40 Fun Facts About Laredo, Texas

Which major freeway begins in Laredo and runs north all the way to Duluth, Minnesota?

Interstate 35 starts near the Mexican border and passes San Antonio, Austin and Dallas, which is why so much cross-border freight funnels through Laredo.

Laredo's biggest festival, a month-long party each February, celebrates the birthday of which US president?

George Washington is honored with parades, a carnival, an air show and a colonial ball, and the party draws about 400,000 people a year.

The Laredo Bucks won two league championships in the 2000s as a professional team in which sport?

Ice hockey thrived on the border for a decade: the Bucks won the Central Hockey League title in 2004 and 2006 before moving to Missouri in 2012.

Which famous classical musician brought a Bach tour to a Laredo international bridge in April 2019?

Yo-Yo Ma brought his Bach Project to the Juárez–Lincoln International Bridge, one of four road bridges linking Laredo with Mexico.

Laredo recorded rare measurable snow in 2004 on the eve of which holiday?

Christmas Eve 2004 brought about an inch of snow to Laredo, in the same storm that gave Brownsville its first measurable snowfall in more than a century.

Larry McMurtry's 1993 novel Streets of Laredo continues the story begun in which earlier western?

Lonesome Dove came first, and Streets of Laredo follows Captain Woodrow Call as he hunts a bandit preying on the railroad; James Garner played Call in the 1995 miniseries.

Which pepper gives its name to a Laredo festival, founded in 1978, known for its eating contest?

Jalapeño fans get concerts, a Miss Jalapeño contest and a 15-minute eating showdown at the festival, which is part of Laredo's February presidential birthday party.

Laredo is the third-largest US city on the Mexican border, behind San Diego and which Texas city?

El Paso and San Diego are the only bigger US border cities; Laredo counted 255,205 residents at the 2020 census, about 95 percent of them Hispanic.

Laredo's February birthday festival includes a pageant and ball named for which Native American woman?

Pocahontas has her own pageant and ball at the festival, which was first staged in 1898 by a fraternal lodge called the Improved Order of Red Men.

Trade with Mexico has made Laredo the largest example of what in the United States?

Inland port is Laredo's title, and Nuevo Laredo across the river holds the same one for Latin America.

Laredo became part of the United States after which conflict, ended by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?

The Mexican–American War left Laredo north of the new border, and residents who wanted to stay Mexican crossed the river and founded Nuevo Laredo.

Laredo counts a seventh flag, beyond the six flags over Texas, for which short-lived 1840 breakaway state?

The Republic of the Rio Grande was a federalist revolt against Mexico's centralist government that ended within the year; its reputed capitol in Laredo is now a museum.

Which former US Army post in Laredo, founded in 1849, now houses the main campus of Laredo College?

Fort McIntosh began as Camp Crawford, guarded a strategic river crossing for almost a century and was deactivated in 1946.

Laredo International Airport grew out of a pilot-training base closed in the 1970s by which military branch?

Air Force jets such as the T-38 Talon trained pilots at Laredo until the base closed, and the city took over the runways for its municipal airport.

Laredo's cross-border trucking trade boomed after which trade agreement took effect on January 1, 1994?

NAFTA gave Laredo's job market a faster growth rate than Texas as a whole, as warehouses and customs brokers multiplied to handle the trade.

A Laredo plaza named for local soldier David Barkley honors Hispanic recipients of which US military award?

Medal of Honor recipient David Barkley, born in Laredo, drowned in 1918 after swimming the Meuse River to scout German positions.

Laredo was named in 1755 after a seaside town in which region of northern Spain?

Cantabria's Laredo is a beach resort on Spain's north coast, and the Texas settlement's full name, Villa de San Agustín de Laredo, also honored Saint Augustine.

Which Spanish captain founded Laredo in 1755 with just three families from a nearby ranch settlement?

Tomás Sánchez got permission from the regional colonizer José de Escandón and ran both civil and military affairs until Laredo became a villa in 1767.

Nuevo Laredo, the sister city directly across the border from Laredo, lies in which Mexican state?

Tamaulipas runs from Nuevo Laredo down to the Gulf of Mexico, and the two Laredos together form a cross-border metro area of more than 600,000 people.

Laredo is the seat of which South Texas county, named for a Republic of Texas official?

Webb County honors James Webb, who served the Republic of Texas as treasury secretary, secretary of state and attorney general.

Which Laredo-born actor played the charming cartel villain Lalo Salamanca in Better Call Saul?

Tony Dalton was born in Laredo but grew up in Mexico City, and he spent years in Mexican telenovelas and films before the role made him famous north of the border.

Which Laredo-born Republican, nicknamed The Hammer, served as House majority leader from 2003 to 2005?

Tom DeLay earned the nickname enforcing party discipline as majority whip; before politics he ran a pest-control company, which got him called the Exterminator.

Laredo-born Federico Peña served as mayor of which western US city before joining Bill Clinton's cabinet?

Denver elected Peña its first Hispanic mayor in 1983, and he went on to run both the Transportation and Energy departments in the 1990s.

Laredo-born journalist and activist Jovita Idar was honored in 2023 on which circulating US coin?

The quarter honoring Idar belongs to the American Women series; she championed the cause of Mexican Americans and ran a league offering free schooling to Laredo children.

Laredo's Santos Benavides was the highest-ranking Tejano officer in which military force during the 1860s?

Confederate Army colonel Benavides held off a larger federal force at the Battle of Laredo in 1864 and kept Southern cotton flowing into Mexico.

Which New Orleans standard is often traced, like the cowboy ballad 'Streets of Laredo', to 'The Unfortunate Rake'?

St. James Infirmary Blues is often said to share the Laredo ballad's roots in an 18th-century folk song, though some scholars doubt the link.

The Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos, a baseball team shared with Nuevo Laredo, are named for which bird?

Owls is the English for Tecolotes, the only Mexican League club that plays home games outside Mexico, splitting them between the two Laredos.

Laredo's independent pro baseball club of 2012 to 2016 was named for which animal?

Lemurs was the name picked when a Shreveport franchise moved to Laredo; the club won the American Association championship in 2015.

Athletic teams at Laredo's Texas A&M International University compete under which nickname?

Dustdevils teams compete in NCAA Division II's Lone Star Conference, which they joined in 2019 after thirteen seasons in the Heartland Conference.

The 1960s NBC western series Laredo followed a comic band of lawmen from which real-life force?

Texas Rangers played by Neville Brand, Peter Brown and William Smith rode for 56 episodes, and the pilot first aired as an episode of The Virginian.

By what name is the river that separates Laredo from Mexico known on the Mexican side of the border?

Río Bravo, in full Río Bravo del Norte, has been the standard Spanish name for the lower river since about 1602; bravo can mean furious or wild.

Which famous long-distance road network officially begins at the border in Nuevo Laredo?

The Pan-American Highway's official route runs south from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City along Mexican Federal Highway 85.

Laredo's modern era began in 1881 when the Texas Mexican Railroad arrived from which Gulf Coast city?

Corpus Christi's line reached Laredo the same year as Jay Gould's railroad from San Antonio and the founding of the Laredo Times.

Which crop, introduced near Laredo in 1898, opened the land north of the city to irrigated farming?

Onions joined the railroads and the coal mines upriver in driving Laredo's growth during the last twenty years of the 1800s.

The airport serving Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, is officially named for which Aztec deity?

Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent, lends his name to the airport, which handles domestic Mexican flights for the two Laredos.

Laredo is home to the main office of a USDA program to wipe out which livestock pest?

Fever tick trouble is serious enough around this ranching center that the national Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program keeps its main office in Laredo.

Which pope created the Catholic Diocese of Laredo, with San Agustín as its cathedral?

John Paul II carved the diocese out of two older ones in 2000, and San Agustín, whose present building dates from 1872, became its cathedral.

Laredo was the last town founded in the colonizing campaign for which Spanish province of the 1700s?

Nuevo Santander was settled in a planned campaign of some twenty towns and a string of missions, meant to keep the French out of Spanish territory.

Rival political clubs whose feud erupted into a deadly Laredo street battle in 1886 were named for which items?

Boots and sandals, Botas and Guaraches in Spanish, stood for the ruling machine and the reformers; their riot officially left sixteen dead.

Which reservoir on Chacon Creek is the centerpiece of a Laredo state park that opened in 1991?

Lake Casa Blanca sits where a tropical mangrove swamp once stood, and paleontologists have dug fossils of primates, fish and reptiles out of the park.