WILLIAM NEALE

For those who find Brownsville's politics unfathomable, William Neale may offer an insight. Neale, an Englishman, joined the Mexican Navy in 1821. He participated in the siege of Veracruz against Spanish forces that same year. After Mexican independence, he roamed the country and eventually settled in New Orleans. He moved to Matamoros in 1834 and started a stage coach line from the north side of the river to Point Isabel.

From the Mexican-American War to the Civil War he found himself in the middle of the action. Business concerns were always at stake. In 1859 Juan Cortina and his followers attacked Brownsville and took control of the city. One of the fatalities was Neale's son. He was sleeping in his bedroom with his infant daughter when a Cortina gunman shot him through the window. The house, the oldest building in Brownsville, sits deteriorating in a forlorn corner of the UTRGV campus.

Hurricanes, yellow fever and cholera outbreaks, wars, battles and droughts, Neale weathered them all and lived to the end of the 19th century. He served as mayor of Brownsville on two occasions. He lived it all and offered this analysis of his adopted city in his last years.

"My experience of three score years and ten is that nearly all communities split into two or more parties," he said. "I have known small communities of but two persons, just a man and his wife to split merely on account of their different opinions, tastes or idiosyncrasies.

"This fate appears to be inevitable and fell on our community. We split into two parties, the party that supported the city's claims was called the Blues and the party that supported the adverse claimants was called the Reds.

"These colors were chosen in lieu of party names to designate the parties so that the Mexican voters might know to whom they belonged, for it would have been a hopeless task to have made them understand either our political differences or our municipal affairs.

"The elections in those days were combinations of force, fraud and farce, and the smartest 'fishers of men' like the apostles of old gained the day. I don't see that we have improved up to this day. The same two colors and the same two parties are in existence, but by some mysterious process the parties have changed colors."