“The land of in-between.” Borderland. Border town. The 956. What do these terms have in common? All of them mean Laredo. Since the beginning of my undergraduate education at William and Mary in the heart of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, most of the rhetoric I’ve faced when mentioning Laredo has been: “Where’s that.”
A mention of the border elicits El Paso or McAllen.
I respond, “No, I’m from Laredo.”
My hometown is filled with commerce, culture, and a vigor for life unlike no other. The sense of place derived from the transient nature of such a bustling border town can be seen through its color-filled streets of new and old murals on many buildings, and the complexities in art that make up Laredo.
A student at the “Alma Mater of the Nation,” my new home has been nothing but a change from the place I called home for 18 years of my life. It is the nation’s second oldest academic institution, and life here has led me to look back at Laredo in appreciation for my hometown. My peers here, though possessed of brilliant minds, have no sense of my home, my community, my identity.
My daily walks to class have presented me with grandiose colonial architecture, imposing Magnolias, and perfectly manicured driveways. What I have learned in classes in Pre-modern European, Italian renaissance, and Impressionism seem separate from the world I grew up in, a world of the public art of intricate murals and San Bernardo Avenue’s mile-long masterpiece of bright colors, signs, and storefronts.
My freshman year, filled with adjustment, change, and an attempt to get used to my new home, engendered a longing to return to La Frontera. When a freshman summer research grant came along, I pounced on the opportunity to pitch and propose a project in Laredo.
Faced with what to do, what to say, I realized that what I was thinking was confined to an idea, the idea that art was attributed only to a built space, one confined in the walls of a museum, exclusive to those who know, care, but more importantly, who have access to a museum.
I quickly realized that this was a construct, one built up for years and years, surrounding many communities in the United States, especially in Virginia. My experiences in Laredo, were simply not comparable, I did not grow up going to the Smithsonian on school field trips or walking around Colonial Williamsburg after school.
What I was walking around in Laredo, was a city established in New Spain in 1753.
When I reflect on my upbringing in Laredo, I think back to the City’s history, its vibrant colors, creative signage, and a downtown still intact as an architectural museum of century-old buildings that once were the core of the City’s central business district of banks, an opera house, theaters, hotels, department stores, general merchandise mercantiles, bakeries, and saddlemakers.
Though much of downtown is vacant and boarded up today, its faded glory persists in the footnotes of incredible cultural and historic architectural detail.
It persists, too, in Caminarte, an art crawl through two of the City’s historic districts, that begins every first Friday of the month at the Laredo Cultural District’s Casa Ortiz, a home built in 1830 on a bluff above the banks of the Río Grande. Casa Ortiz is a vibrant hub for exhibits of the work of local artists, live music and dance performances of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo artists, and culinary workshops.
I learned this summer that art in Laredo has no confines. In nearby historic San Ygnacio on the banks of the Río Grande, renown artist and printmaker Dr. Eric Avery has created his work there since 1981, working today from a compound that includes his studio, an historic sandstone building that houses his papermaking facility, and a museum in a small, repurposed wooden house.
The late Michael Tracy lived in San Ygnacio and produced art in studios there for more 46 years, work that brought him critical acclaim far beyond South Texas.
Another hub of art and culture is the Laredo Center for the Arts, its home in the historic Mercado (Market Square) building downtown. The Center hosted my uncle, Peter Glassford this last summer. This was a magnificent opportunity to get to see my uncle in his world, working on a community piece, picking apart some of the same questions I have wanted answered.
His mural was uniquely Laredo dotted with no Border Wall signs, someone’s old broom, and new and old everyday goods. It represented life in Laredo, and maybe more appropriately coined a mosaic that represented much of the dichotomy of Laredo with the push-and-pull of a transient community through which visitors and commerce pass.
This led me to look at Laredo through a different lens, a lens of potential of what could be.
On that first summer home, I saw Laredo in a different light with a sense of awe and appreciation for its uniqueness. I spent my time on photo and video, putting together my portfolio, which I Iooked at with a smile for the many ways my home had influenced me all the way to Williamsburg.
The sheer color, light, sway of the palms, the mural work lining overpasses and on the walls of buildings and in parks, graffiti on train cars, the little things.
Laredo is not a place of awaited potential; its realized potential lies in its reality. It doesn’t conform to the east coast traditions or the modernity out west.
Laredo is its own. It’s our home replete with cracked sidewalks, intermittent weeds, and its art found not always within the confines of walls, but lining walls and streets with bright colors not bound to a palette or a construct. Art in Laredo represents what makes our home what it is today, unique, unafraid of change, ready for “next.”
(Elijah Glassford is a second-year student at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. An Art History major, he has long held a passion for aesthetic and its intersectionality with sociopolitical factors globally. A native Laredoan, he graduated from United High School in 2024 and has called Laredo home for 20 years.)
