Sitting at the desk in her third-floor office, Dr. Mehnaaz Momen shook her head and laughed softly and somewhat regretfully. “I have students in my class who have never been to Nuevo Laredo,” she told me. “This is unbelievable. If you look at the way people talk about Laredo, there’s no experience in Laredo without Nuevo Laredo, but now [this] still just shocks me.”
Having taught at TAMIU since 2002, Dr. Momen has been here long enough to understand — as an educator, a researcher and author, an immigrant, and a Laredoan — how circumstances in the city and on the border have changed over the years. In both her classes and her books, she has critically examined and considered the effects of NAFTA, the Trump presidencies, U.S. immigration policy, the cartels’ presence, and the city’s emphasis on commercialization over quality of life. But she also realizes she has much more to learn about Laredo, Laredoans, and the border.
While conducting seventy-five interviews with local people for her most recent book, Listening to Laredo: A Border City in a Globalized Age (University of Arizona Press, 2023), Dr. Momen said she “developed a… much closer connection to the city.” Doing field research — driving around town and talking to locals — “changed my relationship with the city. Even though these are not my memories,” she explained, “I felt like I kind of had access to these memories…. I mean I’ve lived here, but I had more of a functional relation with Laredo. I think this book changed [that].”
Clearly, this “functional relation” — the distant and objective professional association academics and professors often have with this community — can be difficult to escape, particularly given TAMIU’s location on Laredo’s outskirts and the primarily academic work consuming professors’ time. Because Dr. Momen understands this relation, her comment about field research is especially refreshing.
She explained that she “grew up in a bubble” in Bangladesh because she “lived in the university campus,” where her parents, both educators, “were paid very, very poorly.” But once she was older and began doing “field work, going to the villages,” “I got to know much more about Bangladesh,” and, she pointed out, “that… opened my eyes.”
Years later, after writing three books, two of which are largely academic and depended on secondary research, she finished her most recent book about Laredo and reached an interesting conclusion: “I don’t think I’m going back to only secondary research anymore because this [primary research in the field] is so much more fun.”
That a university professor characterizes research as “fun” might well surprise people, but in light of her experiences both recently and years ago, it’s certainly understandable.
When growing up in Bangladesh, for example, Dr. Momen rarely had the chance to enjoy ice cream, which was expensive. Eventually, however, new factories opened around the country, and, as a result, ice cream became much cheaper. But “then we heard,” she explained, “that milk had been donated from the Soviet Union but that, in fact, [it came] from Chernobyl,” the site of the 1986 nuclear power plant accident. She laughed and went on. “I don’t know whether it’s true or just a rumor,” she said and laughed again, “but everyone used to joke if we have a child with two heads, then we will know that it’s true.
“So many things sound so bizarre [about Bangladesh], but that unpredictability — I miss that. So in a way that warms me towards Laredo because it also has that kind of vibe, that third-world vibe, where anything can happen.” Her face lights up as she says this. And “if I see something [unusual in Laredo] and I think, ‘Just like Bangladesh,’ to me that’s not criticism.”
Definitely not. That, at the very least, is genuine affection
(Randy Koch taught at Laredo College from 1997-2002 and at TAMIU from 2002-2007, earned an MFA in poetry writing at the University of Wyoming in 2009, and then taught for eleven more years at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. After retiring from teaching during the early days of COVID, he returned to southwestern Minnesota, the area where he grew up, and during the next five years, researched and wrote three volumes of family history. He’s also the author of several poetry collections—Composing Ourselves, This Splintered Horse, and Against the Risen Flesh—and a textbook called Serving Sentences: Twelve Ways to Break Out a Better Writer. In 2025 he moved back to Laredo and is working on a memoir of his twenties and experimenting with some new poems. And he runs (slowly), just to be sure he still can.)
