Word: mexicanization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...When I was a kid," Jesse says, "you had to become Anglo to survive. For the kids today, it's hip to be latino." How hip? A New Wave rock band formed by U.S.-born Mexican Americans is called Los Illegals. Avance, a stylish new magazine written in English, has a young, upscale circulation of 35,000. But for every trendy Avance subscriber in L.A. there are at least ten who resist adaptation. Says L.A. Times Columnist Frank del Olmo: "There's a large segment within the legal population who see themselves as Mexicans. They don't necessarily want...
Some 160,000 refugees have come to L.A. from El Salvador since 1980, when the crossfire of insurgency and repression escalated. Most are unskilled and terribly poor. In 1981 Narciso Cardoza walked over the Mexican border into Texas, illegally, and then flew to L.A. to join his wife and daughter, now 5, in East L.A. "I thought I would be living with Americans, lots of blonds speaking English and playing baseball," he says of his arrival, "but it looked just like Mexico to me." He is disapproving of his Mexican neighbors who, he says, "sit around all day, swearing...
...With the Mexican economy in a crunch, and with other countries in Central and South America racked by political instability, the steady stream of illegal immigrants is turning into a flood. "Simply put," Attorney General William French Smith told a congressional subcommittee, "we've lost control of our borders." Along the 2,000-mile southern frontier, seizures are 30% to 50% higher than last spring. The northern border is emerging as a convenient back door for refugees from the Caribbean, Europe and the Middle East, most of whom can enter Canada without a visa; the flow there...
...will become permanent residents, joining the shadow population of 3.5 million to 6 million illegal immigrants already here. They come for jobs, scrambling through fences, hopping freight trains, wading the Rio Grande, or riding in trucks with smugglers, who charge as much as $2,000 a head. Said a Mexican baker in Phoenix who smuggled his wife and ten children across the border: "It was too hard to make a living in Mexico with so many kids. What you might earn in a week there, you can make in a day here...
...neighboring countries. Historically, the lax border enforcement has worked to the advantage of both. The U.S. has used Mexico as a backup labor source, and Mexico has counted on the annual flow of its natives as a "safety valve" for relieving the pressure of its high unemployment. Although the Mexican government of Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado has avoided taking a public position, Mexican leaders complain bitterly in private that the U.S. is making a unilateral decision about a problem the countries share and is "criminalizing" the immigrants...