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Blog
Brownsville's library helps city brace for Dolly
July 23, 2008
I hope the weather's better where you are. Heavy winds and rain started in the middle of the night here, 60 miles inland from Brownsville-Matamoros where Hurricane Dolly is expected to come ashore around noon.
"The Brownsville Public Library was transformed into the city's emergency operations center on Tuesday for Hurricane Dolly's imminent arrival," is the lead of the story that Laura Tillman filed for The Brownsville Herald early this morning:
"We're going to have a direct hit this time," said police spokesman Jimmy Manrrique on Tuesday evening. Behind him, yellow and red gradations swirled through the Gulf of Mexico across a projection screen. "We prepare for the real thing all year long."
Representatives of the Brownsville Police Department, Fire Department, Animal Rescue, Brownsville Independent School District, and Search and Rescue were assembled at the center through the night.
Tremendous brickwork and stonework characterize the buildings of Brownsville and Matamoros. 
The library that's now doubling as the nerve center for city emergency operations during this hurricane, though it went up in the 1990s, has a design that consciously echoes the twin cities' grand older structures.
Michael Martin's photographs of Brownsville give you views of the city on better days than today.
If you want to read about the place, young native son Oscar Casares wrote a brilliant collection of stories and titled it Brownsville. That was an ALA notable book in 2004 for good reason: its nine stories capture the idiom, obsessions, hopes, quirks, and dreams of this one-of-a-kind region.
And there's no way to talk about the place's literature without talking about another former Brownsville Herald scribe: the great borderland scholar, ethnographer, songster, and author Américo Paredes:
Posted by Bruce Jensen on July 23, 2008 | Comments (0)
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