Word: frontiere
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Grande, I started inland across flat, marshy country where clumps of sable palms stand out like the befeathered scouts from a Zulu impi. Matamoros, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, and Brownsville, in Texas, are the first of a score or more twin towns strung along the frontier. The poverty that prowls much of the country's southern border like a hungry coyote sits back on its haunches and howls in Brownsville. "This is the poorest part of the U.S.," says Tony Zavaleta, a Brownsville sociologist. "We have whole suburbs without electricity, sewerage or running water." Across the bridge...
...from glorious end for a river that for 140 years has been the most tangible physical divide between the U.S. and Mexico as well as the symbolic frontier between the two dominant cultures of the New World. As I skipped stones across the river's mouth with just one bounce, I felt vaguely disappointed. The Rio Grande ought at least live up to its name and course majestically eastward before spilling vigorously into the gulf...
...official modus vivendi Bustamente talks about is a reminder that this is a unique border between the first and the third worlds. Perhaps the closest ^ comparison is the frontier between Western and Eastern Europe. Yet whereas the East Europeans are preoccupied with keeping their own people in, U.S. efforts on this frontier revolve around keeping foreigners out. Only the bureaucratic language and style are similar. WARNING reads a sign in English and Spanish in the U.S. pedestrian immigration hall at San Ysidro. YOUR ACTIONS AND CONVERSATIONS ARE BEING RECORDED BY VIDEO CAMERA...
More than 2,000 miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande, a marble obelisk with the number 258 marks the Pacific boundary of the frontier. On the U.S. side of the wire-mesh fence, this one corroded by the sea air, sanitation workers are emptying trash cans set about the neatly cut lawns of a small park. On the Mexican side of the fence an eroded gully is filled with garbage. What was once the Playa Azul restaurant is drunkenly toppling sideways, its concrete supports undermined...
...water. Its concrete foundations have been laid bare by erosion; on one concrete post someone has written SIN FRONTERAS (without borders). Whether a plea or a demand, the slogan seems more appropriately a dream. Rich man, poor man, Anglo and Hispanic. They might well rub shoulders along this frontier, but they are still set apart by more than just a river, a fence or a line of marker posts...