Mexico’s Bagdad Once Clashed With U.S.

There was once another Bagdad, along another oil-rich gulf, facing U.S. troops.

It was a boom-town border port at the mouth of the Rio Grande, a city of 10,000 that thrived by exporting Confederate tobacco and cotton, evading the Union blockade of Southern ports.

In 1866, after the Civil War, Mexican officials were fighting for control of the town and one faction invited 1,000 American soldiers from the other side of the river to help.

But the soldiers stayed for 20 days of looting--a debacle that got their commander imprisoned when he returned to the United States.

“The sack was so total, it was as if Bagdad had been taken from one side of the river to the other,” says Mexico’s Porrua Encyclopedia.

The Iraqi capital, Baghdad, also has suffered its share of sacks: The Mongols raped and pillaged in 1258, Tamerlane’s followers repeated in 1400, and the Persians did the same in 1524.

Like those attacks, the sack of Bagdad, Mexico, failed to crush the town. It took a hurricane in 1880 and changing trade patterns to do that.

There is not much on either side of the river today: a wind-blasted vista of shoe-high scrub; dry lakes, damp lakes and marshes; a few fishermen’s shacks and a few stands of trees, each visible for miles.

The only U.S. force in evidence is the Border Patrol, which runs an occasional launch up the river, according to Ismael Perez, a fisherman who has lived in what was Bagdad for 12 years.

Perez, who had wandered over with Silberio Duenas to help a stranger push his car out of a small bog, said he sometimes found old bottles, coins or a few old building stones in the area.

But no monuments, not even any eroded walls, bear witness to the not-quite-splendor that was Bagdad.

Why the place was named for the great Arab capital “is a mystery nobody has been able to solve,” said Matamoros historian Andres Cuellar. “It’s extremely odd.”

He said one theory is that one of Bagdad’s founders was inspired by “The Arabian Nights,” which tells the story of an Arab sailor named Sinbad who sets out on adventures from Baghdad.

Even in its heyday, Bagdad lacked the golden domes and tiled spires of the Iraqi capital’s mosques, the twisting alleyways of mud brick houses, the brutal Ottoman intrigue of its politics. To say nothing of any Arabs.

Both are deadly flat, save for a few sand dunes in the Mexican town. Both are graced by a river, although the Rio Grande resembles the puny Jordan River more than Baghdad’s mighty Tigris.

Cuellar said Bagdad was born when the authorities sought to stop goods from disappearing between the ships offshore and the customs house in Matamoros, 20 miles inland. They decided to put the tax collector where the imports met the shore.

Today, some people in Matamoros go blank when asked about the city that once rivaled their own as a center of northern trade.

“Some people say there was a Bagdad, but it’s now under the waters of the sea,” said a soda pop vendor in downtown Matamoros, when asked for directions to the site.

For Perez and his fellow fishermen here, the conflict in the Persian Gulf seems just as remote.

Asked about the other Baghdad, he at first speculated on a city in Texas.

“We don’t have a radio here,” he said. “There is nothing here but air.”