Where do you find the signs of misery as you walk though the streets of Brownsville?
Is it in the dry statistics of the MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) readily available through the Internet or at your local library?
Or is it in the long lines at the Texas Human Services Department building where women with their children sit from the early morning hours and wait patiently to apply or renew for assistance?
Or does misery reveal itself in the number of families scavenging through alley dumpsters behind second-hand stores looking for items they can resell or even wear themselves?
Perhaps it's the scores of young men carrying a plastic paint five-gallon can asking if they can wash your car while you do your business in downtown stores or offices? Or does it manifest itself in the hungry and vacant eyes of crackheads panhandling the patrons at local dives to get the $2 or $3 bucks they need to buy the rock?
Or it it in the hopeful smile that the girls and women who hang around the hourly-rate hotel give you as they ask you if you want a "date?"
Or is it in the eyes of job seekers walking on a beaten path on the shoulder of the road – most places there are no sidewalks – because they don't have a car and they don't have the bus fare to ride public transportation.
Most of the time it's staring you right in the face and we have grown so inured to the poverty and squalor that it goes right over our head.
Witness, for example, the long lines at the local plasma donation centers. Many are local residents, but the "donors" at the downtown centers, many of them are from Matamoros who wait patiently from dawn to be able to donate their blood and walk out to the local grocery store afterward and buy the 10 pounds of pollo leg quarters ($3.90) and 15 pounds of potatoes ($2.95) to feed the household for a week.
If you look closely, you can tell who has been to the centers by the telltale wrap around their left elbow where the needle was inserted to draw their blood.
The plasma companies report that the border has been a gold mine for their "service."
Plasma is not cheap at a hospital, if it has ever been your misfortune to have to pay for it. The money they pay these "donors" is nothing compared to what they charge patients. But to the poor and destitute whose blood has been checked and deemed marketable, it's money in their pocket they wouldn't have any other way.
It's pollo con calabaza or polo with potatoes. It's money for a "new" shirt or trousers at Ayner Second-Hand store. Maybe there might be something left over for a tarro of draft beer over at La Carta. before you take the mandado home.
If that isn't a measure of misery, then perhaps we have grown so jaded that only until you're there yourself, you won't recognize it.