Nuevo Laredo

A memory of the place I used to call home.

Nuevo 

It was a nasty green, the water of the Rio Bravo, dark and dirty. I do not know if it was just me that grew up with the stories of the people that drowned trying to cross it, of the ferocity of its current. Perhaps, my parents simply didn’t want me to play in it, but the stories of the bodies that polluted it were real. I would often see, in the mornings when I rode my bike to the park with my mom running by my side, kids tossing rocks into the water, families bathing in its coolness, a refuge from the Mexican heat, men fishing and shirtless men carrying nothing but a tire. I never thought much of it in my youth, that’s just the way things were.

Going into Laredo was never anything more than the expectation of a two hour long line at the bridge, my parents running errands, and the hope of McDonalds or a visit to ToysRus. As I grew older I became a “trusted traveler” and two hour long lines at the bridge became 5 minute strolls, my bike became a green jeep I would fly down the boulevard, still next to the green river. Rules had never been an issue in my youth and therefore the consequences of breaking them weren’t either.  I would fly down that thing, taking every lane like if there was no tomorrow, daring fate to take the wheel, to take me. Red lights meant nothing, it was my eyes and the road and so every morning I’d cross that river and go to a school I hated, to sit there and be treated by the teacher like another border kid who didn’t know the language, and then every afternoon I’d cross back to the land I called home.

I’ve got no idea what day it was but I know I was seventeen. I know I crossed the bridge and parked at the corner of Saint Augustine High School and waited for Vila and Tito to get dropped off by their parents. As their parents drove off I drove in and picked them up and went straight back where we had come from like so many white people like to tell us today. Back through the bridge and back through the boulevard. We drove through the streets of Nuevo and ate some tacos from a stand and bought some beers at the Oxxo, the corner store.

We cruised for a bit until we settled somewhere around Tito’s neighborhood, he probably lived in the best neighborhood out of ours. Mine had “halcones,” drug dealers, in every corner and Vila’s was just far. In between an orange wall and a gated house we cracked open our beers and drank inside my car. We couldn’t have been there more than 30 minutes before I saw the cops on my side mirror. Before I had time to think we had our hands on the back of my jeep and we were being frisked by a cop. I was standing left of Vila and Tito was to his right.

I wish I could tell you what I was thinking in those moments but I don’t remember. What I remember is Vila tearing up and saying we wouldn’t do it again over and over again, I don’t even remember what Tito was doing, my vision was focused on the assault rifles they carried. They told us to get into the back of my car and as we were doing that we saw one of them salute a bald man resting on the gate of his house. One of them got into the passenger seat and the other one drove. I’ve got no idea where we were or how we got there but when we got out all I could see was deserted land and a torn down house. They lined us up in front of a white house and with our backs against the torn down wall we stood shoulder to shoulder, staring at the assault rifles hanging from their shoulders, we stared at the long black barrels that could shoot us straight into oblivion with only seventeen years under our belt, we stared at the corruption of our city and lived through what seemed to be the longest minutes of our lives.

The silence was broken by their instructions to turn around. We turned and saw a big red Z against the sharp white wall breaking through the brown dirt. Over the years I’ve often heard people say they’d take bullets for each other but I can assure you those people have never had a bullet in the chamber of a gun waiting to explode and penetrate them through the back of their heads. Time freezes, words either become the heaviest thing you’ve ever lifted or become as light as the air we breathe.

I won’t lie and tell you I was some big hero that day or the other days. I’ve seen myself through those situations enough times to understand how I respond, I’ve seen Vila too. His words become as light as the sky but in such form words lose their meaning, they waterfall out of him. For me, they become as heavy as my body, thought becomes maddening, almost infinite, what words to choose if these were my last ones.

We looked at the red Z on the wall and knew we were about to die in the middle of nowhere. We had been in the wrong place at the worst time. One of my biggest fears those days was ending up naked, decapitated and with my dick in mouth on some monument of the city like many people did, as a display of the cartel’s savagery, power, and territory, out in the open for the whole city to see. It was all over before I realized. They told us to turn around again and Tito took out his wallet.

Looking back at it, we probably weren’t going to die, although so many people died for nothing and many still do, but if Tito hadn’t been able to pay for us we probably would have gotten the beating of our lives. About a year later the city got rid of all cops and replaced them with the green army. But nothing changed, it was still Nuevo. One day I drove out of the boulevard into the streets to find a man get shot and thrown into a van, one day there were cars wrapped in flames on the sidewalk of the park, some days people died at the corner of my house, sometimes there were some halcones and sometimes there were none. Nuevo Laredo was and always will be my city, Parque viveros was where I learned to ride my bike, the parking lot of El Venecia was where we had our first fights during the quinceaneras we would crash, la unidad is where I would run, each day we would live and each day we would die. I never wanted nothing more than to leave Nuevo and go see the world but there are days where there is nothing more I wish than to go back.