RUMOR OF LOVE: Brownsville Buys Into McAllen's Idea...Again...

By IGNATIUS BECERRA
Staff Satirist

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - This city just wants to be seen as being a go-getter. And it is not going to idly stand by while its neighbors in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas aim high. After hearing of McAllen Mayor Richard Cortez's dogged desire to sell several high-profile properties to Big Business, a few locals here started their sun-parched noggins thinking: why not sell-off our properties? Yeah, hey...why not us?!

McAllen is dying to sell its ancient convention center. It languishes largely unused at the corner of S. 10th Street and the New Expressway, there near the busy, busy La Plaza Mall and on the crowded main drag for insatiable shoppers from Mexico. Cortez, no relation to Bernie Madoff, also wants to sell land on which now swims the Boeye Reservoir not more two miles south of the convention center and adjacent to the city's bustling airport. And the mayor is also seeking to sell the land on which sits peacful Westside Park. Cortez explains it all by saying city revenues have dropped and noting that less and less shoppers from Mexico are finding the City of Palms.

Here, in Brownsville, the City at The End of The Rio Grande, some elected folks at City Hall want to evict tenants of the La Ultima Cumbia Nursing Home so that they can sell it to something called The Clarence Thomas Boardinghouse for Negroes - a Philadelphia-based enterprise that has tendered a hefty offer for the land and the building. La Ultima Cumbia, where senior citizens lodge and party, currently houses some 75 residents - many of them descendants of the Mexican Revolution.

"It's an idea being batted-around," said a lanky, high-necked City Hall insider. "Mayor Pat Ahumada likes it, 'cause it again allows us to say we chase McAllen on damned near everything. Besides, there have been reports of wanton, all-night sex at La Ultima Cumbia for months now, so..."

Efforts to reach Brownsville City Commissioner Melissa A. Zamora for comment were unsuccessful. As we have heard many times before from her telephone answering machine, Zamora's lovely voice told us: "If this is The Tribune, I am not in. If this is about anything controversial, I am definitely not in. If this is Patrick Alcatraz of The Tribune, I am on an extended vacation - like for 30 years!"

Mayor Ahumada giggled when contacted for comment, then laughed, and then guffawed, and then fell on the floor after gargling this out: "I don't even know how to cumbia, man!"

At La Ultima Cumbia Nursing Home, an elderly man wearing an orange-and-blue Mervyn's shirt, faded cargo shorts and tire-sole sandals said: "Well, it'll be fine with all of us if they get us a place on the island. But why do we always have to be lapping onto McAllen. I hate that Goddamned town..."

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[EDITOR'S NOTE:...We do not mean to denigrate the city's poor and slobbish Southmost Subdivision, where La Ultima Cumbia Nursing Home resides, with the publishing of this piece. Posterity will not be kind to us, we know, we know...]