Ni de aquí, Ni de allá: Laredo, Texas as America’s Macondo, A Photo Essay
Dion Dennis
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Scene One: April 1973: After spending months crossing Mexico, twenty-year-old D and twenty-two-year-old Maura were detained at the Customs and Border Patrol shack on the US side of the International Bridge that crossed the Rio Grande. After having their aluminum-framed orange backpacks aggressively searched, sullen agents gruffly dismissed them into the searing heat.
The couple had landed in Laredo, a third place that remains Ni de aquí, Ni de allá (Neither from here, nor from there). Back in the early 1970s, Laredo was the dusty, dilapidated seat of Webb County, the poorest in the US. Its governmental structure and function was hacienda-basedand deeply patronist, dominating a poverty-stricken population that was overwhelmingly Catholic and collectivist. Like Southern Italy, a Romance language served as the lingua franca for a population at the edges of geographic, cultural and nation-state margins. However, because Laredo shared much of the demographics, language and sensibilities of its sister city of Nuevo Laredo, attempts at suturing the inherent ambiguity between American and Mexican identities have been a defining feature. The local culture is a bricolage, a mash-up, generating a unique place not clearly American or Mexican; ni de aquí, ni de allá: Substitute a corrupt patronist system for the initial egalitarianism of García Márquez’s Macondo, and you get, at least in one iteration, Laredo: At the margins, it generated an insular subculture, unrecognized or unintelligible to the dominant cultures to the north or south, and only dimly aware of transformations that lay ahead.
Scene Two: Between 1979 and 1993, the US lost forty-three million blue-collar and manufacturing jobs. Mexican factories, maquiladoras, were initially permitted to assemble US-made components near the border, to be shipped to the US, with importers paying only a value-added tax, beginning in the mid-1960s. In a series of steps, Mexico abandoned its stiff tariff policies over the next two decades (as the once ubiquitous slogan "Contrabando es Contra Mexico" was retired), joining the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in the mid-1980s. With industrial competition from the rise of Japan, and subsequently the "Asian Tigers" of manufacturing (Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan), the table was set for a counter to their growing dominance; the ratification of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), between Canada, the US and Mexico, in the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s, Laredo became the largest inland port in the US.
Staffing more than a thousand logistics and transportation companies, customs brokerages in-and-around Laredo, the metro population has grown by 367 percent between 1960 and 2025, from 60,000 to 280,000. Laredo had become legible to the American mainstream, its insularity pierced by the growing ubiquity of intercontinental trade and the Internet . By the mid-1990s, the State of Texas had committed more than $60,000,000 to build the initial campus buildings on the northern edge of Laredo. Subsequent phased expansions of Texas A&M International University brought the total infrastructural investment to $320,000,000, part of a generational effort to grow a local professional class. Concurrently, and as a counterpoint to the elaborate, yearly held Society of Martha Washington's Colonial Ball, which reified Laredo's "old money," the rising professional classes created a parallel legitimation ritual, The Pocahontas Pageant. At the Martha Washington Colonial Ball, debutantes parade in cumbersome hoop-skirt gowns that cost as much as $40,000. At the Pocahontas Pageant, the children of the professional class elite re-enact the "peaceful surrender" myth of native compliance, with teenagers extravagantly festooned with a phantasmagoria of beads and feathers. Both ceremonies are a yearly reinscription of privilege in the context of aristocratic, elitist rituals.
Meanwhile, on the streets, traffic on the World Trade Bridge totaled more than $350,000,000,000 of goods in 2025. At first glance, the words of García Márquez's Aureliano Segundo, ebulliently expressed at the height of Macondo's prosperity, echo: "Cease cows! Life is short!"
Scene Three A: Trump Administration trade and tariff policies have monkey-wrenched freight operations in Laredo across several dimensions. Logistics companies have been transformed into behemoth compliance firms, immersed in red tape. Warehouses are no longer storage facilities, but "value-added" assembly points, launching fleets of local trucks choking traffic across Laredo's streets. Revocation of the "De Minimis Rule," which exempted packages under $800 to duties, has rendered a class of mammoth-sized facilities, designed to handle 100,000 or more such packages a day, either as unfinished skeletal construction sites, or as severely underutilized facilities, given the additional requirement of a formal declaration of a customs entry for each package. More broadly, the effects of the repeal of De Minimis has jumpstarted one of the conditions for infrastructural abandonment, mimicking the fate of the failed "Electric Ice Factory," in Cien Años de Soledad.
Concurrently, Downtown Laredo is a near-ghost-town; the streets feature rows of empty and entirely boarded-up storefronts, the result of a wave of bankruptcies, a testament to the decimation of cross-border migration and retail traffic in the wake of the end of De Minimis.
Scene Three B: From the Laredo Morning Times, April 24, 2026:
“Our entire city depends on the river [Rio Grande],” [Mayor] Trevino said. “Any disruption — whether from drought, contamination or an upstream incident — puts our water supply at risk.”
[Mayor] Trevino added that in a worst-case scenario, the city has only eight to 10 hours of stored water available without significant conservation measures, underscoring the urgency of expanding storage capacity.
The decaying water and sewer infrastructure has generated eight E coli boil notices over the last half-decade. A study commissioned by the city has estimated that water supplies, from the Amistad Reservoir, will be exhausted by 2040, exacerbated by an antiquated and grossly inefficient water supply system and the effects of climate change, in the form of intensified and prolonged heat coupled with drought. The City of Laredo's proposed remedy is massive importation of water via Lake Casa Blanca and a broad campaign of infrastructural improvements. Whether these will be sufficient to avoid the water rationing that recently plagued Laredo's neighbor, a hundred miles to the south, Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, is an open question.
What are the net effects of these multiple crises? The Census Bureau tells us that, in 2025, the Laredo metro area experienced the largest percentage drop in population growth in the US, largely due to aggressive ICE enforcement. An April 2026 report on individual credit card debt levels from WalletHub ranks Laredo at eighth worst for the highest percentage of delinquent credit card debt (sandwiched between Memphis and Baltimore), with a delinquency rate of twelve percent. Even more telling is a November 20, 2025 WalletHub survey of mortgage delinquency rates. A whopping nearly one-in-four (23.85 percent) of Laredo mortgages are in delinquency, more than five percent above the runner-up, Detroit.
On top of all of this, it's unclear what the effects of the 2026 USMCA (US/Mexico/Canada Agreement) review will have on Laredo's future. If the Trump Administration's goal is to revoke the "value-added" exemption, reversing a policy more than sixty years old, the commodity assembly industry in Laredo may soon vanish. Already, in 2025 and 2026, metals imports through Port Laredo fell by 13.6 percent, industrial vacancy reached 11.5 percent as institutional tenants hesitated, and capital investment decisions across the corridor stalled amid policy uncertainty. And if the Trump Administration decides to terminate the USMCA, more than a billion dollars in infrastructure will most likely be as orphaned as shuttered Amazon warehouses. Laredo may retain major significance as a logistics hub, but merely as a transit point managed by AI, robots, and skeletal crews of workers and managers. The market for the recently cultivated, large, educated professional middle-class talent in Laredo may well dissolve.
In A Hundred Years of Solitude, Macondo's demise is the result of two factors: The corporate greed of The Banana Company coupled with an environmental disaster; years of torrential rains. If the Trump Administration turns the screws on US-Mexico trade as climate-change driven drought exhausts water supplies, and corporations withdraw from city services, will Laredo become an iteration of Macondo?
Hurricane force winds erased what little remained of Macondo. A different kind of erasure may face Laredo: It may well be hollowed out as a small city, its public infrastructure chronically degraded, its tax revenues dwindling, while private behemoth logistics and freight services, with their own fortress-like water and energy supplies remain, detached from the rump that was once Laredo.
Scene Four: Snapshots of Laredo in Transition, 1993-1998
I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Texas A&M International in Laredo, during this period, in the initial years of NAFTA's effect on the area. With an interest in semiotics, I found the largely unconscious bricolage of architecture and symbols to be fascinating, representing the peculiar insularity of the culture at a time of transition. I share some of these above.
Dion Dennis is a retired Associate Professor. His post-academic memoir pieces appear in The Thieving Magpie, Across the Margin, The Write Launch, The Drift and Dribble Miscellany as well as forthcoming in The Hemlock Journal and Bull. His critical literary work appears in minor literature[s]. Academic publications include CTHEORY, Postmodern Culture, First Monday, Fast Capitalism, Rhizomes, Humanity and Society, and The Education Policy Analysis Archives, as well as chapters in interdisciplinary anthologies.