On Border Women...

"No es ninguna aberración sexual
pero me gusta verte andar en cueros;
al compás de tus pechos aventureros
víctimas de la gravedad.
Será porque no me gusta la tapicería
que creo que tu desnudezes tu mejor lencería..."
- Ricardo Arjona, Desnuda

By RUDOLF VON BULOW
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - You could take a yearlong survey and look at the results that way. Or you could just walk around in any of a dozen Rio Grande Valley towns and see it firsthand. You could move there and live it. The full-bodied Hispanic woman is in these days. Local men may deny it, but there they are, chasing them across the fleamarket landscapes, hiding behind the crowd of elote-eaters while eyeballing to their content.

Not much is written in national publications about Brownsville women. You won't see them on the cover of People magazine. You won't see them on television, shooting the breeze with Oprah or Dr. Oz. They'll pop up in the news, although usually as victims of crime or spousal abuse. Here, a few would argue that this bordertown is no different than those upriver, that the lifestyle is such that geography deals them their daily day, and that, well, that geography is harsh and unforgiving, a clear and present bastard.

But back to our reason for being here, and that is to write about the community's female fare. To be fair, it is a full-card menu consisting of the usual skinny, annoying ones, the overbiters, the fighters, the hefty and the discarded, as in divorced. Any first-year photographer would tell you Brownsville women are due their own exhibit at the best museums across the world. Border Women, A Study in Stone Faces, would be the title, the attraction. Downtown, they flit about like butterflies in colorful regalia, shopping for shoes and bags. In the bars and cafes, they amble-in like sexual animals on break, eyes of the male clientele on their bouncing breasts, on their Jell-oish buttocks. It is free TV, the mental undressings coming with each new patron angling for a table. "Psssssssst," coos one uncouth vato, his ignorance offered willingly. She sashays onward, chest thrown out, hair in a splay, leaving him to his misery.

Of course, women across the planet know their place. They know the power they wield over men, however momentary. They know the biological clock better than men. They know their time and beauty is fleeting. In relationships, they know the ending before it unfolds. They know, and men know they know. Local women fall into the same column in the Life ledger, all of them wild-eyed dreamers in the beginning and sad-faced realists in the end. Fate may just be that wink at the bar, that permission in the backseat, that decision to unfurl on a cold, dark night. The female brain also schemes...

- 30 -

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Writer Von Bulow wrote this after a long night of drinking at a South Padre Island nightclub, on one of those outings when he threw out his line, but never landed a fish...]