IT’S A PART OF THE HUMAN CONDITION TO romanticize your place of origin, to look nostalgically back upon the things you grew up with, and then wistfully shrug off or ignore the negatives.
I grew up in Brownsville, so I’ve never been burdened with this particular sentimentality; I’ve always known Brownsville for exactly what it is, the good and the bad.
Unexpectedly, I spent the last 10 months here, after living the previous 23 years on the West Coast, and the changes I noticed were terrifying at first.
The immediate and most significant was, of course, the border fence, this 21-foot-tall iron monstrosity with the presence of the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, serving as a constant reminder that you, as a citizen of the border, are…