How Jerry McHale Stole Brownsville From The Mexicans...

"Uno-dos-one-two-tres-quatro
AHHHHHHHHHHHH
Wooly bully
Watch it now - watch ityah girl - watch it
Matty told Hattie about a thing she saw
Had two big horns and a wooly jaw
Woolly bully-wooly bully-wooly bully
wooly bully -wooly bully.."
- Sam the Sham & The Pharoahs, Wooly Bully

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Sometime in the late-1970s, a goofy-haired gabacho strolled into this bordertown wearing a Panama hat he'd stolen off a sleeping passenger aboard an autobus de tercera rolling from Monterrey to Matamoros. His arrival here would be the moment history records as the seminal one that turned local writing and news-reporting on its head. Jerry McHale, this town's dean of blogging and a political gadfly extraordinaire, stepped off that battered bus, dusted-off his yellow, salsa-stained guayabera and staked claim to local geography as his own. Border Journalism's flag has been his ever since.

So, how did this California transplant with just enough Spanish to order a second helping of carne picada take this town without raising a finger? How did local reporters decide to cede him hallowed ground steeped in all things Hispanic? Why did they not take-on the new guy in town? In sojourns to downtown bars that came with genuine gritos and unemployed vato laughter, McHale disarmed the city's press without even trying. He had, it turns out, moseyed into the nation's last vacuum for creativity. Where local Hispanic reporters merely accepted two-bit jobs with the newspaper and rarely ventured into the pages of a dictionary, McHale threw out fighting words from Day One, his style quickly downing trees and brush in the same way that Cortez took Mexico City. Instead of wondering much about McHale's ripping of all cultural standards, the Mexicans here laughed alongside him, drinking beer and buying into the newcomer's deconstruction of the community's wait-till-tomorrow lifestyle.

When at full throttle, he began publishing a newspaper he himself distributed downtown, there under the noses of city politicians and other charlatans. Little girls streamed out of their classes at the local college for copies of the sensationalist El Rocinante. It was a high time for journalism, with new vocabulary previously tried in town suddenly bouncing off city government chambers, cantinas and cafes. McHale was not only clearing the forest; he was raking the leaves, and the leaves were always corrupt pols or bureaucrats not used to being hounded in English. For the Brown Boys in town, it was literature-in-a-hurry, journalism lessons without a fee, a rain of novel vocabulary never before seen in town. McHale had searched for the lost chord and discovered this entire community offered him a full orchestra. He partied, he danced, he romanced, he found and fueled rumor, he smoked and he toked. For the little bordertown forever at the mercy of boredom, McHale was the best in free entertainment.

That was more than three decades ago.

Today, the 60-year-old McHale still reigns over local writing, offering work on his latest blog that still shows the Mexicans how it's done, still sets the reporting tone and still remains the day's must-read for the 140,000 legal and illegal residents who call this under-achieving town home. Others have risen from the weeds that is local writing, but few have approached McHale's standard. Most eventually pattern their blogs after McHale's, and one even reaches for rare English vocabulary, as if to wish a major leap onto the clouds of Shakespearean wonder. What results is a laughable stab by a Mexican wishing to sound as if he just stepped off a freighter in from Liverpool.

History rarely bothers with this part of the country. Nothing of any significance has ever been invented here, and it's been years since that one major enterprise - Pan Am Airlines - left town. Rotten sheriffs have gone to jail. Judges have fallen victims to bribery. Criminals fill the disgusting county jail. Drinking-While-Driving has replaced baseball as the comunity's top sport, and adultery occupies the minds and bodies of a large percentage of the town's adults.

Somewhere back there, McHale got the feeling that this town was easy pickings for his brand of reporting, somewhere back there when he tasted his first beers in Brownsville, back there when he landed that first brown-skinned beauty who rested on the seventh day of aggressive courtship and and handed him her body, front and back.

Something is said without saying it when a community embraces a visionary. And perhaps that is how McHale is seen in town so many years after his first all-out salvo of criticism. He has enslaved an entire community, treated them to dramatic news and inside jokes and now those same residents of the success-starved community know how it feels to be spanked daily.

They like it...

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