Word: rio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Skipping one last stone across the Rio Grande, I started inland across flat, marshy country where clumps of sable palms stand out like the befeathered scouts from a Zulu impi. Matamoros, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, and Brownsville, in Texas, are the first of a score or more twin towns strung along the frontier. The poverty that prowls much of the country's southern border like a hungry coyote sits back on its haunches and howls in Brownsville. "This is the poorest part of the U.S.," says Tony Zavaleta, a Brownsville sociologist. "We have whole suburbs without electricity, sewerage...
From a bank of fog loitering along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, the waves emerge silently, advancing slowly and uniformly, like long thin lines of infantry, on the mouth of the Rio Grande. The river, exhausted after its tortuous odyssey along more than half of the 2,076-mile U.S.-Mexican border, offers little resistance to this serried assault. Its tired brown water backs up and bivouacs in a lagoon near a white lighthouse, and from there it slips, as stealthily as a camp deserter, into the Gulf...
...that for 140 years has been the most tangible physical divide between the U.S. and Mexico as well as the symbolic frontier between the two dominant cultures of the New World. As I skipped stones across the river's mouth with just one bounce, I felt vaguely disappointed. The Rio Grande ought at least live up to its name and course majestically eastward before spilling vigorously into the gulf...
Crossing into the U.S. near the Texas town of Del Rio, I spot an old mailbox that U.S. Customs has converted into a drug drop. DEPOSIT CONTRABAND HERE BEFORE YOU ENTER THE UNITED STATES reads a sign in language that seems more suitable for an antilittering campaign. The lock on the mailbox is rusty, and a spider has built a formidable web over the chute where any law-abiding, English-speaking drug smuggler would drop his neat little packet of cocaine or heroin. While the mailbox is an extreme example of bureaucratic wishful thinking, the larger U.S. approach...
Before reaching Del Rio, the road wanders through Roma, a steamboat terminus in the 19th century. The sheriff is out to lunch, but his office, on a bluff overlooking the river, is unlocked and unminded. Two hundred yards upriver a trio of illegal immigrants from Mexico wade across and disappear, just three more of the estimated 1 million to 2 million people who slip across the border each year...