It's Saturday and we've found ourselves at a loose end, so we drive to Laredo on a whim and because we haven't been there in a while. Laredo is on the northern bank of the Rio Grande, and Nuevo Laredo - which is actually in Mexico - is on the other side. We leave before noon, drive for an hour but not quite two and park in the usual parking lot on the bank of the river. We can see a Mexican family on the other side, spilling from their car for a picnic and a couple of the kids with fishing rods. The hysteria attendant to the thought of people on the other side of the border and what they might do seems even more strange and stupid when you can actually see them with your own eyes. The river isn't even so wide as the Thames as it passes through London and the water is warmer which probably explains a couple of border patrol vehicles parked nearby - just in case.
We stroll a few hundred yards along to the bridge where both vehicles and pedestrians cross to and from Mexico, passing through an enormous Border Control center on the opposite bank. There's a guy fishing beneath the bridge, stood in front of a squall of graffiti which is too far away to be legible. I take a photograph on my digital camera and zoom in to read Tepito existe porque resisto, which amounts to Tepito exists because it resists, or similar, although I have no idea what it means. Tepito is one of the reputedly more fearsome neighbourhoods of Mexico City, which is nevertheless seven hundred miles to the south. Maybe there's also a Tepito in Nuevo Laredo, or maybe the name has accumulated some other meaning. In any case, the slogan is surrounded by graffiti footnotes suggesting that the artist really, really likes someone called Rachel, so we probably have a mixed message even before we get to the language barrier.
Laredo itself seems unusually empty given that it's Saturday afternoon. The stores are open but there's hardly anyone around, and I wonder if the traditional Mexican siesta has finally crossed the border. It really does feel like I'm back in Mexico again. The stores are distinctly Mexican - notably all the perfume outlets and a branch of Liverpool, the department store - although I realise they may simply be trading on the name rather than actually related. We pass a branch of Church's, the fried chicken franchise, and because this is Laredo the usual corporate hoardings and illuminated menus are hand painted on a piece of hardboard. The town even smells like Mexico City, which is uncanny - which I qualify by stating that Mexico City smells simply distinctive rather than actively unpleasant, unless it's very early morning for some reason.
Passing a clothing store, I see that the floor is divided into sections for women, ladies, and accessories - marker pen on squares of cardboard. The distinction, so my wife informs me, is that clothes for ladies tend to be regular sizes, whereas those for women apparently presume that the customer could stand to lose a few pounds - which seems somewhat judgey.
We enter what resembles a thrift store because I decide I need to buy a belt. I've been trying to lose weight and have succeeded in so much as that my trousers now fall down with some frequency due to my having reached the final hole on my normal belt. Their belts are a dollar each, which seems just a little too cheap to be trusted. There's a stack of comic books at one side of the store, which is organised according to some free-range logic, and uppermost is a reprint of a specific issue of the Incredible Hulk that I've been after for two years. I haven't bought a copy because the cheapest I can find presently costs several hundred dollars, even in terrible condition, and online searches have yielded no reference to any cheaper reprint leaving me to assume that there was no such thing. Yet here it is for something like fifty cents; except, having been looking for the thing since about 2018 or thereabouts, just this week I paid twenty bucks for a paperback collection including this specific issue - amongst others which I had no particular interest in reading - and which arrived in the mail just yesterday morning.
We keep walking and begin to notice how many stores have been boarded up - pretty much all of them. The heart of Laredo has become a ghost town with just two or three functioning streets at the center. The rest has been abandoned, and even the occasional spray of broken glass seems to have been left untouched as it would be were it a crime scene, which somehow it isn't. There's no telling whether this is a direct result of the pandemic, or whether old Laredo was always on the economic edge. The outlet malls which line the highway on the way in and out of town seem to be doing business as usual, so it's anyone's guess.
We return to the car and head home, hoping the place will have been restored to life next time we visit.
City resources have apparently been stretched by an influx of refugees from Haiti, and there's the recent discovery of a huge mass grave just across the river, but I have no idea whether either of these are really a factor in whatever has happened to Laredo. It's a great shame because it's a lovely town, one where it's still possible to walk down a street without feeling like there's a massive invisible hand squeezing every last droplet of money out of you, without feeling like you're just part of a financial equation; or that's how it was. I fear for whatever the future may hold.
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