The other side

This week we went on a trip to the other side. The other side of the Rio Bravo (a.k.a. the Rio Grande), i.e. the United States of America, the world's richest nation, the walhalla of mass consumption, the land of unlimited opportunity, the country that millions of Mexicans longingly gaze at from across the river, hoping to get in and get a piece of that pie. The only Mexicans that can actually get in legally are those that have money and hence a good life in Mexico, because the gringos figure that those Mexicans will happily return to Mexico after having spent a large chunk of their cash in Texas' WalMarts, Targets and JCPenneys. And that is in fact precisely what they do, as we have found out this week.


We went to McAllen in Texas, a border town of about 170,000 inhabitants, with a disproportionate amount of WalMart Supercenters, malls and other shopping facilities. When you go shopping in McAllen you hardly hear any English, as all these shops purely cater to the well-off Mexicans that pop across the border for a day to buy stuff that is a lot more expensive back in Mexico. And that's the funny part. People that live in the third world go to the first world to buy goods because they are much cheaper there.

This is the Puente Internacional across the Rio Grande, with the first world on the left and the third world on the right. We were already on our way back, we entered the US at night to avoid having to wait hours to get in.
And on the other side: Texas, where eveything's bigger. Big flags, big SUVs, big stores, big people.



This is a homage to local soldiers that died in the Iraq war. This wall is located next to customer service in one of McAllen's WalMart Supercenters. Almost all of these soldiers were latinos.

A typical Texan car dealership, with huge SUVs and pickups. With petrol at 25 eurocents a litre, driving these beasts is not so uneconomical as it is in Europe.

Our mode of transport was slightly more modest, a Nissan Sentra, driven by my brother-in-law Javier. It was a seven-hour drive up from San Luis to McAllen, with the last stretch being a 150-km straight line.

And after having bought iPods, clothes, baby stuff, a Nintendo console and shoes we left the nicely organised and somewhat sterile first world to go back to chaotic, charming and lively Mexico.