Karen Olsson
The Old College Try
Before he graduates—or goes back to the graveyard shift at the gas station—a 23-year-old mayor is working to make life better in his impoverished hometown
(Page 2 of 2)
Reyes is clean shaven and often wears one of the monogrammed “City of El Cenizo” shirts he ordered for the council and staff after taking office—in five colors, one for each day of the workweek. He comes across as somewhat shy, in the way of a shy person who really likes to be around people. (Although he recently quit a part-time job to devote more hours to his mayoral duties, he daydreams about returning to a job he used to have, working the graveyard shift at the Texaco. “You see people. It was exciting to see people come in at six a.m. and already know what they were going to get,” he says. “I tell my mom, and my mom gets mad at me. She says it’s not going to look right. Not that there’s anything wrong with politicians working at the gas station, but it’s not common.”) Though he sometimes acts like a college kid—he canceled one interview for this story by having one of his younger brothers call and claim that the mayor had a sore throat—most of the time he handles himself with poise. He greeted the rancher politely and escorted the two much older and larger men into the back room.
Once the meeting started, you could hear the rancher’s voice from the front of the building, like a small motor converting exasperation and bile into sound. He was tired of people trespassing and leaving beer bottles and trash on his property. Reyes was sympathetic. On city property, too, people were dumping trash and tires. This administration is different, he assured the man. We want to work with you. By the end of the meeting, the rancher was much calmer, though noncommittal.
Reyes’ sympathy was almost certainly genuine. Illegal dumping preoccupies him as it has previous mayors, who have worked to acquire garbage trucks and exhorted the populace to pay for garbage service. When his predecessor, Oralia Reyes—no relation—ran for office, she explained her platform to the Laredo Morning Times as “a change in cleaning.” The city’s one full-time employee other than the city secretary is refuse collection clerk Juany Perez, a stunning, soft-spoken woman in her forties who processes trash-bill payments. Last year Reyes coordinated four cleanup drives and organized a group of “mayor’s teen volunteers” to pick up trash. The city also bought another garbage truck, and volunteers, including Reyes’s brother Erick, now collect trash four days a week.
El Cenizo’s annual budget amounts to less than $400,000, so progress depends on volunteers and grant money to accomplish just about anything. Reyes has worked hard to secure both. With the help of an Austin grant-writing agency, he’s wrangled more than $2 million. He’s also appointed two volunteer policemen, who patrol when they can (typically in the evenings after work); a handful of volunteer firemen; and a volunteer municipal judge, who is, conveniently, the mother of one of the policemen.
In El Cenizo, says Reyes, “the things we have we have because we’ve worked very hard to get them, whether it be a tree or a new door.” Those things have come in fits and starts, ever since what Israel Morales Reyna, a lawyer for Texas Riogrande Legal Aid (TRLA), in Laredo, refers to as El Cenizo’s “democratic revolution.” As Reyna tells it, back in the eighties the mayor and two commissioners were beholden to the colonia’s owner, D&A Realty, which maintained a significant fraction of the townspeople on its payroll. The council would meet in private to decide how to spend what little money the city collected, mostly from franchise fees. Then came D&A’s bankruptcy, as it was facing millions of dollars in prospective fines for violations of state environmental, health, and safety laws in El Cenizo and other developments. Titles to El Cenizo’s properties were transferred to a state-run nonprofit organization and eventually to residents themselves, and the city incorporated. Yet after some initial success administering the city independently, El Cenizo’s elected officials strayed from the good-government path, using public funds for whims like dry cleaning. TRLA had already helped bring more-open government to the nearby community of Rio Bravo, and so a group of El Cenizo residents came together and, calling themselves Gente Aliada Para el Mejoramiento de El Cenizo (People United for the Betterment of El Cenizo), approached Reyna to see whether it might do the same for their town.
After TRLA sued the city to disclose its financial records, candidates affiliated with Gente Aliada won office and passed a local property tax. And in the wake of Gente Aliada’s success, other groups formed with more-limited objectives, one of them the Alianza Nueva Gene-ración Para el Parque de El Cenizo, an alliance advocating for a city park. “This is where we first ran into Raul Reyes,” says Reyna, “a youth leader there who was very bright and who organized all types of activities for the youth.”
Reyes joined the alliance, but eventually the effort fell apart. Now, he’s still trying to get that park. Twelve acres along the river’s edge already constitute a park of sorts, with a soccer goal and a crude baseball diamond, but it’s weedy and often trash strewn. So Reyes has applied for a grant (and meanwhile dispatched volunteers to pick up the garbage); his park- improvement project is in line to receive several hundred thousand dollars from Texas Parks and Wildlife. Reyes expects that the improvements will happen, though when he took me out to see the land, I couldn’t help but think back to my visit to the town five years ago, when then-mayor Flora Baton was equally sanguine about the future of the park. These days, it’s looking worse than it did then, and in the end, the rancher declined to donate the two additional acres. But Reyes remains confident. After a little while, his optimism (what you might at first just take to be the sort of generic positive-thinking trait so often exhibited by elected officials as a species) begins to look different against the backdrop of El Cenizo—more dogged but also more patient.
NI DE AQUÍ NI DE ALLÁ. According to Reyes, El Cenizo residents will sometimes describe themselves as “from neither here nor there”—not from the United States, not from Mexico. “But we have as our slogan ‘Two Cultures, One Great City,’ because we are a great city,” he adds.
The day after the heads-of-lettuce call, their presence in the streets was explained to me by Ricardo Molina, the director of El Cenizo’s community center, which sponsors programs ranging from sewing classes to health clinics. The center is also a drop-off point for food delivered by Webb County’s food-bank program, which had without warning deposited some eight hundred heads of lettuce at the center just an hour before closing time. “People were very upset,” Molina said. “They told me they were going to send tomatoes. You can send twenty pallets of tomatoes, but lettuce? You can’t do a ton of stuff with lettuce.” So there were some sixty heads of lettuce left over at the end of the day, and apparently kids had gotten hold of some of them and used them as soccer balls.
Mystery solved, the conversation then turned to the nature of life in El Cenizo. “We’re out here by ourselves,” said Molina. “You’re going to live wherever you can afford to.” And, he said, echoing Reyes, that means living in a kind of limbo, between Mexico and the U.S. “Over there you’re a pocho because you’re not a Mexican. Over here you’re not a Texan, you’re a Mexican. But everybody’s trying to make it the best that they can.”
Given the dust and the poverty and a climate generally unfavorable to gardening, it’s impressive how many flowers and plants you see in El Cenizo: bougainvillea vaulting over a chain-link fence or small shrubs stubbornly lodged in inhospitable-looking ground. In May little clusters of tiny red flowers were growing in a small bed in a stretch of yard beside the community center. In their midst was a hand-painted sign: “Favor de no pisar las flores ni cortar” (“Please don’t step on the flowers or pick them”). As in just about any community, there are people in El Cenizo who want to cultivate something, and to keep what grows from being trampled.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
