Oh No....They're Back!

It’s that time of the year again. The first cold fronts are pushing in and with it the snowbirds are returning in flocks. They come streaming in, driving great huge dullies pulling fifth wheels half the length of a normal Wal-Mart store, driving gaudily painted motorhomes the size of Air Force one, careening down the highway, a menace to innocent life and limb. Most of these overall clad, gimme hat weaing mid westerners spent the majority of their lives driving John Deere tractors in expansive prairie fields, terrorizing woodchucks and gophers, driving their new-every-year pickup trucks down to the mailbox to pick up their subsidy checks for not growing non-existent crops in the fine American farmer tradition. Getting rich off of the government tit, till eventually “retiring”, driving down to the Rio Grande Valley to be a pain in the ass to the local population. Jeezus, I’ll bet their children are glad to see them go every year. I’ve threatened the fuckers (and I’m not kidding)” that when I get old, I’m going to move up NORTH and be a goddamn pain in the ass”….

Most of them act like they’ve done something good for the world. They drive around with cutesy bumper stickers that say things like “Support the American Farmer”. Fuck you. Goddamn subsidy whores.

And they all know everything there is to know about our home. Where to get the best deals, how to “jew down them meskins over in Progreso”, where the cheapest this and that is. And the fuckers have the attitude that we just won’t make it without them, if they ever stop coming here. Screw you. We did just fine before you came here, and we’ll do just fine when you find some other cheap ass part of the world to go to and be a shitheap in. And everything’s better “back home”. Well…..fuck you again…I say, go back home then.

They pull their goddamn RV’s for six months at a time into old fart RV parks that are empty the rest of the year…just dusty cement pads waiting for the viejitos to come back with their mobile monstrosities, waiting for them to plant yard signs out front that read; “The Edelmyers / Elmer and Eunice”, “God Bless this Winnebago / Bob and Betty Niemenstrudel” and various other wellkomen crap.

No, I’m serious. Each year they get worse. Or maybe it’s just me…my tolerance level is getting less and less.

I attended a meeting last week, a winter Texan meeting, and listened to them bitch about things for the better part of an hour. Terminally unhappy people, truly concerned with only one thing: themselves. I wanted to tell them the story, wanted to shame them by making them aware of how little they really know, how truly meaningless and pathetic their lives really were. I’ll bet they couldn’t even begin to tell how they got here…how it all began. They just blindly migrate, as if by instinct, no more intelligent than the sparrow, and a whole lot less visually pleasing.

But they come here just like my grandparents did, from the Midwest. Now they don’t come following the lure of cheap land and a 365 day growing season, riding the SLB&M through the King Ranch, in a Pullman car with the shades pulled down so they wouldn’t see the barren monte, in the middle of a moonlit night, to be shuttled, sleepily to a “tourist house”, only to awaken on a warm winter morning, thinking of “back home” where snow was piled high, wondrous at the smell of orange blossom and the sound of exotic peacocks screaming and fanning along the fountain lined gardens…the winter gardens. Greedily snatching up land that was snatched from the locals in a variety of methods.

My favorite method was incorporated when A.Y. Baker was running Hidalgo county. He’d post the tax rolls on the courthouse door and then only open the door from something like two to four in the afternoon so that folks could see how much they owed. Hell, old Eulalio out on El Rancho Pequeno couldn’t even read or write in Spanish, let alone English, and for damned sure didn’t have any idea that the gringos were stacking the deck against him. He only knew how to work cattle, and that the land had been passed on to him from his ancestors, land that had been originally awarded to them back in the 1700’s by the King of Spain as a procione, for their settling this malaria and mosquito infested section of the river. Land that had withstood almost two hundred years of turmoil, the Mexican American war, protected by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, only to be lost in the early twentieth century to unscrupulous mid western carpetbagger speculators with a vision to turn the Rio Grande Delta into their own personal mecca. And don’t think the poor “land seekers”, other mid westerners like my own ancestors didn’t escape the carpetbaggers tricks either. Some of the speculators went to jail for selling the same parcel again and again, and even when there was clear title, it was a living summer hell to try and irrigate the desert in the blazing hundred plus degree days. Dennis Bangs Chapin, the County Judge and speculator who was involved in the great Hidalgo County Courthouse heist was indicted for murdering an irate land seeker up in San Antonio, one whom had been sold land that had been sold to another. Chapins’ namesake townsite was changed from “Chapin” to Edinburg” in 1912 for that reason, the settlers just couldn’t abide a murderers name on their town. Not that I blame them.

The land seekers, the first midwesterners finally managed to carve out this fetid section of river, and by the 1960’s, when I was a kid, their children were migrating down here in the winters. We called ‘em “tourists” and “snowbirds” (I still do), and they’d usually stay with their kinfolk here, a few brought early airstreams and other trailers to set up out on the farms or along old 83 where the hub of city life was at the time. Mostly they were an innocuous bunch, kept pretty much to themselves. I remember them, but only vaguely. The didn’t swell our population, and clog our roads like putrid cholesterol in the arteries of this place, like they do today.

Now it’s subsequent generations, who no longer have the attachment that the early snowbirds did. Generations removed from the early ties. Our farm fields, citrus orchards and ranches have been converted to mobile home parks, and many businesses have sprung up to cater to these people. Now they’re too busy worrying about themselves to take the time and learn who we really are, maybe lend a helping hand to one of the poorest, least educated areas of the country, a true third world. I wanted to tell them that we’re survivors, and that their measly, pinche annual contribution to our economy could be done without.

If these people REALLY knew all there was to know about this place, they’d know what the names meant, names like Donna, Winter Gardens, Edcouch and Elsa, Weslaco, Sharyland, Pharr and others. I guess they’re too busy trying to figure out how to jew down them meskins over in Progreso though.