The historical division of ‘Bi Laredo’ ends with the reopening of the border US-Mexico border news

Laredo, Texas – For nearly 20 months, Lilia Brava did not see her elderly mother, who lived a few miles across the U.S.-Mexico border, as U.S. authorities closed her for non-essential travel in March 2020 in early COVID-19. pandemic.

Brava, a non-resident worker who cleans homes in Laredo, Texas, would not be able to return to Mexico if he passed by to visit his family across the river. Even when his brother died in COVID-19 in Nuevo Laredo last year, he was unable to attend the funeral with his mother.

“These were the hardest times of my life,” Brava said Monday in the central plaza in downtown Laredo. “My mother needed me the most so I couldn’t see her at the time.”

When the border reopened on Monday, Brava’s mother, 73-year-old Beatriz Mercado, left her home in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico and crossed a pedestrian bridge to Texas to meet her daughter. Downton Laredo’s central square was embraced for the first time in a year and a half. Throughout the plaza, dozens of people who had just crossed the nearby border bridge waited for family members who had not seen them for more than a year and a half.

Much was expected to reopen on Monday, with Customs and Border Protection agents warning of the planned six-hour wait to cross, and the economy of Laredo drowning in this place as they waited to return the crowd of Mexican buyers. But when morning came, only a few people were crossing the bridge, a sign that life will not return to the way it was in this bi-national community on both banks of the Rio Grande.

“I was surprised there was no line, nothing,” Mercado said as he hugged his daughter in the square.

The reopening marked the end of a historic subway break known as the “two Laredos,” where about 450,000 people live in Mexico and 250,000 live in Texas.

While the border was open to U.S. citizens at the time, it was closed to almost all Mexican citizens along the river and to thousands of citizens living without a residence permit in Texas. They were allowed to cross some essential workers – mostly those associated with the massive and prosperous inner port of Laredo. The barrier separated families, removed thousands of people from their livelihoods and forced two brothers from cities before the border to move away for 18 months.

“Laredo and Nuevo Laredo are like a city that crosses a river,” said Sister Rosemary Welsh, Laredo’s executive director of Mercy Ministries, which has been doing humanitarian work here since 1993. “All this was Mexico until we stole it.”

The two city brothers were one until the United States took over the territory in 1848, making Rio Grande an international border. After that, the limit was barely set until the 1980s, when he was 15, according to Ernesto Canche, a 75-year-old who has worked in downtown Laredo.

For Cancher, closing the border was the worst disaster he had ever seen in this city.

The devaluation of the Mexican peso has been experienced since the beginning of border security in 1994 and after September 11, 2001. It faced the outbreak of war in northern Mexico, a region that has once inhabited a harsh atmosphere since 2006.

“No one like that has affected us like that,” he said in a roundtable at a downtown clothing store. “This was horrible.”

Not far from the Rio Grande that divides the city, downtown Laredo has long been a commercial district in the center of the urban brothers. People came every day from Nuevo Laredo and all over northern Mexico to shop. The area was targeted at Mexican customers rather than the U.S..

“People with money don’t come here, they go to big stores and northern shopping malls,” said Jose Alvarado, opposite the old town hall of Laredo, the manager of printing T-shirts called Jerico.

Jose Alvarado, the manager of a t-shirt printing shop in downtown Laredo, said his business has barely lasted since closing the border. [Dylan Baddour/Al Jazeera]

The field had been in decline for a decade, he said. Then, the pandemic border closure left half of the shops closed or closed, with abandoned buildings in almost every urban area. Expensive shopping malls in North Laredo also lost a key customer base: holiday buyers from all over Mexico, hundreds of whom came every day to buy American clothing brands and electronics. Susie Torres, marketing director at CBL Properties, which owns Mall del Norte in northern Laredo, said Mexican buyers accounted for 40 percent of sales there.

As a result of the border closure, the northern crossings of the area’s main pedestrian bridge were reduced by 60 percent from about 1,834,000 in the first half of 2019 to about 1,482,000 in the first half of this year, according to data from Texas A&M International University’s Texas Center. .

Crossings of vehicles heading north fell by about 43 per cent from 2,133,000 to 1,209,000 in the same period.

The closure of the border left many buildings in the center of Laredo boarded, closed or abandoned [Dylan Baddour/Al Jazeera]

Thousands of people traveled daily or weekly from the southern hemisphere to the U.S. to work. The economies on both sides of the river have depended on the flow of daily workers between the two Laredos, said Israel Reyn, a lawyer for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, which represents low-income clients at no cost.

In Nuevo Laredo, many people who worked in the north have struggled to transplant their businesses.

“It’s been a very difficult time,” said 70-year-old Joel Arroyo, who drove a cart that sold homemade candy in downtown Mexico City. “Not just for me, everyone was affected.”

Joel Arroyo lives in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico and sold candy in Laredo, Texas. [Dylan Baddour/Al Jazeera]

He used to go to Laredo every day to sell sweets in the summer and sell pallets in the busy streets of downtown in the winter. He then took home at least $ 12 a day. Since closing, it has tried to sell on the Mexican side, but rarely earns more than $ 5 a day.

Others like him, he said, have set up taco businesses from home kitchens or sold personal belongings to make money.

On Monday, public officials gathered at a press conference on the main pedestrian bridge in the sister cities to celebrate the reopening. U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar, a member of Congress for the Laredo region, said the U.S. has lost about $ 30 billion from Mexican consumers who spend in the U.S..

The mayor of Nuevo Laredo, Carmen Lilia Canturosas, acknowledged that the last 18 months have been tough times for the community.

He told reporters and many city leaders gathered near the bridge, “I know better times are coming for the two Laredo.”