ICE MONUMENTS SPROUT ALL OVER CITY, SOUTH TEXAS: IT'S NO LONGER A FREE COMMERCE IN BORDER COMMUNITIES

By Juan Montoya 

You can see them all over town and and in other Rio Grande Valley cities, the exoskeletons of unfinished construction projects that were halted when ICE agents came upon site and ended up arresting workers – "los maestros" here without immigration documents. In this case, the owners said the had planned to add apartments atop the businesses below before the project was halted when the carpenters were hauled off.

Those of us who are old enough to have been around in the 1960s and early 1970s remember that local cotton farmers would often pick up farm laborers from Matamoros at the old Continental Trailways bus station that was located at the Lopez Supermarket at the corner of 13th Street and Adams where the new multimodal transportation terminal now stands. In fact, the farmers' trucks would pick up the laborers – some of them still wet from wading across the berms in the river – and in sight of the Border Patrol trucks who turn a blind eye and allowed the practice to continue.

And who doesn't remember when the old HEB was open on Elizabeth Street and local parents would pick up the nanny from across early Monday mornings and then drop them off at the new Gateway Bridge Friday nights so they could go home to their families after providing child care for their kids while the parents were at work? The HEB was a preferred pick-up spot because of the convenient row of pay phones along the wall for them to use to call their employers.

And many local residents would hire gardeners who cut their lawns and trimmed their trees and then leave on their bicycles at the end of the day.

Everyone knew they didn't have a work visa, but the practice was so entrenched here that it didn't matter. In fact, some of the Matamoros nannies - criadas - were picked up by Border Patrol employees so they could watch over their kids and cook for the families through the week. 

Commerce flowed. Kris Kristofferson was raised by a nana while he was growing up and his dad worked for Pan American Airlines. So did many other Brownsville kids.

Inversely, many maquila managers who lived on the U.S. side would commute to their factories in Matamoros daily. For some families, it was a weekly ritual to go buy some commodities like sugar and coffee and to visit Matamoros barbershops adjacent to el Mercado Juarez and maybe have a cabrito dinner.

This interchange of labor and capital was a fact of life across the U.S.-Mexico border and – to a smaller degree along it – still exists.

Things have changed now, and as ICE and the Border Patrol enforce the more stringent immigration policies today, these "arrangements" are becoming a thing of the past. The skeletal remains of unfinished projects like the one above bear silent witness to the changing times.