BROWNSVILLE, Texas – In Juan Montoya’s Brownsville, it’s always a sorrowful Bob Dylan song moving the little border town down the road. There are little annoyances and big problems coming up the street every morning – enough, anyway, to feed the beast of a Blog he operates here.
Recently, he ended a story with these sentences: “Meanwhile, as our mayor rises to urban star status, city residents can expect for their resources to continue to be funneled to bike trails, health-craze gimmicks, inane Guinness World Records and an endless parade of resolutions to curry favor with the different niches of the electorate. That should keep their minds off the sorry condition of our city streets, the Beirut-like appearance of our downtown area, the ineptness of our over-paid city administration and the old ladies and children waiting for a bus under the blazing sun.”
Yeah, Dylan: “Hot chili peppers in the blistering sun, dust on my face and my cape.”
Montoya, in his 60s, has been writing-up Brownsville for the better part of the last – what? – 35 years. Mayors have come and gone. Hurricanes have come and threatened destruction. Women have come and split. The moths, as poet W.B. Yeats might say, have winged through.
If anyone can be said to be the chronicler of Brownsville, well, it may as well be Juan Montoya. He’s like Underdog, everywhere. A trained journalist with credits here and in San Antonio and someplace known as Saginaw in Michigan, Montoya has kept his eyes and face on the prize, that prize being a chance to defend the homeless, the abandoned, the dispossessed. It’s not just for a story that Juan decries the lack of shaded bus stops. He seems to actually feel for people forced to stand out in 100-degree heat, stand and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait for the city bus to come down the street. Montoya likely agonizes.
We knew a younger Juan Montoya, back in our own Brownsville Herald days and days when he was at The Herald and we’d drop-in working for another paper. The word on him from the beginning was that Juan was a newshound, a reporter who would frown in the presence of anyone he’d interview who might be lying, a reporter who took notes, but then took some more. It’s been awhile since Juan actually wrote for a news publication. His Blog – El Rrun Rrun – has been around for more than five years now, perhaps a few more than that. Montoya will write the traditional news story with the required elements, only these days he is never so constrained from one tale to the next. He will go off the Journalism rails from time to time and practice advocacy journalism for pay. It is the legacy of online blogging, is what I say. Post a good story – or advertisement- for a candidate and take their cash. There’s a bunch of candidates out there these days, 20 or so seeking a post on the Brownsville Independent School District’s board of directors, for one.
And perhaps Juan, shown at left in photo above, does not see himself as a “true” journalist bound anymore by the accepted ethics of the trade. Bloggers have no such structure. They will write a story full of what newspaper editors would deem “holes” and go ahead and post it, where the newspaper editor would simply throw it back at the lazy reporter. Montoya, when he gets on his Journalism horse, puts out good, useful stuff. More than the other bloggers in town, he provides stories that actually say something. Where another blogger will go off on a tale of woe without getting both sides of the story, Montoya will do it when the story demands it. He knows the ropes, as they say in boxing.
We’ve not been reading the local Blogs as much as we used to, but we do notice that Juan Montoya, more than the other bloggers here, has defined his product and has stayed true to himself, even if, on occasion, he, too, gets silly with the facts…
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The Brownsville Avenger 