Word: mexicanization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the atomic age dawned in July 1945 on the New Mexican desert, William L. Laurence of the New York Times was the only reporter there-although security prevented him from printing a word for a month. On Aug. 9, 1945, he rode with the B-29 bomber that obliterated Nagasaki. He once talked Harry Truman into sending a clandestine Government expedition to Africa, in quest of a rare plant from which cortisone could be produced. Leading scientists were more than his informants; they were also his friends, who respected his ability to translate the labyrinthine mysteries of their profession...
...Burtons thus became one of the 10,000 or so non-Mexican couples who each year consummate a Mexican divorce in the not-quite-polygamous marriage ritual that has been called "serial monogamy." Mexican divorces are relatively inexpensive and remarkably swift. But are they also legal...
Perhaps. Some lawyers hold that almost all Mexican divorces obtained by Americans are entirely worthless. Other divorce-law experts insist that the situation is not all that bad, that a correctly handled Mexican divorce is perfectly valid in most of the 50 states. But if someone contests it later, defending a Mexican quickie-cheapie can prove long-drawn-out, costly and uncertain...
...start all seems wondrously easy. The average wife who hates her average husband and has an average competent lawyer, can get on a plane to El Paso, say, and be back home the next day-divorced. From El Paso she crosses the border to Juarez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. She makes her way past bars and tacky tourist shops to the Municipal Palace, where she meets a Mexican lawyer by prearrangement, signs the great registration ledger of the clerk of the court, pays one dollar, and gets a slip of paper certifying that she is indeed...
With the paper she acquires instant residence, the chief attraction of Mexican divorces. (Nevada and Idaho require all of six weeks; Alabama, once an easy-divorce state, now requires a full year's residence.) It takes only another few minutes for the judge to grant a divorce; by Chihuahua law, his court now has jurisdiction over the visitor. All further steps will be handled by the Mexican lawyer. The new divorcee gets her elaborate Spanish decree with its impressive ribbons and seals. Legal costs can amount to as little as $500, or as much as the traffic will bear...