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Beldades of the Ball: for more than half a century, the most important event in the life of a teenage girl in Laredo has been the Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and Ball, a curious display of Anglo culture in a decidedly Hispanic city. But as violence spreads across the border, can the old world survive the new?

Article Excerpt
BEFORE THE DAUGHTERS of Laredo's most prominent families are presented to society, they come to see dressmaker Linda Leyendecker Gutierrez. Her rambling white Victorian sits eight blocks north of the Rio Grande in the city's downtown historic district, on a quiet side street lined with orange trees and bougainvilleas. When I visited one afternoon in early February, Gutierrez and her seamstresses were hurrying to finish the faux eighteenth-century ball gowns that local debutantes would wear to the social occasion of the year: the Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and Ball. The event, in which a dozen or more well-bred high school seniors promenade across the stage of the civic center dressed like contemporaries of Martha Washington, falls on Presidents' Day weekend and is the centerpiece of an extravagant, 108-year-old celebration in honor of the country's first president. Around Laredo, the debs are sometimes referred to as "the Marthas."

Gutierrez, a magisterial blonde who made her debut in 1960--and who, like both of her sisters, married her escort--led me through her house, fingering unfinished beadwork and summoning her seamstresses when she spotted a detail that needed attention. "A girl gets her social education the year she is a debutante," Gutierrez said. "She learns manners and poise and the old social graces." It was less than two weeks before the ball, and her dressmaking operation had, by then, come to occupy all thirteen rooms of the house. Sequins and rhinestone banding covered the dining room table, and unfinished gowns with enormous hoopskirts trimmed in Spanish lace spilled out of doorways and across the hardwood floors. Their historical reference point--Colonial America--had been somewhat lost in translation; some of the gowns came in colors like burnt orange and chartreuse and had so many sequins that they weighed nearly as much as the girls themselves. As we stepped over stray scissors and spools of thread, I asked what the dresses--which take a year to make--usually cost. "I can't say," Gutierrez said with a laugh. "That's like asking someone, 'How many acres do you have on your ranch?'"

The Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and Ball has always been a genteel celebration of patriotism, or at least of "Americanness" as imagined on the edge of Mexico, but this year's celebration felt different. While Gutierrez and the rest of Laredo were gearing up for a weekend of revelry, its sister city--with whom its economic interests and family trees are so intertwined that the two communities are often referred to as los dos Laredos--was stranded at a bloody impasse in the ongoing turf war between two rival drug cartels. Nuevo Laredo was averaging nearly one murder a day, and articles on the front page of the Laredo Morning Times about Washington's Birthday Celebration competed for space with lurid crime-scene photos from the other side of the river. Kidnappings and execution-style killings had become routine half a mile south of where we stood. So chaotic had the situation become that last year Nuevo Laredo's new chief of police had been gunned down eight hours after taking office, and the city councilman in charge of public security had been murdered a few blocks from city hall. Just two days before I visited Gutierrez, masked gunmen armed with assault rifles and grenades had forced their way into the newsroom of the city's biggest newspaper, El Manana, and opened fire on its reporters.

But what was happening across the river did not make for polite conversation. Gutierrez's focus that afternoon was on a more remote moment in history--specifically, March 3, 1797, the last night that President George Washington spent in office, when his wife held a reception that would be reenacted in the pageant. And so Gutierrez turned her attention to a pretty, sweet-natured seventeen-year-old debutante named Alyssa Cigarroa, who had made an appointment to practice bowing in her...

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