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by Jacob G. HornbergerAugust 1, 2013 Part 1 | Part 2 According to a Census Bureau announcement during the 1950s, I was growing up in the poorest city in the United States. That was Laredo, Texas, a city that borders the Rio Grande. Even though I was only a kid, that announcement struck me hard. Here I was, actually living in the poorest city in the entire country! The announcement didn’t really surprise me. While there were plenty of middle-class families in Laredo (for example, my dad was an attorney who had come to Laredo after World War II and married one of the local Mexican-American girls) and a few wealthy oil-related families, it wasn’t hard to find the poor. They were in areas of town called barrios. It wasn’t hard to see that the people who lived in those parts of town were indeed poor. Their houses weren’t very fancy, and some of them actually lived in wooden shacks. They drove jalopies. Needless to say, many of the students with whom I attended elementary, junior high, and high school didn’t come to school wearing the latest fashions. But as poor as Laredo was, its poverty was nothing compared with Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. The two cities — Laredo and Nuevo Laredo — were really just one great big metropolitan area, separated by the Rio Grande, much as St. Louis and East St. Louis are separated by the Mississippi River. Laredo’s downtown was connected to Nuevo Laredo’s downtown by an international bridge. As soon as someone crossed the bridge into Mexico, he would immediately notice how much more poverty there was in Nuevo Laredo. If he went beyond the downtown area into some of the residential areas, he would see people living in cardboard shacks. No one, as far as I can recall, ever asked why that was so. Why were people on one side of the Rio Grande significantly poorer than people on the other side? After all, the two towns had once been one town, under Mexican rule. That was before the Texas Revolution and before the United States had absorbed the...