The 71st version of Charro Days is sure to be as festive as ever with all of its traditions and pomp and ceremony on display in vivid colors and lively celebrations.

But this year will be different in this respect: Brownsville’s famous and most enduring celebration will lie under the national glare of a brand of American politics that disses the very essence of Charro Days, which is to revel in the cultural and historical ties between U.S. and Mexican border communities. The nativists and nationalists of the political right were on a roll a few years back, exploiting the 9/11 terrorist attack as the currency to push their views into the periphery of the American mainstream.

It worked well enough that those forces were able to ramrod a border fence bill into law, with a president and Texan who had long opposed such a thing folding up like a cheap tent in the face of the noisy right of his party. And so it is that when locals gather up next year to enjoy the 72nd edition of Charro Days that a troubling quandry may well exist. Festival goers may have to go through some sort of special access to gain entry through a border fence that will relegate the Charro’s sprawling carnival to the “Mexican side” of the wall.

“Nobody wants to go through an access to the carnival grounds across the border,” said Michael Puckett, the longtime executive director of Charrro Days. “The wall would really hurt Charro Days.”

The commencement of Charro Days this year dove tails with the intensity of interest in our region and community from the two major Democratic Party presidential candidates. Hillary Clinton has been to the Rio Grande Valley in successive February weeks, including a stop in Brownsville last week, and she dispatched her daughter, Chelsea, to this region over the weekend. Big Bill can’t be far behind in the run up to the crucial March 4 Texas primary.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, made his initial Valley visit last Friday, chatting with students at UT-Pan American in Edinburg before addressing a large outdoor crowd at the university. Clinton and Obama, in seeking favor from South Texans, were clear in their debate points last week at the University of Texas at Austin that they had problems with the construction of a border fence.

There’s this little problem with the opposition they expressed last week. Both Obama and Clinton voted in the fall of 2006 to build a border fence. It was no doubt a political calculation on their part as they fired up their presidential bids. Neither, I’m guessing, wanted to be seen as being weak on illegal immigration, so they both went against their natural political grains and voted for the construction of 370 miles of border fencing.

Now, with a Pew Hispanic Center poll showing that nearly 70 percent of Latinos oppose building additional fencing, Clinton and Obama are making like Texas border mayors in voicing their concerns about such a structure. So much so that on Monday morning, La Jefa herself, (that would be Hillary), issued a statement in response to a Sunday story that ran in The Brownsville Herald and El Nuevo Heraldo, saying the article, which detailed the cultural and economic impacts of the border fence, raised serious concerns.

“It is troubling to me that our country’s current border security plan threatens a South Texas tradition, (Charro Days), historically created to celebrate the sharing of cultures,” the Hillary Statement stated. “I believe we need to re-evaluate the border wall as it is currently being implemented.”

Esta bueno, Hill, thanks for the attention and sending the note of concern. Pero, here’s the thing, by the time you or Barack take office in January 2009, if either one of you can beat GOP bad boy John McCain, the fence is likely already going to be up. As comedian George Lopez would say, the fence is going up “right now- right now,” unless border leaders are successful in running out the clock in 2008 and convincing that pelon, Michael Chertoff of Homeland Security, to hold off a bit and work things out so a fourth of the UT-Brownsville doesn’t end up in Mexico.

Look, both Clinton and Obama are playing the panda-rama political game with us right now on the border fence. Where were they in late 2006 when we needed national political leaders of their type to stand up against the right-wing noise machine and say a border fence may work in some concentrated areas, but please don’t let it cut through the heart of American communities like Brownsville, Laredo, Eagle Pass and El Paso. Instead, they voted for the thing, quietly and with an eye toward the 2008 presidential election year cycle.

Well, 2008 is here, right now-right now, and with Charro Days firing up for its seventh decade, let’s enjoy this edition before the border fence goes up and we have to show our passports at a Border Patrol check station so we can be allowed entry into the carnival grounds on the Mexican side of the fence. Who could have known that eating sticky cotton candy and throwing little hoops at bottles could be so controversial?

Joaquin Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger