Historic Laredo

SOME LAREDO STREET STORIES
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San Bernardo Avenue in the 1950s and
60s was a beautiful artery of commerce
graced by prettily landscaped tourist
courts and restaurants.
COURTESY OF ROBERTO PEÑA
TOWN AT NIGHT
Dusk was the hour at which date palms stood like cut-out sentries against the evanescent orange
band of sunset at the horizon. It was the hour at which day folded itself into night, the hour in which
the skies were filled with the movement and the shrieks of day birds settling in for the night and
those of nocturnals making ready for flight.
Laredo at night was like a favorite film on an endless reel. Some evenings after supper an errand
might take us across town from the Heights to the downtown business district. Driving from the
Heights to Zacate Creek on the Guadalupe or Market Street bridges, we entered El Azteca neighborhood.
Zacate Creek with its grassy reeds and cattails divided new Laredo geographically from the old.
The streets of El Azteca narrowed at the bridge, setting some of the old houses at curbside without
so much as a sidewalk to distance them from the street. As passengers along the pavement we caught
glimpses of the interiors of homes and lives. Some of the houses were wood board-and-batten and
others were built of sandy yellow Laredo brick.
The sights on our drive changed fast as film frames as we moved toward downtown, driving past
homes with their accompanying fragrances of suppers, gardenias and jasmine, and the moist earth
smell of a watered-down side street. It was there at curbside, the world moving at 20 miles per hour
from the Fluid Drive Plymouth or the Chevy truck with its wrap around windows that I framed the
lingering images of my town, the insides of homes illuminated by the dim light of a single strand
bulb to show linoleum floors, framed photos of loved ones on dark wooden furniture, kitchens in
which women cooked and men waited for their suppers. Some of the screen doors facing the street
effected privacy with cloth flour sacks stretched on a string across the inside. We passed the mural
of the Aztec Indian and the maguey plant at the Kita-Tos factory, the Indian Laboratory Co.
From our slow rolling vantage we heard voices and radios broadcasting novelas, baseball games,
and “Radio Juventud.” Where the street widened, people sat on porches in high-backed metal chairs
and gliders. Children played out of the traffic.
The drive from our home to downtown could not have taken more than a few minutes, but the
texture of those drives was so rich that I remember even now that leisurely drive in and out of consciousness,
absorbing the exact hue of faded ochre or turquoise paint on wood, the comforting
melancholy of leaning door frames, and the precise ratio of rust to paint on the ancient red gas
pumps at the Iturbide Street Texaco.
64 ✦ HISTORIC LAREDO