LareDOS marks its 13th year in publication in December 2006, a significant milestone when you consider that small, under-funded publications usually have short lives in print.
Revise “significant milestone” to minor miracle and add “under staffed” to under-funded.
That’s who we are, and who we always have been, so true a reflection of our corporate name, ShuString Productions, Inc.
LareDOS is 100% Latina owned and has been since 1996 when co-founder María Eugenia Guerra bought out partner Richard Geissler.
The publication earned its muckraking (muckraking is a compliment, Raza) spurs through the late 1990s when it wrote relentlessly of the outrageous taxpayer funded expenses of the Laredo Independent School District for travel of its superintendents and trustees (and their wives); property acquisitions; salaries; and paint, landscaping, and decorating schemes the district chose for the turn-of-the-century structures that became home to the district’s administrative offices and the fine arts magnet school campus in the St. Peter’s Historical District.
LareDOS has consistently covered issues relative to the spending of the public nickel, the pomposity of public officials, the migration and reinvention of the patron system through local governmental entities, and the environment. A host of regular columnists and contributors, some who have written for the journal since its first issue, offer commentary and debate on writing, literature, ranching, politics, weather, and religion.
LareDOS is archived in microfilm at the Laredo Public Library and at the University of California-Berkeley. It is also archived in hard copy at UT’s Benson Collection in Austin and at Southern Methodist University’s DeGolyer Library.
Suffering politely under the malaprop monikers of “Los Dos Laredos” and “Laredos Dos,” LareDOS looks forward to another decade in publication.
Publisher Guerra, a journalism graduate of Southwest Texas State University, is an environmentalist, a Zapata County rancher, the mother of Laredo attorney George Joseph Altgelt, and the grandmother of Emily Ix’chel Altgelt, a dynamo of love and energy. Guerra is the former director of the Río Grande International Study Center and the former chair of the City of Laredo’s first Citizens Environmental Advisory Committee which laid the groundwork for the establishment of the City’s Environmental Services Department. She attributes her lefty leanings and her environmental point of view to reading The Texas Observer for the 20 years of self-exile in Austin, San Marcos, and Wimberley.
In rare moments of spare time, usually at traffic lights, Guerra contemplates writing memoir, finishing a dozen short fiction pieces set on the ranchlands, and gathering up the column she’s written for 15 years, the Santa María Journal, into a single volume for publication.
Since December 2005
