Word: mexicanization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pill's hormones are derived mostly from a chemical called diosgenin, which until 1945 was obtainable only in small quantities from tropical plants. Then Dr. George Rosenkranz, at that time a Syntex research chemist, found that the Mexican yam, or barbasco root, yielded much larger amounts of diosgenin. In 1951 Syntex's Dr. Carl Djerassi first synthesized from it female sex hormones that women could swallow. Later it was discovered that the hormones were effective as an oral contraceptive. Syntex then began selling the compound to other drug firms, later introduced its own pill. Both Syntex and Searle...
...gunslingers, delighted to be doing for pay ($1.25 a day) what they would normally have done for pleasure, proved remarkably effective, and in 1848, when the U.S. declared war on Mexico, they went roaring across the border like a platoon of panthers. Unhappily, the Texas Devils, as the Mexicans called them, were so blind-crazy for blood that they often made more enemies than they killed. In Mexico City, for instance, when a Mexican made so bold as to murder a Ranger, the victim's friends went on a shooting spree that in one day deposited 80 corpses...
McNelly of the Tex-Mex. At war's end, with no more Mexicans to kill, the Rangers were temporarily disbanded. But in 1874, the corps was reconstituted in two battalions-one assigned to the frontier to arbitrate range wars, the other posted to the Tex-Mex border to control cattle rustling. The leader of the border patrol, Captain L. H. McNelly, is generally acknowledged as the greatest Ranger of them all. He mounted a scarum series of across-the-border raids against Mexican rustlers, and then capped his campaign with perhaps the most famous action in the history...
...then there was a Ranger named Ray ("Pinochle") Miller. When captured by Mexican bandits who decided "to 'dobe-wall him," he shot the firing squad with a camera before it could shoot him with bullets. Flattered and fascinated, the bandits began posing for photographs and drinking straight shots of sotol, a distillation of yucca that makes tequila seem like celery tonic. When they were suitably swacked, Sergeant Miller took a flying leap to the nearest horse and "hit the Rio Grande so hard he knocked it dry for 50 feet." He left his camera behind. No matter. No film...
...good deal easier than picking them at age ten. One student out of the first group--20 member of the Class of '61--had grown up in California's Imperial Valley, where his father made $4500 a year icing railroad cars. His mother, a Mexican, spoke little English, and neither parent wanted their son to go to college. The student's Scholastic Aptitude Test verbal score was 415, and his math score was 452. The college guide books caution that scores this low often indicate a serious inability to cope with college work. Yet the boy was first...