Negotiating the Border

On Saturday, I'll be taking my running club to a race in Edinburg, a town 30 minutes north of our school. The race is at another school in our charter network and I had imagined that students' parents could drive them. For five kids, who play on club soccer teams that travel around Texas, that was no big deal. For three of them, it caused some concern.

"Will there be a bus, miss?"  

Amanda's* mom lives in Reynosa, across the border from McAllen. Amanda normally spends school nights with her aunt in Pharr but likes to go home on the weekends. Two other students live in Reynosa. Their parents drive them to the border bridge and drop them off on the Mexican side. They walk alone through the turnstiles and to an AutoZone across the street, where a school bus picks them up.

"Oh, it's ok, I'm normally with my cousins," Sofia* says. 

Walls and borders are a daily concern here. We can't see the wall from school, but I'd see it on my drive to work last year. Before sunrise, migrant workers picked lettuce or berries or tomatoes on the ranches around Military Highway. They lined their pickup trucks on the field with headlights shining south to the wall. It looks frightening but fragile from far away, a row of sharpened pickup sticks. 

This NYT article does a beautiful job of telling stories that unfold around, over, and under the border wall further west, in Arizona:

In Nogales, there’s a short stretch of border where the fence turns into a metal grille. At sundown one evening we watched as two women faced each other across the border, touched fingers through the grille, and wept. 

We managed to get a bus that will leave from school on Saturday. I hope all of my kids can get there. 

This Saturday Night in South Texas

When we walked in, we saw the young men in army fatigues and the old men in leather vests and the biker gang of all ages near the bar with Budweisers and lime-flavored beer salt in the middle of their table. Then we saw the young woman in black booty shorts and a black bra top and two loose braids, breathing fire in and out and winking when she was done. She burned the hairs on her arms and wiggled slightly in time with the heavy rock song, her body like the farther ripples of a rhythm.

We had walked into Chingona Fest 2016. My computer wants to autocorrect chingona to chignon, which is perhaps the opposite of chingona. A chignon is a tight, neat, French-style bun - your ballet teacher, your librarian, your gymnast, your executive; a chingona, in Mexican slang, is a badass woman, with a mohawk at a rock concert or a messy bun writing an essay or a wild mane at the end of a long swim. Chingona, of course, can carry different meanings. Traditionally, the term wrapped up more derogatory ideas - a woman who couldn’t control herself, a woman of stubborn character, a woman who thought she was hot shit but was really a hot mess. 

But chingón - that’s been a man who gets shit done. So in the past ten years, in South Texas, chingona has been taken back by las mujeres del Valle. A chingona is a woman who gets shit done. Chingona Fest 2016 was, apparently, a celebration of this evolution - a chance to see the chingona in many possible forms. 

It also took place at the American Legion of McAllen, so the crowd was an odd mix of army veterans and spouses, tattooed women with biker vests, and matrilineal family clusters that made me miss my grandmothers, chingonas in their own right even if the word never entered their New England or Italian vocabularies. 

I went with 4 other women, all teachers. We had missed the roller derby team; we walked in for the fire-eater who, power to her, had people staple dollar bills to her body as tips. (She’s friends with the guy who eats glass at open mic night at the counter-culture bar on 17th street). The next act was an awesome rockabilly band from San Juan and Edinburg, Los Gatos Locos. The lead singer was certainly chingona. She spoke warmly and welcomingly to the crowd with a rich voice running over hints of raspy Janet Joplin. When she sang Bobby McGee, the floor filled with couples, notably a man and woman with matching long grey hair and sensible shoes, and a gangly 60-something-year-old woman in a pink dress with no bra, dancing with her arms over her head. 

When our chingona sang a slower song, that pink dressed woman’s spectacle was eclipsed by the quiet closeness of another older couple. He wore a black vest - “Atomic Veteran - Christmas Island” - and she wore a knee-length denim skirt with cowboy boots. They both had gray hair. Her chin doubled at her neck and his belly bulged but they moved like a lazy river, navigating the floor with the confidence of years together. His hand was lightly on her back, her head was lightly on his chest. 

We left after a 12-year-old girl with tight curls sang “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow” and her mom played a set of 4 bluesy heartbreak songs while dressed as a unicorn. In reality the whole thing was kind of weird, but none of us regretted the $5 for the variety of people watching, the chance to see other peoples’ versions of badass women. 

Around the Valley, Rain

Found words from October - 

The sun here beats so strong that my students sometimes don't even want to have recess. It's too strong to think or play - all you feel is heat. When it rains, a different place descends, calm and cool and reflective. Green shoots come up and the next day, it seems, they're ready to be harvested as cotton, corn, soy, sugarcane. Our backyard has sprouted bananas and avocados. The citrus is coming. 

It rained yesterday. I woke up at friends' house in Harlingen, a city known in the Valley for having the most white people and the most Winter Texans, retirees who come south for the winter (we spent Friday night at a soda bar watching 50 year men in bandanas play the blues). Saturday morning can be sleep or work in coffee shops - but we, Northeast transplants, chased the thought of a city. We drove to Brownsville because it promised buses and parking meters. 

Every city in this Valley has its own distinct feel. Brownsville moves at the pace of the slow-flowing Rio Grande. Coming into the city, if you forget to turn right on Washington Street, you'll end up in Mexico. When we arrived, we wandered slowly, lazily down sidewalks. We gloried in the paired luxuries of walking and accidental human contact. It began to rain and huddling under an awning watching steam rising from those rich sidewalks brought the smell of cities far away. 

In the late afternoon, I drove back to Weslaco. Brownsville is gritty wet sidewalks - Weslaco is a new housing development still tickled by the warmth of bordering fields.  I went to the bridal shower of a 3rd grade teacher at my school. We played wedding bingo and spoke Spanglish and ate small plastic plates heaped with desserts - cupcakes, chocolate chip cookies, a mandarin cake the school nurse had baked for the occasion. I did my grocery shopping on a sugar high and by the time I was driving home, along the local highway, the clouds were over town.

When I got home it started thundering, then drizzling, then raining, that all-out downpour that makes this Valley one of the most fertile in the country. My roommate and I went for a walk at dusk around the citrus groves and marveled at the smell of new dirt.