The Brownsville Beacon

By Diego Garcia III | Editor of The Brownsville Beacon The moving vans pulled up to the White House. Trump's personal belongings, as well as whatever pieces the government owned Trump wanted, were packed away and removed from the residence and the Oval Office. The carpet in the Oval was changed from Trump's favorite gold to a more traditional dark blue carpet. The portrait of Andrew Jackson was replaced by a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. A bust of Winston Churchill was replaced by a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The official photos of Trump and Pence were replaced by portraits of Biden and Harris. Donald Trump left the White House on Wednesday morning and boarded Marine One for the final time. He took a flight around Washington, D.C. and headed to Joint Base Andrews for his triumphant farewell rally. But there were no huge crowds of adoring admirers in attendance. Most of the elected officials decided to forego attending his send off and decided to stay ...

Speechless. Just... speechless.

By Diego Garcia III | Editor of The Brownsville Beacon In today's city commission meeting, the Brownsville city council voted to put a proposed change to the city charter on the ballot in the upcoming municipal election to be held on May 1, 2021. The proposed City Charter Amendment, proposed by rhe charter committee, is broken down into multiple amendments. The two key amendments are the implementation of term limits for the mayor and the other six city commissioners. The proposed amendment would limit the mayor and city commission to two four-year terms. A visit to The Brownsville Herald's social media page will show dozens of comments approving of the proposed term limits. Several of the people commenting are in favor of limiting the amount of time politicians get to spend warming an executive leather chair behind the dais in the old federal courtroom above the post office on East Elizabeth Street. I'm not a fan of term limits. If an incumbent is doing a poor ...

By Diego Garcia III | Editior of The Brownsville Beacon One of my favorite TV shows is the White House drama The West Wing . The last season sees a presidential election between Democrat Congressman Matthew Vicente Santos from Texas against Republican Senator Arnold Vinick from California. The election boils down to Arizona, where Santos squeaks out a narrow victory agsinst Vinick. A few thousand votes is the margin of victory. When the results are announced, the defeated Senator Vinick asks his aides to get the President-elect on the phone. When his campaign advisors tell him he should challenge the results in court, Vinick, played by veteran actor Alan Alda, says no. When his people insist, Vinick puts up his hand and says, "I'll either be a winner, or a loser tonight. I won't be a sore loser." It would be nice if in this instance life imitated art. Donald Trump has caused lasting damage to the presidency, to the country, and to the concept of separatio...

By Diego Garcia III | Editor of The Brownsville Beacon I am a Star Trek  fan. One of the byproducts of discovering life on other planets is the realization there is only one race of human beings. It seems during the time of Captain Kirk and Captain Picard, the idea of discriminating agsinst one's ethnicity or gender is something that has become extinct in the future. I always wondered what it would be like if this country and this planet would realize Martin Luther King Jr's dream of judging someone by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. I fear this is something that will never come to pass. The United States was supposed to be the biggest incubator for the biggest social experiment on the planet. Would a group of castaways and rejects from other corners of the earth be able to join together and melt away their cultural differences to form a new type of person? Would you come to the United States and become an American? For a while i...

By Diego Garcia III | Editor of The Brownsville Beacon Brownsville's newspaper is a shell of the shell it used to be. The once proud daily newspaper was published and printed in Brownsville across the street from the Old Cameron County Jail and a stone's throw from Downtown and the new Cameron County Courthouse. The printing presses would chug all night as distributors would fill the parking lot waiting for their bundles of newspapers to deliver all around town. The offices have been boarded up and the behemoth printing presses have been shipped to Mexico long ago. The Herald  is now printed in McAllen along with The Monitor and the Valley Morning Star . Most days you'll find the local stories written by authors from McAllen or Harlingen. The Brownsville "office" is a room in the refurbished VentureX Building. Probably the same room where they store the mops and the Fabuloso . Their Facebook page is riddled with grammatical errors and misspelled word...

By Diego Garcia III | Editor of The Brownsville Beacon . If you're a night owl, go around hunting Pokemon, or thinking about a midnight snack, you'll have to curb your craving. Citing the rising infection rate and the lack of hospital space, County Judge Eddie Treviño has issued a curfew to start on Friday at 12:01 p.m. Here are the particulars. Nobody out from midnight to 5 a.m. unless seeking medical attention or for "essential travel." Children have to be inside at 10 p.m. Night spots have to cut off their party at 11 p.m. and close by midnight.  Social gatherings of more than 10 are prohibited unless they are members of the same family or the gatherings are approved by the County Judge or the mayor. Nothing was said about limiting capacity, although capacity in restaurants and public places had been limited. That said, several people around town have seen popular eateries filled way past capacity. I guess that late night trip to Whataburger will have t...

By Diego Garcia III | Editor of The Brownsville Beacon It's turned cold outside. The wind is quietly howling, making the tree in my front yard sway. The hum of a passing vehicle is the only sound that breaks the silence. I'm sitting in my living room in the dark. The atmosphere is appropriate for this last post of 2020. This year has been challenging and trying, to say the very least. From the large scale probelems of a global pandemic, to losing friends and family, to still dealing with heartbreak and depression, to some pretty serious health issues, this is absolutely a year I'd like to forget. That said, I'm not so naive to think the problems will all go away because the calendar starts all over again tonight at midnight. The pandemic won't go away, my heart is still broken, and I'm still fighting my issues with my health. I have always been an open book. I've never been scared to tell people how I really feel - I'm just built that way. The reason I b...

By Diego Garcia III | Editor of The Brownsville Beacon The times, they are a changin'. The Brownsville Blogosphere has been going through an evolution of sorts. It seems 2020 has seen changes everywhere. Jerry McHale, publisher of the McHale Report , often times refers to Brownsville as the blogging capital of Texas. That's probably because the city's newspaper is a shell of the shell it used to be. The old Herald  offices close to downtown sit abandoned and dormant. Their skeleton crew works out of an office in the VentureX Building off the expressway. Because of the Herald's lack of local reporting, bloggers have usually reported on local stories and provided Brownsvillians with the goings-on around town. But the bloggers aren't what they used to be. Brownsville has starred to see a shift from blogs to video blogs, or vlogs, that are posted to Facebook and YouTube. For years, the gold standard has been blogs by Brownsville blogging royalty - Juan Monto...

The UIL has dropped the hammer on the ECISD athletic department. From an article from Austin, Texas: (Austin, Texas) - The University Interscholastic League placed the entire Edinburg High School athletic programs on probation through the end of 2023.  Head football coach JJ Lejia was also put on a one year probation, including a public reprimand for infractions which occurred on the sidelines during the PSJA/Edinburg football game.  “We need to make sure that all programs at Edinburg High School understand the severity of this issue,” said Dr. Charles Breithaupt, Executive Director of the University Interscholastic League (UIL).  “We commends ECISD for their quick response to what happened with this incident.”