Word: bordered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Grossman had traveled down the coast thirty miles to the homeland of these immigrants, she might have understood why so many of them willingly cross the border for the opportunity to perform "slave labor." There, in Tijuana, she would have seen not workers picking oranges for a few dollars an hour, but people begging for food; not housekeepers living in the "slave" quarters of fancy homes, but wretched families living in cardboard shacks that wash away in the winter floods; not gardeners driving beat-up Chevy's, but beat-up human beings for whom the prospect of owning...
There has, of course, been progress. Americans of middle age can still remember when blacks had to move to the back of the bus as it crossed the border from Washington into the Virginia suburbs, when Marian Anderson was not allowed to sing at Washington's Constitution Hall, when Jackie Robinson had to promise not to retaliate if spiked and spat upon as the only black in major league baseball, and magazines periodically published photographs of some charred black body dangling on a rope from a branch of a tree. "In the 1940s," says Pettigrew, "Howard Beach occurred every night...
More importantly, we must consider the economic need that drives Mexicans to cross the border and seek work in California and other southwestern states. Widespread corruption and government control have wrecked the Mexican economy to the point that jobs are simply not available. Jobs available for Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are perhaps poor by American stan dards, but pay and conditions are vastly superior to what is available in Mexico...
...battle at the end of the film was based on a New Year's Day skirmish less than a mile from the Cambodian border. "They hit us with about 5,000 troops that night. They laid bombs right on top of us; we dropped bombs right on them. It's possible that our high command was using us as bait to draw the ! Viet Cong out so we could inflict heavy casualties. We lost about 25 dead and 175 wounded; we killed about 500 of them. Their bodies were scraped up by bulldozers, just like in the movie. For that...
...script of Platoon, and another decade to put it on the screen. But first he had to take his high, wired act on the road. The same month he arrived back from Viet Nam, he was busted for carrying an ounce of marijuana across the Mexico-U.S. border, and called his father, saying, "The good news is that I'm out of Viet Nam. The bad news is that I'm in a California jail, facing five to 20." Stone says his father helped get the charges dropped. "That was my homecoming," he says. "I got a true picture...