An abecedarian for “Los Dos Laredos”: Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, México, and Laredo, Texas, USA

Across the river, Walgreens and Happy Meals. On our side, Farmacia
Benavides y tortas from El Padrino. You know, pesos instead of dólares.
Charisma and dormant rancor on her eyelids, my mother Graciela was a one-time
doppelgänger of La Novia de México, Angélica Maria. As
exquisite as she was frugal, my mother ran a lil pop-up
flea market from our front yard every weekend in the late 1980s– a flourishing
gambit so her family could afford huevos for dinner, cos our dad–
He-Man, he was not. Graciela would cross the border
independently and buy little tchotchkes to sell for a reasonable profit. It was fungible
junk, really, pero totally fancy to our neighbors sin papeles.
Knick-knacks del otro lado by way of China, my mother’s products would barely
last a season, and her customers knew it. Pero por un
momento majestuoso, they could feel supremely opulent.
Nombre, all the neighbors would come by for a bit, especially
Olivia from across the street con sus hijas, who spoke
puro pinche Spanglish. My mother would sometimes play her favorite song,
“Querida,” by Juan Gabriel– the anthem of 1985, always on the
radio. His feminine growl matched his torrid vulnerability, “¡Mira mi
soledad, mira mi soledad!” Wasn’t Juan Ga’s loneliness a tragedy of
titanic proportions? Of course it was. I didn’t know then that,
ultimately, my mother was all alone, despite how much people envied her
Verónica Castro eyes, despite her three children always trying to please her,
watchful for the ways we could be exactly who she wanted us to be.
Xenófoba con éxito, esta mujer. Perhaps she simply longed for the gazes of
yesteryear as a teen– wearing homesewn fashion, selling shoes at
Zapatería Elisa, prosperous young men yearning to admire her face to their heart’s content.

Of course I’d write about growing up in Laredo in the 1980s. I’ll take any excuse to write about Mexican pop culture heroes like Juan Gabriel. To elevate the poem, I chose to write it as an abecedarian, where each line begins with the first letter of the alphabet, “A,” and is followed by each successive letter until we get to “Z.” I always try to write at least one line that is easily understood by a beginning learner of English– one that can be translated into any language without much fuss, for the sake of accessibility.