The Beating Of Women

"The distraction is gone, and she can file all the appeals she wishes, who cares, she will be a citizen, who no one cares about. Well, maybe someone at La Placita might have a different view. Daisy, I am good for $50.00 for the korrry moving away fund, or as the Beatles use to sing, far, far away. I agree too many carpetbaggers in our city..." - Harlingen resident Olivia Levier Richardson

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

HARLINGEN, Texas - In Brownsville, less than 25 miles downrange from here, they throw the Sex Card at female politicians. It's always So and So's had an affair, while married, with any number of local males, usually many. They throw the dirt, and they do with gusto. Ask City Commissioner Melissa Zamora.

Here, in the sloping back of the Rio Grande Valley, the game is a bit different, but it is just as low-down and vicious. Woman elected officials get roasted right and left, for things that their male counterparts generally get away with, adultery especially.

City Commissioner Kori Marra is being shown the door today following her conviction in district court Monday on a charge of violating state ethics rules regarding governmental action. That conviction came yesterday afternoon; the blows arrived minutes later. It is a barbaric way to live, but there it is, splashed in all its raw, ripped-skin gore for all to see and enjoy.

Commissioner Marra has herself to blame for some of it. She is a single woman and, from all accounts, she partied hard. A glass of booze in her hand became the quintessential Marra photograph (see photo atop this story). They forever made the local blogging circles, where residents and other commenters quickly let her have it. She was now a loser and, in a land of losers, well, who wants losing exposed so dramatically, so publicly. Now, they want her gone, not only from the City Commission, but out of town.

What is it about the Mexican bordertowns and women? The region needs them, but it also uses and abuses them. Brownsville City Commissioner Zamora's image has segued from a string of photographs depicting her with different men to what now appears to be a settled elected official finally interested in aiding her community. Zamora's ride, however, was one of those stagecoach rolls over the bumpiest of roads. Nicknames bloggers used to characterize her never were kind, most obscene and vulgar. Ms. Marra met a similar fate after reports circulated showing her to be an oaf of sorts while performing her duties, at times declaring she would arm herself while attending city commission meetings at City hall, at others cursing at her colleagues, sometimes ignoring payroll taxes at her real estate business and finally then falling victim to the ethics violation related to a zoning proposal that saw her fail to recuse herself on a matter too close to home.

What becomes of Commissioner Marra?

Some say she was never a Harlingenite, amateur historians noting that she only moved to town to accompany her then-husband, a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Little about her past ever surfaced, with many residents not able to even name her hometown or speak about her accomplishments in school. Those who loathed her said she was a carpetbagger. Marra was attractive and she rousted the votes in her district to win election. In the end, however, she offered little in the way of a governmental vision, never really posturing ideas for the city's progress. Critics still argue she enjoyed being a city commissioner more than she worked at being one, although she would never be alone in the Valley on that count.

Still, Harlingen is left with one more blackeye to soothe.

It remains as goofy a town as it was before Kori Marra arrived. Nothing has changed. High school kids keep drinking before and after football games, gunfire flashes across gang-infested neighborhoods, the unemployed find refuge in Mexican music at the downtown bars and those colleagues of Marra's at City Hall stay their low-flying course. Not one said one word about Kori Marra's fall. It was the Ol' look-the-other-way move for the mayor.

Life is funny here. They stare at the dead carcass of yet another drug-pusher sprawled on the street curbs, but they amble on. In a town where there is no up, looking down on your troubled neighbor is the community sport...

- 30 -