Word: bordered
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There may be more tension between the nortenos, Mexicans who live along the border in northern Mexico, and their countrymen in Mexico City than between Mexicans and Americans. The nortenos see themselves as more industrious and democratic than the others, whom they sometimes call guachos (the kept ones), accusing them of living largely off government services. "We started using computers in our business ten years ago," boasts Eugenio Elorduy, a prosperous Mexicali businessman. "In Mexico City, the computer boom is just starting...
Sheer economic interdependence is, of course, the main tie that binds the people living on opposite sides of the border. Mexicans cross the checkpoints, often daily, because there are more jobs and higher pay in the U.S. Merchants on the American side depend heavily on sales to Mexicans, who often find items of greater variety and higher quality than in their home cities. Lately, the strong U.S. dollar and the devalued peso have sharply cut Mexican buying power and caused havoc for some U.S. border businesses. Many American shoppers in turn have been flooding into Mexico in search of bargains...
...mutual reliance has grown spectacularly in recent years with the increase in maquiladoras, so-called twin plants on the Mexican side of the border. These are creations of U.S. companies, which set up factories to take advantage of cheap and once abundant labor to turn out products, ranging from computers to jump ropes, that are shipped back into the U.S. Both nations have reduced various export and import fees to aid this development. There are now some 700 such plants, providing Mexico with about $l.3 billion in earnings annually and a foreign exchange income exceeded only by its oil exports...
...exception to the general harmony along the border is the friction between Tijuana (pop. 566,000), a former honky-tonk town that has made impressive progress in modernizing its business section, and San Diego (pop. 2 million), an adjacent Sunbelt city with many military personnel, both active and retired, and relatively few Hispanic residents. The canyons and ravines on the south side of San Diego have become a no-man's-land, where Mexican bandits, many of them drug addicts, prey on their countrymen crossing the border illegally. U.S. Border Patrol agents and San Diego police trying to control this...
...even made Americans a minority. In Los Ebanos, Texas, 80 miles northwest of Brownsville, Postmaster Lucio Flores was asked how many of the town's 800 residents are Anglos. Flores held up one finger and said with a grin, "We call him El Gringo." What is happening along the border, says University of Arizona Anthropologist Tom Weaver, is "the Americanization of Mexico and the Mexicanization of America." It is a relatively painless way for neighbors to become friends...