Starved For Old Mexico, I Chance A Trip to Heroica Matamoros...

By ROD BLAGOJEVICH
Special to The Tribune

HEROICA MATAMOROS, Mexico - They tell me this - this sprawling chunk of harsh Mexican ground - was the absolute happenin' place along the southern end of the Texas-Mexican border. They tell me cool and dumb people from Brownsville across the Rio Grande would drive-over most evenings for dinner, for haircuts, for carwashes, for shoeshines, for gifts, for fruit, for chiles, for tortillas, for women, for just about everything the dominant Mexican culture around here requires, booze especially.

No more. Things have changed dramatically in recent years.

People from Brownsville stay home. Folks in the area from upstate are told you go to Heroica Matamoros and you may not come back. Guns all over the damned place. Drugs and drug cartels rule the streets now. That 10-year-old, unbathed kid who used to beg for coins below the international bridge now lugs an AK-47, ready to off someone, anyone. He has more cash in his pockets than the few people who brave the walk across the old bridge from downtown Brownsville on the river's northern banks to this town of some half-million oft-whipped residents.

Heroica Matamoros, some 621 miles from Mexico City and 354 miles from Houston, isn't as welcoming as it was seemingly forever. Originally known as "Villa del Refugio", the city was renamed for Independence War hero Mariano Matamoros in the early 19th century. Mexicans here still remember their own defending against marauding Anglos stuck on killing Mexicans during the Texas Revolution of the mid-1800s. That's the historical storyline.

Others remember jaunts to Blanca White's disco barely a moonshot 8-iron from the bridge, or the Autel Nieto and its cheap lunches, Las Dos Republicas bar, or the Hotel Ritz and its $26 rooms that made for gorgeous afternoon delights. Whatever became of those places? What exactly died, aside from the peace? How are things at the Piedras Negras Cafe downtown, where, it was forever rumored, the original crime bosses of the city wined & dined? Cabrito, sliced and rolled into warm handmade tortillas at El Norteno near the mercado, seemed the perfect border meal. A deal with a street prostitute served as the best of desserts, especially after the Mexican army invaded the side-of-the-road Zumbido on the road to the beach and shut the dusty bordello's doors forever. Angst-filled, black & white photos of women in underwear, tired chickens rousted at dawn, graced the front page of The Brownsville Herald that fateful afternoon, alerting many well-known Brownsvillians of the end of the fooling-around era.

Heroica Matamoros, once the perky city of multi-tiered love, now lives as long-faced hostage to flying bullets and lobbed grenades and murders and assassinations and neck-slicings and other such criminal mutilations. The portrait painted by the press is one that has a darkened background, a glimmer of light, and splatterings of blood that convey the message of pain, of cruelty, of a tragedy even the church can never explain.

The heavyset customs guy on the Mexican side of the bridge asks me if I had a good time in his hometown. He seems sincere, but what is sincerity in a lawless town? I shrug my shoulders and say: "Su cancion 'Las Golondrinas' llena mi cerebro..."

He smirks and waves me through. Halfway across the bridge, I turn to look back. I spot the Mexican customs guy and he spots me looking back at him. He waves his adios. It is an ending, I tell myself...

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[EDITOR'S NOTE:..Rod Blagojevich, the writer of this report, is not the former governor of Illinois...]