María Eugenia Guerra, known to everyone except perhaps to her centenarian schoolteachers at Ryan Elementary as MEG, has deep Laredo roots. Roots in more than just our city and a soil, but in time, all the way back to 1750, when her Guerra Cañamar ancestors came north to the Río Bravo and settled in Revilla (Guerrero Viejo.)
MEG was a truth-telling journalist for twenty years with the monthly print newspaper LareDOS, which she founded, edited, wrote and sold ads for, published — and even delivered if need be. Her articles about the malfeasance and abuse of office by Laredo city and Webb County political leaders were as effective as relentless. She was Laredo’s previously missing “someone watching” in the aphorism, “Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching.”
Hers was courageous and invaluable work.
More than one self-important politician had to look at the unflattering image held up to him in LareDOS’ honest mirror. There was no exaggerating, no hysterical ranting in MEG’s exposés. Her articles were extensively documented, worthy of Sgt. Friday’s “just the facts, ma’am.” The hypocrisy and misuse of public funds embarrassed vain politicos as they entertained an audience of indignant readers.
Those investigations were a useful community service in the small newspaper’s heyday. Looking forward into the future, MEG’s work will be a window on Laredo’s environmental, cultural, political, and commercial life; on its scoundrels and how the city changed and didn’t change, as the old patrón system migrated from City Hall to the school district to Webb County and back again.
Laredo has never had anything like it.
However, other sides of MEG’s unusual genius are too often overlooked.
One of the sharpest knives in her political writing was an ironic sense of humor. How often was iniquity in high places laid open for all Laredo to see, not with a shrill tone, but with a smiling, razor-sharp scalpel in a velvet glove. More often than not, the objects of her exposés were as humiliated by the humor of the portraits as by the shame of having their true faces revealed to the public.
When the city decided to build a $38 million ice skating rink financed by a tax increase in 2000, LareDOS satirized the incongruity of such an out-of-place project in a commentary by one “Cholula Bankhead.” According to the mock report, members of the Society of Martha Washington were planning a “Marthas on Ice” skating spectacular to include a finale called “Lip Service on Ice,” in which city public works officials would appear “in sheaths that resemble lipstick tubes dancing in synchronization.”
And there were the cartoons. For example, the one on the cover of a 2007 LareDOS in which Mayor Raul Salinas and the City Council were drawn exuberantly destroying a wetland adjacent to Lake Casa Blanca to build an unneeded but lucrative strip mall. The cartoon called it “Dead Duck Mall,” and the Mayor’s pet Chihuahua “Princess” is shown asking plaintively, “Why you want to keel all my leetle friends?” When he saw the offending issues of LareDOS Mayor Salinas was so angered by the cartoon that he had all the copies of LareDOS at the Laredo International Airport confiscated and thrown in the trash. Unfortunately for the Mayor, defending himself against the obvious First Amendment violation, the denials were proven false by the recordings on the airport’s surveillance cameras.
With all the focus on MEG’s holding Laredo politicians’ feet to the fire, there has been less notice of her environmental activism. The fact is, however, her work defending the river flowing between the two Laredos is but another aspect of her political writing.
And it was more than just the writing: MEG served as the first executive director of the river pollution watchdog Rio Grande International Study Center, which was founded in 1994. She chaired Laredo’s Citizen Haz Mat Advisory Committee, the group that drafted the city’s landmark first environmental and hazardous waste ordinance in 1999. Many issues of LareDOS included environmental reporting with special attention to the careless handling of toxic chemicals and the consequences of unregulated development since NAFTA.
Anyone who reads MEG’s “Santa María Journal” will be moved by the ongoing presence in it of her young granddaughters, Emily and Amanda, as they grew up. One of the journal’s themes is MEG sharing with them (and us) her love for that special place. There is a gentle kindness in that maternal love which also informs her writing about Laredo. When threats and personal invective might have turned a lesser person to disowning her hometown, MEG never stopped loving Laredo. She always held up to us an unchanging vision of our better self. Like a good mother, MEG has taught with patience and disciplined with love rather than anger.
The lyric essays in “Santa María Journal” are keen observations of the natural world. They are informed by a sense of ranchland culture and family history, all written with the sensibility of a poet. Together they make MEG’s Santa María Journal a landmark of South Texas writing. In them, the monte was given its voice.
From close-up perspectives of ranch life to visions of the universe, and the connection of outer and inner worlds, passages like this appear in every entry. “Out in the brush I love the surprises that fill my vista — a covey of quail flushed from the brush, the sighting of a pair of wild turkeys, a red fox hurrying across the cow path to an assignation with its dinner, the Milky Way a creamy, breathtaking sash on the indigo of the night sky.”
Many have been the quiet beneficiaries of MEG’s kindness; from apprentice writers she mentored to older ones she published for the first time.
María Eugenia Guerra, Laredo journalist and environmentalist, yes — and vouched for with awards and recognition.
But also, lest we forget: nature writer, historian, humorist, poet, mother, grandmother, and generous friend.
(Dan Clouse, native Laredoan, first baseman on the 1960 American Little League Yankees, and a graduate of Nixon High School, lives with his family on Puget Sound in the state of Washington. During his 40-year academic career, he taught students from pre-K to college. Nowadays, he writes occasional columns for LareDos[redux] and his local monthly, The Key Peninsula News.)
