No tumbleweeds to report

I was having breakfast at a local cafe in Edinburg, Tex., with my friend, Jennifer, who I had not seen in about eight years, back when we worked together at the newspaper in Lynchburg, Va. It was the day after my wheels had flown off Roxanne and I had been rescued by some angelic truck drivers and found myself in this South Texas town, just north McAllen, and it was my first time out of her apartment since arriving.

“How far from the border are we?” I asked. “How many miles?”

“Not even 10.”

“Not even 10 miles?”

It would take maybe 20 minutes, she said, depending on what bridge we took to get there. Matamoros she would not use. Reynosa, likely not, either, unless we stayed in the main plaza area. Nuevo Progreso was considered the safest, she said.

Not that we were even considering going over there. I had already decided long before I crossed the Texas border that I was not going to Mexico and on the phone before I had arrived, when I was asking Jennifer how safe it was to even visit her, she had said I’d be fine, as long as I did not cross the border.

“It’s safe here,” she said. “People don’t want it here, so it’s really safe.”

“If people don’t want it here, how do you think they keep it away?” I asked.

Border control and minutemen groups, she said. But walking into Mexico with no car from there was very easy, she added, and she could just walk right in, pay her 25 cents and no one would ask her what she was doing. Coming back, it cost 30 cents and there was a long line, because you had to stop at the border to have your passport checked; they asked you what you were doing there, and whether or not you had to declare anything, she said, and then you paid whatever taxes you needed to pay. If you were in a car, it was about an hour or two of being stuck in traffic and then, should they find anything suspicious or if you had a lot of stuff, they took you to secondary check and did a full search.

Still, we were not going to cross.

“Because here’s the thing,” she said. “You and I could have gone to a nice little restaurant in Reynosa or Nuevo Progreso or wherever and then who knows? Because they have military there; they have military presence there, so who’s to say that okay, the military’s there and then, like, some cartel guys are there and then there’s a shootout. It’s not like they’re going to go after us. They don’t care.”

“Right. We’ll just get caught in the crossfire.”

“Exactly.”

I told her that the only reason that I had even brought up whether or not McAllen would be safe to visit, when I had called her before I went down there, was that some people had started asking me about whether it was a good idea for me to go down there, and they were Texans, but that the story I had heard about an innocent bystander getting shot and killed had taken place at a pool hall.

“Yeah, what pool hall?” she asked. “It was probably some sketchy, hole in the wall place. Any of that shoot-em-up, woo-woo stuff, it’s in some ghetto neighborhood.”

“And I mean you never know when something changes; you never know when (the violence) goes to a new locale,” I said. “You never know if somebody is hanging out in a nice place and they get ‘em in there. You just don’t know for sure. But I think in general you can take some precautions.”

Her friend, Albert, was born and raised there, she said, and though he spent part of his childhood in North Carolina, he also knew the McAllen area very well, so they went barhopping together recently and she said she never felt like she was at risk. It was very mellow, she said, and overall the area was what she called quaint.

“This place fascinates me,” she said. “Because you still have some of that culture from Mexico but it’s also very patriotic, American. It’s really its own culture. And if you talk to any Mexican-American who was born and raised here, they’ll tell you: ‘The folks in Mexico, they call us American.’ And then of course to the rest of the country, they’re Mexican. So it’s like they’re kind of, not only geographically but culturally and psychologically in limbo.”

We drove around a little after breakfast and went to pick up Rennie for a walk around the University of Texas Pan American campus, where Jennifer works. As we drove by a Whataburger chain, she told me about it, saying it was the place to go in Texas when you’re going to get a hamburger.

“They don’t even pretend to be healthy,” she said. “The burgers are big. The serving sizes are big. They will cook your burger anyway you want it. You can put all sort of crazy toppings on it. It’s a very Texas thing. It’s open 24 hours. They also serve breakfast and the breakfast is even less healthy than the lunch.”

I asked if she had made a pretty good network of friends in her four, going on five years there, and she said it was more acquaintances than anything and that a lot of then were from the church where she goes.

“I don’t usually go out with people,” she said. “I spend most of my time by myself but occasionally, people will drag me out, which is good. I need that.”

The overall vibe is very family-oriented, she said, so that people do not stray much from their family, hanging out mostly with their siblings or parents or cousins.

“Which is wonderful,” she said. “I like the strong family unit. It’s just hard to meet people, because when they have free time, they’re with their family.

The campus was pretty, full of palm trees waving in the wind and hardwoods standing steady and solid, their branches forming cool, shaded alleyways to escape from the dry, dusty heat. The manmade corridors often mimicked nature, distant points of perspective nearly disappearing at the end of long walkways that led to far-off doors, and the buildings were done in a mix of colorful bricks and interesting lines and angles, broken up by the occasional arch or domed ceiling.

And as we drove and walked, and walked and drove around for the three days that I was there, she told me stories from when she worked at the newspaper, which was the reason that she moved there in the first place, before she got burnt out on that and was recruited by the university. I commented that when I first got to town, she had said that she was tired of being there, because everyone was fairly negative, for example assuming that anyone who was doing well money-wise had earned it from involvement in the drug trade, but then at the same time, towards the end of my stay, she had said that her faith in humanity was restored by living there.

“But see, people are just kind to each other here,” she said.

For example, she said, every year at the paper, they teamed up with United Way and would write about families in need and she said that so often, people who did not have very much to begin with would give.

“People here, they’re very god fearing. There is a lot of goodness here. The family is a very sacred unit,” she said. “Unfortunately, there are a lot of domestic problems, as well, on the other side of the coin but for the most part, family is very important. Faith is very important. And there is that sense of kindness.”

She went to visit her mom in Florida, she said, and they went to the grocery store and it was the middle of the day on a Wednesday but you had to push your way through all these people and her mom was getting aggravated by everything and Jennifer said she was just fighting to calm her mom calm.

“People were just very abrasive, move-out-of-my-way, what have you,” she said.

Then she returned to Edinburg and said that a young man bumped into her with his cart at the store and said “Oh, excuse me, Miss.”

“And I just wanted to hug this kid, because if that had happened in Florida, it’d be like, ‘Move,’ ” she said. “And the children, even the ones who are quote-unquote-bad kids, they’ll call you Miss or Sir. It’s really nice. There’s that level of respect here.”