Word: frontera
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...against the tropical climate and southeast Mexico's lush countryside to gaze at. These folks are going home. Trouble is, they don't want to. When the bus crosses the border and pulls up on the narrow, rain-soaked street in front of the immigration office in El Carmen Frontera, Guatemala, its passengers are in a foul mood. Home is El Salvador or Honduras or Nicaragua or Guatemala itself--all disaster plagued, crime-ridden, poorer by the minute and, as far as those on the bus are concerned, best seen in the rear-view mirror. They had hoped to travel...
Mexico, whose officials are campaigning for an amnesty for the millions of its people illegally in the U.S., is turning on its own undocumented migrants. Tapachula, a city of 170,000 in the state of Chiapas, 10 miles from El Carmen Frontera, is the headquarters of the "Southern Plan" against illegal migrants--nearly all of them Central Americans heading for the U.S. to look for work. Even before the campaign began, Mexico was stepping up deportations--93,563 during the first six months of this year, a huge increase over the rate in 2000. Originally, the deportees were simply taken...
Central Americans know all about Mexico's reputation before they cross the border. That doesn't stop them. At El Carmen Frontera, Guatemalan immigration officials wait for the next busload of deportees. "I don't believe this will solve the problem," says one of them, with some reason. Already, he says, Central Americans are dodging the crackdown, using remote routes to cross the border into Mexico. Two thousand miles to the north, Mexican immigrants to the U.S. are doing precisely the same thing...
...gringos to the north and haughty chilangos (Mexico City residents) to the south, who sneered at the border for being neither American nor Mexican enough. "That identity crisis and alienation grew into the violent face of the border," says sociologist Jose Manuel Valenzuela of Tijuana's Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Coupled with the region's poverty, it spawned a subculture of toughs, often called pachucos and cholos...
...village of Tanque de Guadalupe is typical. Virtually every male age 17 and older is gone, and the town's population--now 120--has been cut in half. "There is no sign that it is going to slow down," says veteran demographer Rodolfo Corona of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, the country's main border-issues research center. Zacatecans in the U.S. are so widespread--and so successful--that many band together to form clubs to pool their earnings and send cash back home to build roads, clinics and schools. Some of these clubs even have websites...