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.)

Dr. Norma Elia Cantú didn’t grow up with the word Chicana in Laredo. “My father jamás decía eso,” she explained. It wasn’t until graduate school in Nebraska in the 1970s, that the name came to her. At the time, she was working with the Department of Education, visiting school districts to help teachers adjust to new immigrant communities, especially Vietnamese families arriving after the war.

One day, in a small Nebraska town, she was introduced to a room full of teachers as “Spanish.” She corrected the superintendent: “I’m not Spanish. I’m from Texas.” Nobody laughed. Later, over lunch, she asked him why he had chosen that label. His answer stunned her: “I didn’t want to insult you by calling you Mexican.”

In that moment, she pushed back. “What would you want me to call you?” he asked. She looked at him and said: “Chicana.”

“That was the first time I called myself Chicana,” she recalled. “Because I wanted to be in his face.”

Born on the border, she has carried language as both inheritance and question mark. English was not her first fluency, nor was Spanish untouched by doubt. In school, teachers marked her as “behind,” struggling with reading comprehension. At home, she remembers Spanish slipping away in half-finished sentences. “My literacy was always in between,” she reflected. “Spanglish became the first real language I knew. It was what I lived in.

“And it became a ray of light for all those U.S. border natives, writers, and storytellers, who needed to express ourselves both in English and Spanish, because one language was not enough to tell our stories,” she said.

This doubleness – of being too much in one language and not enough in another – would later define her work as a writer, editor, and cultural organizer. For her, the border has been less a line than a shifting syntax. “Writing in English was a way to survive,” she said, “but returning to Spanish felt like a way to breathe.”

She learned English in first grade, entering school without knowing the language, but already able to read and write in Spanish, thanks to her grandmother. The experience was a shock – her teacher, Rogelia García (who she later discovered was also a folklorist), guided her through those early years. Still, it wasn’t until around third grade that she truly felt she could read and understand English.

At home, Spanish was the foundation. Her grandmother and mother taught her poems to recite on Mother’s Day, and she began memorizing long declamaciones in Spanish from an early age. 

By third or fourth grade, she was experimenting with her own writing, beginning with poetry. Switching between English and Spanish came naturally for her. It became a third language that she moved through with ease, depending on her audience.

Cantú was born in Nuevo Laredo, where her parents had briefly settled after marriage, but crossed to Laredo as an infant and grew up identifying as Tejana. The border shaped her, but she didn’t leave until her mid-twenties – not out of desire, but because the local institutions didn’t offer the graduate studies she needed.

As the eldest of eleven children, she had to work while pursuing her education. She spent years at Central Power and Light before finally earning her undergraduate degree at what was then Texas A&I at Laredo. When the university expanded, she took the leap – quitting her job to finish her studies. Eventually, in 1973, she left for Kingsville to pursue a Master’s degree, and by 1975, she was on her way to doctoral studies.

 Still, the most persistent thread in her story is identity – the way she names herself and the way others try to name her. Chicana. Tejana. Fronteriza. Each word carries history, geography, and negotiation. She embraces the plurality. “Being from the border means you never stop translating,” she said. “Not just words, but feelings, belonging, even silence.”

When I visited at her home on a bright summer Sunday morning, she was returning from a ten-day self-retreat at Port Aransas – a space of solitude she created for herself while writing her latest book, Champú, a collection of stories that transpire at a beauty shop. 

The stories of Champú are at once intimate and political. The book examines bodies, beauty, and the border with a gaze that is both playful and unsparing. Writing it has meant allowing herself to pause, revise, return. 

“For a long time I thought speed meant progress,” she admitted. “Now I know slowness can be just as necessary.”

She has been teaching for 51 years, starting with her first college classroom in Kingsville, where she taught Introduction to the American Short Story.

One of her most unforgettable experiences came in Laredo, when she founded Literacy Volunteers of Laredo more than four decades ago. Working alongside her students, she helped test residents in the colonias. An elderly woman once came to her saying she didn’t want to learn English – she just wanted to learn to write her name before she died. Sitting down with her, she taught her how. The woman cried with joy, and that moment remained one of the most rewarding in Cantú’s career.

Her teaching in Laredo was transformative for many first-generation college students, many whom went on to become teachers themselves. Later, in 2000, she moved to start a PhD program in English, a decision she initially resisted because she wanted to stay close to her home, family, and garden. She recalls writing in her journal: “When I have graduated 20 students with this PhD program, I will have done my job.” By the time she retired in 2012, she had graduated 21.

Cantú is the Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Editing, too, has sharpened her relationship with language. As an editor, she has held to a clear ethic: integrity over trend, care over speed. “Publishing should expand voices, not flatten them,” she said. “You learn to protect the writer’s rhythm while also making the text sing.” In this, she sees no separation between craft and politics. Editing, like writing, she believes is an act of advocacy.

She learned early on that the work is the work – and she is herself. Her voice lives in the writing, but the work is not her identity. Editorial corrections, then, are about craft and perspective, not about who she is. And perspectives can clash: one professor insisted on the em dash, another forbade it. Editing, she realized, is subjective.

Over time, she learned to distinguish which changes serve the work and which threaten its integrity. When editors pushed for full translations of the Spanish in Canícula and Cabañuelas, she refused. Instead, she made the text accessible while preserving its bilingual form. To defend that decision, she pointed to the work of other published writers – such as Cormac McCarthy – who included untranslated Spanish in his writing. For Cantú, content choices that reflect culture are not negotiable.

This commitment has meant walking away from opportunities. When Duke University Press showed interest in Mexicana Fashions, but required the book to expand its scope to include other communities of color, she and her co-author declined. The project had a clear purpose, and altering it would have erased that focus.

She said that every publisher has a “book list” – a vision of what fits its catalog. Part of the process is finding the right home for a manuscript. That’s why Somos Tejanas took years before finding its place at UT Austin Press. Other publishers wanted it to be either fully academic or purely creative. For her, the strength of the book was precisely in its mix of testimony, poetry, and scholarship. She said UT Austin recognized that value.

Publishing, she acknowledged, can be slow, frustrating, and rejection-filled. But with patience, persistence, and an unwavering defense of the work’s integrity, a book ultimately finds both its publisher and its readers.

As our conversation ended, she circled back to language, to the girl once told she was behind. “Maybe I was slow,” she shrugged. “But slowness taught me to notice things. To sit with a sentence until it turned into something else. To trust that the words would come, even if they came late.”

In that lateness, she found not failure but form. The studio, it turns out, was never a room she lacked – it was the border of languages in which Norma Cantú was already living.

Baruc Elimelec Castillo, who currently works under the pseudonym Brooklyn Crane, is a published writer born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and raised in Nuevo Laredo.

Winner of the National Literary Expression Contest La Juventud Y La Mar in 2016 and gold medalist in the international GENIUS Olympiad competition in 2019, Castillo is defined by his insatiable passion for composing poetry and his relentless ambition to spread it to the world; both of which, at twenty-three years old, have completely shaped his life.

In 2022, Castillo began sharing his artwork through digital platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. In 2024, he published his first collection of poems in English, titled Traumatophobic, and shortly afterward, his first collection of poems in Spanish, titled Fugaz. 

In February 2025, he founded the poetry group Verso & Sangre with the support of Elvira Cruz Osorio and Claudia Yvonne Pérez Aréchiga. In June of that year, shortly after the publication of his second collection of poems in English, titled Anarcholeptic, he founded the poetry club Court of Quills under the direction of Jorge Santana, a member of the City of Laredo Fine Arts and Culture Commission, with the dream of revitalizing literature and promoting the city’s writers.

Castillo, is known for his insatiable passion for writing poetry and his relentless ambition to communicate it throughout the world.

Anarcholeptic, which was released in June 2025 is the third of his books published since 2024. His work, which is written with cadence and rhyme, reflects Castillo’s resolution to raise awareness about the injustice faced by his generation, war, and climate change. He writes from a cynical and yet human perspective. This collection includes events across history and from recent memory, as well as fictional stories that illustrate reality, all woven together in verse. 

Castillo said the two poetry clubs, Verso & Sangre in Nuevo Laredo and Court of Quills in Laredo, seek new members and more opportunities to continue engendering poetry in the heart of both cities.

As one of the state’s pre-eminent journalists, native Laredoan Wanda Garner Cash has held every position on the editorial side of a newspaper – reporter, editor, and publisher. She also taught journalism at the University of Texas-Austin and served as associate director of the University’s School of Journalism.

The author of Pancho Villa’s Saddle at the Cadillac Bar   begins the restaurant’s timeline about a quarter century before she first sat atop Pancho Villa’s saddle in grandfather Mayo Bessan’s legendary eatery in Nuevo Laredo.

She recounts that her grandfather Achille Mehault “Mayo” Bessan of New Iberia, Louisiana, traveling on his 1923 honeymoon trip with his bride, Odette Savoie Bessan, left her in the care of a San Antonio cousin, and took the train south to Nuevo Laredo to scout for the location of the Cadillac Bar.

He returned for Odette, and they rented a small apartment next to Sara and Octavio Longoria in Nuevo Laredo. Odette set up the household, and Mayo established the bar on Avenida Guerrero.

“It was Prohibition that brought my grandfather to the border. He was a gambler who used his nest egg to come here,” Garner Cash noted.

The original Cadillac Bar, a cantina with a dirt floor, became Nuevo Laredo’s top-drawer restaurant when the establishment moved on July 4, 1929 to Belden and Ocampo, half a block west of Avenida Guerrero. “Mayo recruited some of his Louisiana friends to staff the kitchen. They thought it was exciting to be on the border,” she recounted, adding that the staff would grow to 40 full- and part-time employees, most of them from Nuevo Laredo.

“Mayo asked my father Porter Garner Jr. to work at the Cadillac in 1947. He was Mayo’s right hand until Mayo retired in 1960 at 75 to enjoy hunting, fishing, and cards,” Garner Cash said.

“The Cadillac Bar had a legion of loyal employees, some who worked there 30 years. Porfirio Robles, a prince of a man, was the mayordomo, the captain. My sister Clay and I knew all the waiters and bartenders. They watched us grow up,” she said, “as my grandfather had watched their children grow up and helped them with school and college expenses.”

The author writes with tenderness of her father, a World War II veteran injured so severely in combat that it was thought his wounds would leave him unable walk again. Walk he did, however, marrying his high school sweetheart, Wanda Mae Bessan, in 1946. His would be the kind, amiable face that welcomed thousands of local and out of town diners to the beloved landmark Mayo Bessan had established two decades earlier. Porter’s ability to remember names and his drive carried the enterprise well into the late 1970s. The Cadillac Bar had survived the ravages of the Flood of 1954 and peso devaluations. 

What the enterprise did not survive was the ever-changing taxation policies of the Mexican government.

“The day after Thanksgiving was always the Cadillac’s best day. In the mid-1970s the Mexican government began to assess the Cadillac’s taxes on that day rather than on a yearly average of sales. The increased corruption of the tax structure eventually made it untenable to operate, and my father gave the restaurant to the employees decades later. He signed documents transferring ownership and handed them the keys,” Garner Cash recalled.

She writes tenderly, too, of grandparents Mayo and Odette and her mother who would be called Big Wanda to differentiate daughter from mother.

“Mayo was courtly, formal, and self-disciplined, giving attention to living each day to the fullest, enjoying a meal without rushing off, sitting and savoring it. He paid great attention to how he prepared for the day, what he wore, the cufflinks he chose, that the crease of his trousers aligned with his shoelaces. I may have inherited from him how he prepared for the day,” she said, adding, “I’m not a casual partaker of life. I, too, want to be dressed for the occasion.”

She called Odette “an intuitive cook who had an easy way around the kitchen.” Odette consulted no recipes and never measured ingredients. “She taught me to cook. We were very close. She doted upon us. The South Louisiana traditions of her childhood never left her. She always deferred to Mayo as her protector and provider,” she said.

Garner Cash recalled the friendship between Odette and first neighbor Sara Theroit Longoria, who spoke French. “My grandmother spoke no Spanish, but she did speak French. Mrs. Longoria adopted Odette as her protégé, took her to the grocery store, and made her feel less alone in this new place,” she said.

She described her mother’s part in the workings of the Cadillac as “the interior decorator,” the purveyor of white table linens, drapes, lamps, chairs, and tables. “She also held down the fort in Laredo in the typical role of housewives of the fifties and sixties, raising us while also maintaining a very active civic and social life. Her work at home allowed my father to grow a very successful business,” she said.

Garner Cash reflected on the process of writing Pancho Villa’s Saddle at the Cadillac Bar. “It was rewarding to gather up the memories, photos, and recipes. It brought me to an intimate introspection into feelings, places, family, and my own personal life. It was overwhelming at times,” she said, recalling a childhood memory of being on the streets of downtown Nuevo Laredo with the children of other Nuevo Laredo businesses owners. “It was a remarkable time in our lives when Laredo and Nuevo Laredo were one place on the map, and safe.”

She said that as a child she was oblivious to the Cadillac’s fame. “It was where we celebrated birthdays. It was not a big deal to us, but in the lives of others it was a place where good memories were made. I hoped the book would be a touchstone that would evoke who they were with at the Cadillac and what they were celebrating, what it looked like, how the food tasted, how it smelled, how agreeable the chilled temperature was if they had been shopping in the summer heat that day.”

She said the place that is most evocative of those who made and carried the history of the Cadillac Bar is her home on a hill near Hunt where she lives with her husband Richard Cash. “It is the home of my heart, a place that was purchased by my grandparents in 1949 two months before I was born. This place harkens the sum of the best times of my life. We spent so much time on this hill and on the Guadalupe River below. My house is adjacent to the house my parents built as a summer home and where they lived when they left Laredo in 1979.”

Pancho Villa’s Saddle at the Cadillac Bar is no thin, tame recuerdo. Garner Cash has written with rich, deep detail of Mayo Bessan’s choices for ingredients and how the Cadillac Bar’s signature favorites appeared so effortlessly on the cloth-topped tables of the dining rooms. 

There is an intimacy to her writing – that of the grandchild who was part of and witness to the workings of so legendary a restaurant and that of the gifted wordsmith who has deftly crafted a family story inside the history of the frontera, Prohibition, Los Dos Laredos, the devastating Flood of 1954, and international trade.

About Wanda Garner Cash

The daughter of Wanda Mae and Porter Garner Jr., Wanda Jean grew up on Malinche Street in the Montrose neighborhood near Chacon Creek. She is a 1967 graduate of Nixon High School and a graduate of the University of Texas-Austin. She was an academic standout known for her wit, brilliance, and intellect. 

A truth-telling journalist for decades, she was much admired and recognized for her courage and ethics.

The former president of the Texas Press Association and Fellow of the F. Griffin Singer Professorship in Journalism at the University of Texas, she was the 2016 recipient of the James Madison Award presented by the Freedom of Information Foundation.

If you have ever dived into Laredo’s rich history, you have surely encountered the name Jerry Thompson. Dr. Thompson, Regents and Piper Professor of History at Texas A&M International University, has written by far the most books about Laredo history. His most popular, Laredo: A Pictorial History, provides a visual snapshot of Laredo’s past and can be seen in homes and offices across town. 

One of the most fascinating things about Thompson as Laredo’s premier historian is that he was neither born nor raised here, but rather in the small Arizona town of Springerville on November 21, 1942. 

“People always assume that I’m Mormon when they see where I was born, but the only reason I was born there is because this was the nearest hospital,” Thompson said. 

He documents his early years in his book Under the Piñon Tree, a set of childhood recollections of growing up in a very rural part of New Mexico bordering Arizona. 

“I rode the school bus for over 50 miles a day for eight years to get an education in Pie Town, New Mexico, a little settlement of Dust Bowl refugees. Today, the place is nothing, the school long since closed,” he said. 

This early upbringing where schools were scarce instilled in him the value of education that he carries to this day. He currently serves as senior history professor at TAMIU. After growing up at 8,000 feet elevation, which he described as a place of brutal winters and delightful summers, he arrived in Laredo in the brutal summer of 1968 in a car without air conditioning. It was 105 degrees on his first day. He began teaching at Laredo Junior College, earning an annual salary of $6,500. His classroom also lacked A/C, requiring humungous fans like airplane propellers that deafened the classroom. 

Thompson arrived in Laredo during a volatile political period not just for the United States but also for Laredo, in the waning years of the Mayor J.C. Martin regime. He recalled an occasion when he was helping his wife’s uncle run for office in West Laredo when somebody shot a bullet through the front window. On another occasion, he joined Chicano activist Chaca Ramírez in a demonstration against the Washington’s Birthday Parade only to be forcibly escorted out of the public eye by local police. 

It was clear to Thompson from the very beginning that he had arrived in a peculiar place. As he began learning about the city’s history, he was further perplexed that few people had cared to seriously document Laredo. Aside from a handful of articles about Laredo by Sebron Wilcox in The Southwestern Quarterly, nobody had ever seriously written about the city’s rich history, including a significant Civil War skirmish in 1864 led by Confederate Colonel Santos Benavides. 

Researching Laredo’s history is particularly challenging. Historically, our own people have had little interest in our own culture and history. This challenge is exemplified by the fact that many of the very earliest archives from the Villa de San Agustin have been lost. Many Laredo archives were collecting dust in a closet and nearly lost forever before they were accidentally discovered and now held by St. Mary’s University. 

Despite these challenges, Thompson began publishing historical articles in The Laredo Times about the city’s early years, which he eventually compiled into a dramatic account of Laredo’s volatile and often violent early history in Sabers on the Rio Grande. 

Thompson then got a grant to continue his research, which allowed him to publish another book focused on the contributions of Tejanos, including Laredoans, in the U.S. Civil War in Vaqueros in Blue and Gray.

By far his most ambitious and challenging project was Defending the Mexican Name in Texas, a biography of the life and work of Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, who both defended oppressed Mexicans in the Rio Grande Valley in the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexico War and later fought with the Union against figures like Colonel Santos Benavides in the Civil War. He said this book was particularly challenging because the relevant sources were “scattered everywhere” – in Ciudad Victoria, Monterrey, Matamoros, and Mexico City. Because of the Spanish handwriting in the old archival documents, Thompson required the assistance of a research assistant in Mexico City. 

The rights to Cortina were recently purchased by a producer of the 2002 film Frida, for a possible Netflix program. 

From dusty, forgotten archives to a possible television series, there is no doubt that much of Laredo’s history might be buried forever without Thompson’s work. On the advice he would give to writers interested in following in his footsteps, he has some very simple advice. 

“Throw your TV and cell phone into the Río Grande. You just need time and isolation. It’s very hard to write when you’re teaching a class for one hour and then having to write the next hour. It’s much easier when you’re in the mountains of New Mexico where the only sound is the birds in the trees.”

Somehow, his successful teaching career spanning over 50 years hasn’t stopped him from writing nearly 20 books. 

About Dr. Jerry Thompson

Thompson is the recipient of numerous awards and honors from the Arizona Historical Society, Historical Society of New Mexico, and the Texas State Historical Association. He has received the Best Scholarly Book Award from the Texas Institute of Letters three times. First, for his Civil War to the Bitter End: The Life and Times of Major General Samuel Peter Heintzelman, his biography of Juan Nepomuceno Cortina entitled Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas, and more recently for his Tejano Tiger: Jose de los Santos Benavides and the History of the Texas-Mexico Borderlands,1823-1891, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He received the Kate Broocks Bates Award from the Texas State Historical Association for Civil War and Revolution on the Rio Grande Frontier, which he co-authored with Larry Jones. He has also received the Tejano Book Award three times. First for his biography of Cortina, then his Tejanos in Gray: The Civil War Letters of Captains Manuel Yturria and Rafael de la Garza, and more recently for his Tejano Tiger. Thompson has also received the Senator Judith Zaffirini Medal for his teaching excellence and academic accomplishments, as well as the Texas A&M University System Teaching Excellence Award.

Thompson received his doctorate in history from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a former president of the Texas State Historical Association. At the present time, he serves on the Editorial Board for The Southwestern Historical Quarterly. His A Civil War History of the New Mexico Volunteers and Militia won the Fray Atanasio Francisco Dominguez Award from the New Mexico Historical Association and the Pate Award from the Fort Worth Civil War Round Table. His most recent book by the University of Oklahoma Press, Wrecked Lives and Lost Souls: Joe Lynch Davis and the Last of the Oklahoma Outlaws, is the story of Thompson’s Cherokee outlaw grandfather. 

Thompson’s Courage Above All Things: General John Ellis Wool and the American Military Experience, 1812-1863 (with Harwood P. Hinton) was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2020. Thompson is married to Dr. Sara Amparo Cabello, a professor at Laredo College, and they have one son, Jeremy, a graduate of TAMIU and Rice University.

(Ryan Cantú was born and raised in Laredo and has 10 years of experience in various areas of civil litigation. He is a lover and supporter of the arts and serves on the board of the Laredo Film Society. In addition to writing articles for Texas publications, he is currently writing a book under contract with Texas Tech University Press about the culinary traditions of South Texas and Northeastern Mexico. )

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.)

Writing requires regular practice. A writer’s tools range from laptops to classic pen and paper. For teacher and poet Randy Koch, even a piece of brown Kraft paper – similar to what tortillas de maíz are wrapped in – can serve as a medium. Last March, at a Poetry Day event at Treviño-Uribe Ranch in San Ygnacio, he held such a piece of paper while reciting his poem, “No Man’s Land.”

Koch has long strived to follow the discipline he learned from writer Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones: “My rule is to finish a notebook a month… my ideal is to write every day.”

By the time he moved to Laredo in 1997, he carried with him a nine-inch stack of notebooks – written in Minnesota, where he had lived with his daughter, Mary. That year, he accepted a job at Laredo Community College to teach composition, creative writing, and developmental writing.

Koch recalled that the bicultural encounter was at first a bit of a shock. Some of his students were learning English as a second language, which challenged him to listen more closely, to hear how accent and cadence shape meaning. For young writers, he explained, the temptation was to write only in first person, which older, more experienced writers may see as a mistake born from a lack of experience – not only in writing, but in life. His task was to guide students beyond their own sightlines.

One of his classroom exercises was to ask students to step into the voice of a conquistador and write a poem as if in their final moments on earth. That experiment remained with him, eventually guiding Koch toward his first collection, This Splintered Horse, in which he adopted voices that moved beyond his own.

In 2002 he became the director of the TAMIU Writing Center, which was established to help students become better writers.

Koch said that observation is at the core of writing. He recalled living in New York in 2008, where he would ride the subway, watch people and imagine their stories. For young writers, he recommends the exercise of describing people – their clothes, gestures, differences – as a way of training the eye and ear, almost like practicing semiotics.

These days, Koch is reading Dean Young’s poetry, which inspires him to write less logically and more abstractly, breaking the habits of a composition teacher. He tries to follow illogical, unexpected directions in his drafts and avoids rereading until his notebook is full. His revisions, however, are rigorous: he re-reads each piece at least six times, always aloud, to catch rhythm, sound, and repetition. The oral quality matters to him. As he explained this, I contrasted it with my own method – sometimes recording spoken words first before shaping them into writing.

Koch’s commitment to writing extends beyond the classroom. In 2000, he began a monthly column for LareDOS, its content often connected to his classroom experiences, the Writing Center, and TAMIU’s South Texas Writing Project. 

Though he left Laredo in 2007 to complete an MFA in Poetry at the University of Wyoming, Koch continued writing for LareDOS. A recent column, titled “Manicfesto,” political in nature, is one of the finest examples of his creativity – lyrical, cadent, purposeful, moving sometimes in swells and then to a subtle pause to ensure the reader has come up for air.

He has recently returned to Laredo, collaborating with local writers like Raquel Valle Senties, editing work for friends, and very much at work in the mechanics of verbs.

Koch’s fascination with words is meticulous. He keeps notebooks filled with favorite terms, often copied from the dictionary – three pages a day – paying special attention to the Anglo-Saxon roots of words. He marvels that some English words trace back to Aztec or Mexican origins. In his admiration for writers like Cormac McCarthy and Roberto Bolaño, he notes how they stretch language, weaving in Spanish, violence, and the complexities of border life.

Koch’s list of favorite authors is long and varied: Dean Young, McCarthy, Rebecca Solnit, Carolyn Forché, Joan Didion, Raymond Carver, Louise Erdrich, and Roberto Bolaño. He especially admires Forché’s poetry collection, The Country Between Us and her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True.

Not all writers, he points out, are natural storytellers. Koch has often struggled with short stories, particularly with endings, which is part of what drew him toward poetry. Poetry, he said, feels more manageable, especially the sonnet form, which offers structure and a natural stopping point. At its heart, poetry is musical to him – a vibration and rhythm of words that matter even beyond meaning. Writers, he insists, should not force language, but should follow where it leads, letting sound, rhyme, and alliteration open unexpected directions.

He remembers the first time he felt like a “real writer.” In a Minnesota fiction class, his professor Terry Davis, a published author, praised his draft and said he was doing what writers truly do. That validation made the possibility real.

When Randy Koch and I met, it was on a summer Saturday afternoon in downtown Laredo, seated on a bench in San Agustín Plaza. As he spoke, we were surrounded by the layered sounds of the border: the chatter of families, the shuffle of people crossing the bridge, the rustle of grocery bags and backpacks. It struck me then that there was no better setting to hear his reflections about writing and the border – eclectic, imperfect, and perfectly alive.

Our conversation ended with mutual excitement. He said he looked forward to seeing what I would write. I, meanwhile, left with enough material for a good story – and the sense that a follow-up would surely follow.

(Nuevo Laredense Seyde García is a human resources professional in international trade and logistics. She lends her support to the arts in both Laredos in numerous ways, among them by writing about exhibits and artists. She can be reached at seydeg91@gmail.com.)

When Katie Gutierrez’s debut novel was released in 2022, the writer and her work were greeted with praises and reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Parade Magazine, Kirkus Review, Good Housekeeping, Crime Reads, She Reads, and more. More Than You’ll Ever Know was a Good Morning America Book Club pick for June 2022. On Oprah Daily’s July 22, 2022 list of 15 books to read, Gutierrez’s novel topped the list.

Gutierrez is a National Magazine Award finalist whose essays and features have appeared in TIME, Texas Highways, Harper’s Bazaar, and Texas Monthly. 

Her story on Día de los Muertos — Earth, Water, Wind and Fire — is featured in the September 2025 issue of Texas Highways.

She lives in San Antonio with her husband and their two children.

INTERVIEW BY VALERIE GONZALEZ

Tragaluz: How did growing up in Laredo shape your perspective as a storyteller?

Gutierrez: Laredo is not quite Mexico, but also not quite the U.S. It’s its own little pocket. You can’t really call it small, but it still feels small. The culture of Laredo is one of family and traditions. There’s a duality there, too —“Happy Birthday to You” and Las Mañanitas, English and Spanish, often both in the same sentence. Time in other cities allowed me to understand that Laredo is an interesting, special place. It took a long time to let my upbringing here influence my storytelling. Now I feel like the “both/and-ness” of Laredo kind of defines how I try to see my characters — it’s a resistance to simple binaries, or two-dimensionality in a place that’s so multilayered. I hope my storytelling reflects that depth.

Tragaluz: Were there any particular memories, places, or people in Laredo that inspired elements of this novel? What gave you the ganas to write this story and highlight so many Laredo landmarks?

Gutierrez: The financial struggle my father endured during the peso devaluation in the 1980s inspired the Rivera Iron Works and it’s owner, Lore’s husband Fabian Rivera.

 A scene at Lore’s parents’ house for Sunday lunch was very much inspired by my memories of Sunday at my grandpa’s house. The biggest inspiration came from my parents’ stories of the peso devaluation, a difficult time as small business owners and as a young married couple. That environment of lack was a ripe background for characters making choices they might not ordinarily make. Fortunately, my parents made better ones!

The ganas to write this story and to highlight much of Laredo, rests in my first 18 years of reading dozens, maybe hundreds, of books a year, and only one was by a Latina author, Sandra Cisneros, who wrote The House on Mango Street. As I got older, I realized how little Mexican-American communities and culture were represented in literature and still are today. Only 6% of published authors are of Latino descent, which made me feel the increasing necessity to set my stories in the places I knew, within the culture I love.  

Tragaluz: What was your reading/writing life like growing up? Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

Gutierrez: My mom is a book lover, and before my brother and sister and I could read, she read to us every night. As we got older, my parents took us to B. Dalton every Saturday after lunch. They never rushed us, always let me sit for ages in the children’s section in the back, searching for books in series like Goosebumps, Fear Street, Sweet Valley Twins, The Babysitters Club, and Nancy Drew. On trips to San Antonio, Barnes and Noble was our first stop after lunch. Presenting my parents with stacks of books, they never told me to put any back or told me what I could and couldn’t read, even when I started getting into adult crime fiction at a pretty early age. I read every night and for hours on weekend mornings. During the summers, I’d invite my brother and sister to “reading parties” in my room, which they’d usually decline. Now there’s a Silent Book Club in San Antonio where strangers get together in various parts of the city to read their books in silence, together. That’s a reading party! I was a reader before I was anything else. Some of my first conscious memories are intertwined with reading — both being read to and the moment I started reading on my own and my world cracked open. 

In third grade, I wrote a story and fell in love with writing fiction. From then on, it was all I wanted to do. I wrote stories and novels through elementary, middle, and high school, and I never had a fallback career desire. I tell aspiring writers that you need to possess an almost delusional level of self-belief, and I had that in spades. Often, I told my dad I would be the world’s youngest published author. (Spoiler: I wasn’t.) I got my MFA, and while I was piling up rejections (and some acceptances!) for my short stories, I wrote marketing copy, white papers, newspaper articles, and magazine profiles. I proofread and did developmental editing and eventually was executive editor of a small hybrid publishing company, helping other people write and edit their books. There was a period in which I thought that was what I was meant to do. Then in 2015, my dad and my husband encouraged me to leave my job for one year and focus on writing a novel. One year, full time, best shot. I didn’t realize it would actually take five years and an unpublished novel before More Than You’ll Ever Know sold, and another two years after that to see it published. Taking that risk, with the support of people who believed in me, changed everything. Still, even if I’d never been published, even if I were never published again, I’d always be writing.

Tragaluz: More Than You’ll Ever Know moves between two timelines, Lore’s story in 1980s Laredo and Mexico City and the writer Cassie’s investigation in 2017. What inspired this structure and these characters?

Gutierrez: The seed for the book germinated in 2008, when I happened upon a story of a wealthy Florida man who’d lived a double life for more than 30 years — living with his wife of 52 years, with whom he had three kids, and then, 20 miles down the road, also lived with another woman, with whom he had two kids. All five kids went to the same elite prep school, where both women served as trustees and each had a wing of the school named after them. All of this came out after the man’s first wife died, and he officially married the second woman two weeks later. I’d heard of double life stories, but this one felt particularly gutting to me — three decades of deceit. I wondered how he justified the lies and whether it was possible the women truly didn’t know. I wondered how someone gets into that situation and maintains it for so long. I did some digging and quickly realized it’s mostly men who live these double marriages. I wondered what it would take for a woman to do the same. What would be similar, what would be different? 

That was the initial thread, but I didn’t follow it up for almost 10 years, when I was on submission — that is, publishers were reviewing and considering publishing—with a different novel. To take my mind off all the incoming rejections, I went back to this idea. Maybe because I’d initially read the double life story as a news article, I’d always been drawn to the idea of a journalist character, someone who puts pressure on the woman living a double life. So my first question was when the book would be set, and I decided on the 80s for two reasons: one, it felt like a more plausible time period for a woman to pull this off, before the ubiquity of phones and the Internet and social media; and secondly, it would allow for an interplay between past and present. Once I landed on that, it felt like I kept playing with the idea of doubles — two timelines, two husbands, two cities, two women who don’t realize they’re sort of warped mirror images of each other. It allowed for more complexity.

Tragaluz: The story explores themes of motherhood, betrayal, love, and secrecy, particularly through Lore’s double life. What drew you to that complexity?

Gutierrez: I’ve always been drawn to the darker sides of the human experience, and how often they can co-exist with the brighter ones. The idea of “good people” making “bad decisions” has always compelled me. How do we define good and bad in these contexts? How much pain does a person have to cause in order to not be “good” anymore? I’m interested in the lies people tell themselves and others and why it’s so difficult to be completely honest about who we are and what we want. I’m interested in the push and pull between people’s desires and their fears, and how we find moments of connection and truth even in the midst of deception. 

As far as motherhood, I became a mom twice over while writing and editing this book, and some of those years were during a global pandemic, when it was mothers who left the workforce in droves, even if they were making more money than the fathers, in order to homeschool and care for their children. As a new mom, I was experiencing such extreme emotions — heart-shattering love, endless worry, extreme boredom, a lot of physical pain — and also witnessing how our society both glorifies certain kinds of mothers and refuses to actually value that work in a meaningful way. I saw firsthand how quickly and viciously people judge mothers who voice anything but how #blessed they are. In response to an essay I’d written for TIME about pandemic motherhood, someone emailed me that I should have gotten a pandemic puppy instead of having kids, that I wasn’t fit to be a mother, and they feared for my children’s safety. That’s how much we’re expected to give up our previous identity and voice. Ultimately, I saw my character Lore with a lot of compassion, because I think what she wanted most was was permission to continue growing as a woman, not only as a mother.

Tragaluz: Was Lore based on a real story or a composite of ideas and cultural observations?

Gutierrez: Lore is her own character. She came to me almost whole, and I fell asleep many nights listening to her tell her story in my mind. This does not always happen with writing. Cassie, for example, took work. But Lore, I think, had been inside me, wanting to exist for years, and when I gave her the opportunity, she didn’t waste it. 

Tragaluz: The book has struck a powerful chord with Mexican American readers. What does it mean to you to see South Texas reflected in national conversations about literature and identity?

Gutierrez: First I have to acknowledge how Mexican-American novelists are writing from and about South Texas right now: in no particular order, Sandra Cisneros, Rudy Ruiz, Fernando Flores, Ursula Villarreal-Moura, Kimberly Garza, Elizabeth Gonzalez James, Rubén Degollado, Marcela Fuentes. The list goes on, and our way was paved by Gloria Anzaldua, Tomás Rivera, and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. For many years publishing tried to pigeonhole “Mexican” stories into stories of immigration or trauma, and all of these writers demonstrate how limited that conception of our stories is. It’s been extremely meaningful to be a part of this conversation, and to contribute toward a South Texas literary canon. 

Tragaluz: What do you hope readers from the border, especially Laredo, take away from More Than You’ll Ever Know?

Gutierrez: That they’ll take away the knowledge that we belong in literature — and that our stories are rich, varied, beautiful, and complicated, unable to be contained by genre or stereotypes. I hope they see parts of themselves in some of the characters and hear through their dialogue a familiar cadence of speech. I hope the book inspires readers from Laredo to pick up more novels by Latino authors, to not wait as long as I did before seeking them out. 

Tragaluz: As a writer who’s published across major outlets like TIME, Harper’s Bazaar, and Texas Monthly, how did your journalism background influence your fiction writing?

Gutierrez: My background in journalism, which was never a part of my writing plan, taught me how to research, how to interview, and how important specificity is in telling a story that feels vivid and true. I do a ton of research for every project. For MTYEK, that included learning about the peso devaluation of the 80s by reading archived national, local, and international newspaper articles and also talking to my parents, who lived through it; watching old news clips on YouTube about the Mexico City earthquake, and talking to a photographer who’d been there firsthand and was able to share his photos; doing a deep dive into the complex relationship between journalists and their sources; exploring through nonfiction why women are true crime’s biggest audience; digging up old subway maps of Mexico City; Googling the price of cigarettes in the mid-eighties. I could go on and on. To me, every detail matters, both for the story and out of respect for readers. If I’m going to write about something I haven’t personally experienced, I have to acknowledge that someone out there has, and I want to respect that person enough to do my best to get it right.

Tragaluz: What has it been like navigating literary success while staying grounded in your roots balancing national acclaim with your South Texas identity?

Gutierrez: Publishing, always my dream, now is my career. It’s definitely the business part of the process, while the writing is the art. It is easy to lose yourself in the business of publishing with anxieties about sales, reviews, or awards. Writing, on the other hand, keeps me grounded. With every project, I feel like I’m learning all over again how to tell a story — how to inhabit a character, to write a good sentence, to explore complicated questions without coming to easy answers. Writing connects me with who I am and where I’m from. I’m cherishing this time drafting my new novel without having to be in promotion-mode because this is the part of the process that feels pure. On top of that, I’m a mom to a 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. While it’s important to me that they see me realizing my dreams and ambitions, to them I’m just Mom. And that’s also healthy for me, remembering that these two beautiful human beings don’t care how many words I wrote that day or whether I got a starred review. They just want me to look at the fort they built, or jump in the pool with them, or, of course, read them one more chapter before bed.

Tragaluz: Are you working on anything new; will we see more stories rooted in Laredo or the borderlands?

Gutierrez:  My new novel, tentatively to be published summer 2027, is inspired by an infamous murder trial in San Antonio, and revolves around three women named Emma and the charismatic man between them. It explores the intersection of wealth and power, medical gaslighting, and the kidnappings along the border circa 2012, and ultimately it asks whether bad behavior can ever be balanced out by good. I’m really excited about it, and I hope readers will love it. As far as more stories rooted in Laredo or the borderlands — absolutely. South Texas is home, and pieces of home will always be in my books.