Word: mexicanization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When a team of U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents roared into a grocery-store parking lot in Santa Ana, Calif., dozens of Mexican workers scattered, but Mario Moreno-Lopez just stood there. "Run! Run!" shouted a friend. "No," said Mario. "I have papers." Mario, who is 14 but looks much older, does have a green card showing that he is in the U.S. legally. But his father Juan Moreno-Garcia, who was granted U.S. residency rights in 1981, was holding the card for safekeeping. As a result, father and son both became victims of a classic bureaucratic bungle...
Mario and other Mexicans were ordered into a bus by the INS agents and taken to a detention center in Los Angeles, 30 miles from Santa Ana. Mario was shown a form, written in Spanish, telling him he had a right to get an attorney. Mario, who did not know an attorney, said he did not understand the form. He was told he could talk to officials at the Mexican consulate. Mario assumed that it was in Mexico. The agents kept asking him and the others to sign a paper waiving their right to oppose deportation. "They threw...
...Wambaugh recalls, the San Diego police department formed what came to be known as the Border Alien Robbery Force in 1976 to aid the thousands of illegal Mexican aliens who came north from Tijuana. The original ten officers, eight of them Mexican Americans, did not arrest the aliens: the "wetbacks" were useful as cheap labor. Instead, they cracked down on the knife-wielding thieves and rapists who preyed on the meek pollos in the barren DMZ between countries...
...drug of choice. One officer ignored his wife's plea to wear a bulletproof vest because his buddies might laugh. Another pasted a coroner's snapshot of a riddled body in his scrapbook. "Think of it," muses the author, "ten little hardball lawmen, shooting down Mexican bandits where they stand, out there in the cactus and rocks and tarantulas and scorpions ... If that wasn't a John Ford scenario, what the hell...
...these national championships can become confusing. The USSRAs are a five-man team tournament. Last year the racquetmen won this one. This year they lost to the Mexican National Team in the finals...