La Mina Cantina Bar sits in full view of the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge that connects the banks of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Every day over 11,000 pedestrians, and over 2,000 passenger vehicles traverse the 1,050 foot-long concrete isthmus to go to work and school, to run errands and to go out at night. In the mornings, they can stop by La Mina to pick up breakfast tacos and coffee. In the evenings, the bar offers post-work drinks, homestyle Mexican fare, and karaoke. Just outside its entrance, the crosswalk is monitored by Customs and Border Patrol agents, which are just as fixed into the landscape as the muddy waters of the Rio Grande or the security fencing around the bridge above it.

Enrique — “Quique” — and his brother Arturo have owned La Mina for almost four years. They purchased the space for cheap in the aftermath of the pandemic, which decimated Laredo’s once-vibrant city center.

“I don’t want to complain,” Quique says of his circumstances while bartending over a counter framed by twinkling Christmas lights and neon homages to Cerveza Estrella Jalisco, Tecate, and the second-most venerated entity in Mexico: La Selección, the national soccer team. Costs were “always expensive,” he says of the last few years of business in the region, but now things are going “very poorly and I think it will probably get worse.”