As I have covered in my last two posts, Mexico has consistently failed to meet its water treaty obligations since they were established in 1948. Several times a year, every year since 1948, politicians in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) speak out about this injustice to coax more federal relief dollars for our farmers and sugar mill operators. Check that our last sugar mill closed last year, a victim of South Texas drought and Mexican perfidy. This year it was State Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa’s (D-McAllen) turn to bitch about the missing Mexican water, which he did last week. Then, out of the blue, the President of the United States stopped American water shipments to Tijuana, citing Mexican recalcitrance over fulfilling their obligations under the 1944 International Boundary and Water Commission as the reason.
At this point, Valley locals who travel to Mexico often to visit with family and friends began to worry. Mexico had just installed (elected isn’t the proper word) its first female President, Claudia Sheinbaum. In a male-dominated, masculine society like Mexico, when you see a woman ascend to the president’s office, it means the office is ceremonial and disconnected from power, or the woman has serious, powerful, hard-to-explain power behind her. This morning, as curanderas throughout the Rio Grande Valley cleaned up behind receding flood waters, they were all saying the same thing: “I told you this would happen”.
Curanderas are practitioners of herbal medicine, home remedies, and witchcraft. There are two types of Curanderas: Brujas Blancas (white witches) and Brujas Negras (black witches). The difference between white and black brujas is that one removes the spells and the other casts spells, but in practice, good curanderas can do both, causing as much peace or mischief as you can afford to pay for. It is easy to recognize the work of Mexican curanderas by timing and irony. Yesterday, the most powerful curandera in Mexico sent a little black magic to Chuy Hinojosa in the form of a biblical three-hour rainstorm that came out of nowhere to dump over 21 inches of rain on McAllen.
Chuy Hinojosa bitches to the press about not having enough water in the Valley, and suddenly, a scattered line of thunderstorms forecasted to sporadically drop an inch or two of rain somewhere in the Valley turned into a Training Thunderstorm. Training means that as individual thunderstorm cells form and move downwind, another cell forms upwind and moves directly over the path of the previous cell. These storm cells form so fast that when viewed on radar, the thunderstorm looks stationary or moving backward against the upper-level wind. On the radar, they look like a train; on the ground, it feels like you’re being hit by a train.
At this point, I am sure most of my gringo readers who reside far from the border are skeptical of the supernatural angle to this story. Let me provide more evidence that the train rain was the work of curanderas: Nobody can agree on what happened. According to RGV.com, McAllen received 4.96 inches of rain yesterday. The local Fox News station said McAllen was hit with 8 inches of rain. My SanAntonio.com claimed yesterday’s rain totals for McAllen were between 13-21 inches. Good Morning America claimed we got 14 inches of rain. Do you see the trend here? That’s how you know this wasn’t some innocent weather phenomenon. My neighbor on the corner, after saying, “I told you this would happen,” added that in 48 years, she had never seen this much rain or flooding.
As usual, the poorest were hardest hit by this storm of spite, with many spending this morning recovering abandoned vehicles or cleaning out flooded homes. Many more are lined up outside various homes or apartments as the faithful consult their trusted curanderas about what the hell is going on with the weather. But I know what’s going on; I’ve seen this shit before in the Hindu Kush with the Mountain Pashtun and their Jinn. If I were an advisor for Senator Hinojosa, I’d tell him to stop bitching about the 1944 water treaty before we end up with 350 acre-feet of water being dumped on our heads.
