ALWAYS BOTH AND NEITHER

Your hometown is like your body—so familiar you stop seeing it, so familiar you think you’ve seen it all, though there are whole geographies only visible with a specific angling of mirrors. Your hometown is like your face—just OK, until you look back at old photos and realize you were beautiful then. How could you not have noticed?

Laredo is a flat 150-mile drive south from San Antonio, where I live with my husband and two kids, past small towns and the mesquite and cactus that thread the landscape of my childhood. Follow Interstate 35 until you reach its end—or, rather, its beginning—and there you’ll find Laredo: a city in between two countries, a city that is and is not American, is and is not Mexican. An interstitial place of both and neither.

I’m a third generation Laredoan, and when I was growing up, 99% of the city’s population was of Mexican descent. Now it’s closer to 95%, which still makes it among the least ethnically diverse cities in the U.S., creating a bubble for those of us who grow up there. Many have family living just across the bridge in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and many others can trace their Texan roots back to the first Spanish land grants along the Rio Grande. Today only 10% of the population speaks English alone, while the remaining 90% are bilingual. Anywhere you go in Laredo, you’re as likely to hear Spanish as you are to hear English, and often both in the same sentence in that third language dubbed Spanglish.

With a population of table. Once, when I was in eighth grade, they took us to watch at the new Cinemark Movies 12, and the entire row in front of us was occupied by the popular kids in my class. I slunk low as my dad whispered, “Was there a field trip you didn’t know about?”