In border town, World Cup watchers balance team pride, anxiety about US
LAREDO, Texas–Late Saturday morning, a trickle of people wearing green and white Mexico jerseys trickled into the TKO Sports Bar & Grill, seven minutes from the Texas-Mexico border, its doors and windows shuttered to keep out the steadily climbing heat.
Just inside the door, a life-size cardboard cut-out of four Mexican players greeted fans, one with a hole instead of a face, and some supporters stopped to briefly fill the vacancy next to the smiling likeness of star striker Javier “Chicharito” Hernández. Some finished up breakfast as the national anthems played, while others headed straight across the freshly mopped floor to join the crowd watching El Tri take on South Korea. The whistle for kick-off triggered muted clapping and cheers.
When a World Cup rolls around, it has in recent years meant a complex and emotional decision for most soccer fans in Laredo. The city is 95 percent Hispanic, the largest percentage of any large metro area in the country, and fans are often torn over their allegiance to the country of their birth and the country of their heritage. Daily life on the border, meanwhile, is relatively calm, with residents used to being surrounded by border agents and daily shoppers from Mexico, and used to heated border-security rhetoric from Washington.
This time around, though, World Cup allegiance has been made simpler here by the United States team’s absence from the quadrennial soccer showpiece. But the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance border policy – the decision to prosecute everyone caught crossing the border illegally, including asylum-seekers – and now-ended separation of migrant families, has disrupted and complicated routines on the border. Border residents, who had grown used to the post-9/11 ramp up in security infrastructure and rhetoric, say they are getting caught up in the emotion and confusion of this new crisis…
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