Historic Laredo

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Carmina Danini began her career in
journalism as a proofreader and
moved through the ranks of the
Hearst Corporation to become the
first chief of the Mexico City Bureau
for The San Antonio Express-News
in 1994. She is still with The
Express-News in San Antonio.
about the way they did their jobs. Journalists ferret
out that history. It was increasingly difficult to continue
to write in Laredo, my hometown, as I did in
the seventies and eighties. People I went to high
school with, if they were the subject of a story I
wrote, would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you
were really hard on me in the newspaper!’ I would
say, ‘Wasn’t that you on the police report? Weren’t
you indicted for allegedly killing someone?’ It is
inevitable in the news writing business that you
will burn some bridges behind you.”
Danini, a 1963 graduate of Martin High School,
came into the news business as a proof reader at
the Laredo Times from 1967 to 1969, “Before the
moon landing,” she clarified. She returned to the
Times from 1972 to 1974 and then attended the
Doscher School of Photography in Vermont in
1975 before returning to Laredo to write for
Saludos, a magazine owned by Pat and Connie
Miller. “I covered the Tecolotes,” Danini said,
despite the fact that I knew nothing about base -
ball. “During a game I asked veteran sportswriter
Matias Arambula when the half-time was and he
took me under his wing to give me a better understanding
of baseball. In this business, you can
learn as you go along,” she said, adding, “That was
before Elvis died.”
Danini took a time-out from newspapering to
be the telephone operator at the Hamilton Hotel.
“It was a Lily Tomlin set-up, not at all modern. I
enjoyed my time there,” she recalled.
With the advent of the publication of The
Laredo News in 1977, Laredo became a two-newspaper
town. Danini characterized her years with
The News as “extremely turbulent.” She said her
time at The News was filled with new experiences
and news stories that turned Laredo politics on its
ear—such as the May 1978 federal indictment of
former Mayor J.C. Martin, Jr., for mail fraud; and
the establishment of city manager form of government
for the City. “There was a newspaper war
going on. These were exciting times. Sometimes
they were fun,” she said.
After a brief tour of duty as city editor of The
News, Danini returned to The Laredo Times as a
reporter in 1981 and wrote for the publication until
she went to the San Antonio Express-News in 1990.
She found a three-month exchange with
Monterrey’s El Norte “an extremely satisfying experience,
one that called up all my experiences as a
journalist, as a bilingual person, and as a human
being who had grown up on the border.
“Knowing more than one language is so impor -
tant. It allows you to experience and write about the
world in more than one way,” she stressed.
Danini holds dear the distinction and the experience
of being the first chief of the Mexico City
bureau for the Express-News. She spent 1994 and
1995 in Mexico City, witness to the tumultuous
and tragic events, including the assassination of
PRI presidential candidate Donaldo Colosio, that
placed Ernesto Zedillo in power. “Those were very
important years for me as a journalist,” she said.
Writing of Colosio’s “first and last stop in
Tijuana,” Danini reported, “Two shots rang out as
Colosio strolled through the neighborhood, two
short and not very loud blasts that changed the PRI
and the history of Mexico politics forever.”
Danini, never one to spare words, characterized
Zedillo as “gray and dry, with all the charisma of a
fried egg.” She described her post-assassination
hikes across the incertidumbre (uncertainty) of
Mexico’s political map as “garden paths, land
mines, and shifting sands, a landscape dotted with
the unprecedented.”
Danini chronicled how the ‘little’ matter of Chiapas
and its rebellion mushroomed and was unleashed
when it was revealed the government had used its
own troops to squash the insurrection.
The story Danini remembers best is not the one
she filed about the fall of patronismo in Laredo—
events to which she refers as “Laredo’s equivalent
to Watergate”—or about the murder of Colosio. It
is a police story. There was a call to the Laredo
Police Department from a housewife on Hidalgo
St. who reported that the neighbor’s cat had
entered the open window of her kitchen and taken
a steak left out to thaw on a table. The officer
answered the call and wrote his report. Danini
read the report, filed her story, and the story ended
up on the front page of The Laredo Morning Times.
“The police officer was furious. He came to see me
and said he was the laughing-stock of his depart -
ment. He wanted to know why the story was written,
and beyond that, why it had merited the front
page. The story, as it seems often to be the case,
had an effect I had not anticipated,” Danini said.
Carmina Danini was born in Laredo September
1, 1945, the daughter of Geuril and Josefina
Danini, the sister of Josie Subik and Eloína Fudge.
22 ✦ HISTORIC LAREDO