Word: mexicanization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Skipping one last stone across the Rio 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...
...loitering along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, the waves emerge silently, advancing slowly and uniformly, like long thin lines of infantry, on the mouth of the Rio Grande. The river, exhausted after its tortuous odyssey along more than half of the 2,076-mile U.S.-Mexican border, offers little resistance to this serried assault. Its tired brown water backs up and bivouacs in a lagoon near a white lighthouse, and from there it slips, as stealthily as a camp deserter, into the Gulf...
...woman in a subdivision named Country Green tells of well water so cruddy that it broke her washing machine three times. Outside a small house near by, Francisca Jimenez, mother of eight, casts an eye south toward the Mexican countryside she left eleven years ago. "I was better off there than my children. At least we never lacked for water or sewer." Illness in the colonias is running at Third World levels. In some areas, with nearly every well lying dangerously close to sewage flows, the hepatitis rate is close...
Making them work with first-generation Mexican Americans who speak little English and are wary of Government poses a particular challenge. "What we are telling people," says the nun, "is that the system has failed and you must rise to fill the gap. Your vote makes a difference. You must organize...
American Ideas introduces you to Sister Pearl Ceasar, a Roman Catholic nun in El Paso's Rio Grande Valley. Using the precepts developed by the late Saul Alinsky, a Chicago social activist, she is leading a campaign to bring drinking water to impoverished families along the Mexican border...