In Torreon, Mexico: This is the Phoenix of Mexico. Like the Arizona city, Torreon´s become a boomtown in the last 80 years because of its crossroads location. It´s also unbearably hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Two major rail lines crossed here a century ago carrying products north-south and east-west. That attracted lots of people out to make money on the trade. Chinese and Middle Eastern immigrants did well out here. The phone book´s multiple columns of Sanchez and Garcia are peppered with Wong and Abularach. They´re largely assimilated. The big supermarket´s got a falafel shop and Chinese food is a staple.
My Mexico City relatives moved here about 40 years ago when there was still a shallow laguna, or lake, that fed the vast cotton fields and dairies. Massive industrial and housing developments have sucked up the last drops of that water. And free trade´s changed the look of this city in the last 15 years. Applebee´s is next to the Holiday Inn Express and Coors dukes it out with Corona at the bars.
Progress has left many by the wayside and that´s pushed lots of people north. The migration has been evident in the days after Christmas. The most read of the five daily newspapers here carried news of the Covina Santa Claus killings. It´s a local story because Bruce Pardo´s in-laws, the ones who owned the house he torched, are locals who married in Torreon before heading to el norte and returned a few years back to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. The fallout from the carnage has stayed on the front page, bottom fold for days.
I´m out here to celebrate the holidays with my father´s side of the family. The food and the focus makes it traditional, but they´re not devout Catholics, so there´s no manger scene and they don´t organize posadas. That appears to be the norm in this city of about half a million people. The Catholic church doesn´t have the tight grip here that´s loosened in cities it colonized nearly 500 years ago: Puebla, Oaxaca, Guanajuato. Torreon feels more tolerant as Mexican cities go. The Mormons gather at a building across the street from my father´s house and down the street there´s a Baptist church.
But the drug violence raging across Mexico is testing all that. Not far from here a month ago, a former U.S. Army major who worked as an anti-kidnapping advisor was himself kidnapped. My half-brother´s visiting Torreon from Ciudad Juarez, a city that´s home to one of the branches of Mexico´s Murder Inc. Sadly, he said, he couldn´t think of a city in Mexico that´s not dealing with drug violence in one way or another.
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hey man, my dad's from torreon, too! actually san pedro de las colonias just outside of the big city. i havent been there in over a decade. im so bad for not visiting my familia out there. i gotta go back someday. go santos!