Laredo to San Antonio - Mexico Through the Mirror

At first glance, Laredo, the border town, is wholly American: coming from Mexico you get the full culture shock.  Roads are smooth, everything is clean, parkinglots are vast, restaurants have doors, business signs are printed.  You have crossed the line into the First World, and the difference is stark. 

                                                

But Mexico is still present in Laredo.  In the stores I went into, and especially the restaurants, the music of the Spanish language could be heard fluttering back and forth behind the counters, amongst the clerks and waiters.  It made me wonder how many of those cars crossing the border were Mexicans who live on one side and work on the other.  Laredo thus seems bilingual, even bicultural, but in the manner of a lap joint, with the USA sliding in on top to fit to its neighbor.

By “the USA,” it should be understood, I mean the Land of The Franchises and Home of the Brands, for Laredo is a mighty shopping strip for big box retail.  Coming from Mexico, the triumph of cold reiteration has its appeal of familiarity: an IHOP breakfast, a Sprint store to plug back into my cellphone account, TWO Best Buy stores, were all within range of my hotel.  Given that my animating image of America was a smalltown restaurant where I could get coffee and pie, there nevertheless remains something soothing and efficient in this world of prepackaged experience. 

(The Best Buy, alas, didn’t have a replacement camera body for me.  They had the Sony a5100, and I was tempted, but I have three Canon lenses, dammit.  So I’m still taking pictures with my iPad.)

I got another last look at Mexico, in the rear-view mirror as it were, up the road in San Antonio, where I arrived in time to visit the Alamo yesterday.

A thunderstorm was clearing off leaving the streets puddled and the air still humid as I arrived at the site in downtown San Antonio, where the old stone building and the low walls of its compound are preserved amidst banks, hotels, and office buildings.  (Entry is free, but parking costs $15.00.)  The Alamo is probably the most curious tourist attraction in America.  It commemorates a battle lost, not even by the United States, but by rebellious settlers within Mexico fighting to establish Texas as a third country.  Yet somehow the massacre has been appropriated as a patriotic American symbol, to the point where flags of all 50 states stand inside the building alongside metal plaques naming the fallen.  The building was originally a church before it was a fort, and a twisted version of the sanctity remains: visitors must remove their hats and take no photos as they contemplate the last redoubt of brave soldiers. 

Inside, the old stone is a mottled white like palsied skin.  It’s a small space, undecorated, with nothing in it, and aside from the plaques and the scale model showing the cannon placements there’s nothing to see.  Perhaps that’s why they’ve added a large garden outdoors, and a living history exhibit, and a film about the battle, and a great stone bas-relief monument, and a gift shop.  Part of the garden is given over to a series of standing panels showing the history on a timeline, and I was struck by the illustration of Miguel Hidalgo, founding father of Mexican Independence.  Whereas in Mexico he is represented (everywhere) as a larger-than-life, leonine, heroic figure, the picture here showed a gnome-like little priest amid books.  Farewell Mexico.

I liked downtown San Antonio.  The streets are broad and clean, the buildings large and handsome, traffic light, and a great, spacious quiet reigns over it.  I had lunch prematurely at an expensive hotel restaurant near the Alamo, prematurely because I then found, just a few blocks further on, dozens of better restaurant possibilities along what they call the “Riverwalk.”  This is a boutique remodelling of the city’s little river into an upscale promenade, sunken below street level so you descend on stairs into a separate world of meandering tan stone walkways along the water, overhanging trees, romantic arched bridges, tray-like canal boats going by, and, on both banks, a line of tony restaurants and expensive hotels.  It’s an open-air shopping and strolling galleria, and the only element that doesn’t participate is the old river, whose murky waters slop sluggishly with the unmoving detritus of leaves and litter.  It was a nice place to walk.

When I came back up to the streets I found myself before the “Buckhorn Saloon Museum,” an emporium of antlers, stuffed animal heads, and the promise of tacky Texas glories inside, including Bonnie and Clyde’s “actual car!”  I bought the ticket for $20 and went in, and added an $8.00 beer from the saloon to carry with me into the museums in back.

There was enough taxidermy on display to be sad (including a room full of stuffed fish), but this was the kind of place that celebrated guns, gunfights, hunting and carnival sideshows—a little bit of everything for the 1950s boy in you.  There was an exhibit on the history of the old Texas Rangers, others on P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill, skulls of both Asian AND African elephants (interesting to see the difference) and whole rooms dedicated to obscure target-shooting marvels from the turn of the century.  Oh, and the car was indeed a lovely old 1930s sedan—with “bullet hole” stickers plastered all over it.  In short, it was good tacky fun, but not worth the $20 (and I couldn’t finish the beer).