By ELIOT ELCOMEDOR
Staff Writer
BROWNSVILLE, TX - The other day, at a grocery store here, a woman spent her morning complaining about prices for items on the shelves. Her gripe centered on an assessment that the price of bread, cereal, tortillas, flour and canned beans was now beyond her means. "And they have sliced my food stamps in half, the bastards!" she was bemoaning to a six-deep line of patrons whose interest was another.
There are poor people in Brownsville. That is not news, but it is a measure of what observers call the stagnant lifestyle endured by some 120,000 souls who call this bordertown home. The price of a dozen tortillas zooming from 48 cents to 89 cents is enough to derail a grocery budget, or so this woman was saying loudly, as if to let anyone around her know, as if to shoot it to the clouds and beyond, where, presumably, God could hear his flock suffering the world economy.
Elsewhere, there are larger problems. America is in the grip of a silent revolution no one wishes to acknowledge. White people are rioting in a manner not felt from coast to coast since the Civil Rights fights of the 1960s, when it was the Blacks bitching about everything. The president of Poland was killed yesterday in a weird plane crash. U.S. law enforcement officials took time out to declare the Sinaloa Cartel as the victor in the disgraceful Cd. Juarez turf war. It is one hard-luck story after another.
Yet, even as the Big Picture is painted in blood-red, the poor cannot help but wonder how it is that some people don't give a damn about grocery prices and some do. "Being poor in the US is cruel," said Fela "La Cama De Piedra" Montalvo, a local washerwoman found hanging clothes along a sagging outdoor clothesline. "I come from Mexico, and I can understand being poor over there. But not here. I don't know what it is, but that's how I feel."
On a downtown street, an elderly man wearing a dusty, ragged poplin coat, stretches his arms, palms up, asking for a few dollars, so that he can eat. "What plate would you like today?" we ask him in French.
"Milanesa, hermano," he says, rotten teeth flashed as if a sodium light on a dark night in December.
I hand him $20. He laughs, perhaps shocked into doing it, that unexpected guttural reflex.
Brownsville is home to too many poor people.
The town, however, shines the light on other things....
- 30 -
9 comments:
ElComedor, man you tell it like it is. A town riddle with poor, uneducated, hopeles people. Amen, bro!!!!! Amen.
ANON: Education has little to do with it. There are plenty of towns the size of Brownsville suffering these tough economic times, towns that at the very least live gracefully...- Editor
Understand, but highliting the issues wakes up the social concious, from what I see no one really cares. (Good article Mr. Editor, very good)
ANON, we were taken by the news that a semi-pro soccer team is moving to Brownsville from McAllen. As social progress, that is, well, laughable. Someday, Brownsville will stop taking the scraps and demand the very best of everything... - Editor
The Comatose Town, essay, has to be one of your best wrtten article. Your staff highlites the issues to a "t".
ANON, it is clear to us that the area needs a Social Revolution. It is a mystery to us why things never change, why people suffer the same indignities, why politicians fly so low, and then why when someone tells them their life sucks...how they so-easily find the energy they hide so well to criticize the critic... - Editor
Mr. Editor, you ougth to write an article about the comatose Valley, San Benito, Harlingen, La Feria, Mercedes, Rio Hondo, there is nothing there either. There like gohst towns. Maybe worst than Brownsville.
Anon, you should know that reporter Juan Mo-Time has been noseying around Harlingen and will soon offer his insightful story... - Editor
Alright, the Myharlingennews.com has a lot of articles about the candidates in harlingen, there is power struggle going on. It gets nasty. 85% Hispanics and at one time all the commission was anglo, hijole que vergunza.
Post a Comment