and combine chocolate with peanut butter and call it this city's generation's contribution to its bright future.
 "We are poised to create something to rival Houston or Austin or San Antonio on a smaller scale, but we can create a cultural hub that changes the face of Brownsville," said Cizon. "We can compete on the grown-up level.”
Do these people meet somewhere and make this stuff up? Or do they think of it on the fly?