DESPITE SLIGHT PROGRESS, CITY STILL SEEN AS GHOST TOWN

By Trymaine Lee

MSNBC

Ghost Town

Brownsville and other border cities have a symbiotic relationship with Mexico. 

Not only are most residents of Mexican descent, but the economies on either side of the border share mutual interests. When the Mexican economy suffers it pushes more of its citizens into the U.S. to look for work. 

But it also means fewer Mexican customers are able to cross legally, with extra money to spend with U.S. businesses. When traffic along the border is cinched, for political or other reasons, so too is the lifeblood that flows across it.

“We have money when they let Mexicans in and out,” said Obe Ordinales, 78, sitting in the little storefront shop where he and his wife make a pittance selling religious literature and second-hand clothing. 

The storefront in downtown Brownsville, with its collection of Spanish-language Jesús ephemera, candles and tambourines is just a block from the border.

Ordinales said guards at the border crossing have gotten especially strict about who they let in and are routinely scrutinizing who is going over and with what.

“Now, you can’t get across the border with two 10 pound bags of chicken and a loaf of bread for sandwich making. When I was a boy you could come and go. The bridge was open, they just wanted a little money for their coffee and they’d let you go by,” Ordinales said. “Now they’re checking to see how many pieces of bread you have.”

The old man gestured up and down the block, waving his hand like an aged but agile maestro. He pointed to abandoned buildings that once bustled with business, to shops that have changed hands so many times that the faded names from prior incarnations stubbornly haunt the latest signage.

Many cash-strapped business owners in Brownsville have opted to hand over their property to the city rather than pay back taxes. That means the city owns a number of hulking relics in its historic yet haggard downtown. Many storefronts sit empty and dark, while others glow with colorful quinceanera dresses, plastic flowers and shoes in vibrant hues of yellow, red and blue.

Ordinales said the good old days of easy passage across the U.S.-Mexico border have given way to far more than just ramped up scrutiny at the checkpoint. The border, he said, has grown far more dangerous -- with the desperate and the desperados all scraping for whatever they can, and by whatever means.

“Drive over there with a nice truck? Take a picture, because it’ll be the last time you ever see it,” Ordinales said. “The people who come here are making $50 a week with a wife and two kids. They’re desperate.”

Add to that the uber-violent drug cartels that control the black market and the underlings and wannabes caught in their orbit, and the desperation is downright frightening, Ordinales said.

Linda Campos, 65, who sells antiques and baubles at Manny’s Collectibles out of a stall at the Border Flea Market, said as a kid she grew up riding her bicycle with friends along the border. They’d take family trips into Mexico to go to restaurants and visit relatives. All that has changed, she said. Too many bullets are flying these days.

While the violence has stayed largely on the Mexican side of the border, Campos said the Texas side is experiencing trauma of its own. The lack of business, undercut by the weak economy and undocumented workers, are starving out resident businesses, including hers and her husband’s, Campos said.

For 45 years Campos’s husband has worked as a broker trading in shrimp hauls dredged from the Gulf of Mexico. But higher prices mean fewer people are buying domestic shrimp, while shrimpers from Mexico are illegally chartering into American water and collecting loads of the product, often out of season and before the shrimp can mature.

The nature of the shrimp business has also eroded. In years past boat captains, which are required to be government licensed U.S. citizens, would round up workers as needed, offering decent pay for long hot days on the water. But as those captains have aged out and few younger folks have embraced what has become a dying trade, a once steady infusion of income into local households has dried up.

Where there had been hundreds of boats operating in the Gulf, many of those are now sitting in disrepair, rotting away as their owners slowly die off.

“I don’t think it can get any worse than it is now,” said Campos, whose father emigrated legally from Spain, through Mexico to the U.S.

Campos said that as an American citizen she’s conflicted as to the plight and complications brought on by life along a soft border.

“I was born here and my family came legally. And we’re all paying a price for those that come illegally,” she said. But, she added, “The only true Americans are the Indians. The rest of us are all immigrants.”

Downtown Brownsville boasts century-old Southwestern architecture, much of which has eroded due to decades of neglect and disregard.

Old men gather in groups to chew the fat on sultry summer afternoons, as younger ones run errands in local shops. There are beggars and street-sleepers and families with small children huddled in taco places and chicken joints in the shadows of towering, once-noble hotels and city buildings.

Predators abound, circling the poor and vulnerable here like sharks—from employers who pay little for back breaking work in the fields and factories, to lenders who offer same day loans at crippling rates.

From the corner of 9th and Washington Street, just up from Ordinales’ shop, no less than 10 quick loan shops beckon.

“We don’t have big corporations. No good jobs.” Ordinales said. “We just have dependence on the government. And people looking to take advantage of us.”