Word: mexicanization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Chronicling the life of 1950s teen-idol Ritchie Valens (Lou Diamond Phillips), La Bamba is an ode to the American middle-class dream. The film opens with the Valenzuela family, a group of Mexican immigrants, working as California migrant workers...
...first displays of rock talent occur, fittingly, in a redneck bar and an American Legion Hall. Ritchie also misses no opportunity to brag of his ignorance of Spanish. He only learns his parents' tongue so that he can rip off a Mexican folksong, jazz it up with a rock beat, and make millions...
...fact that the most interesting character in the film is the fat Mexican with dark glasses who plays La Bamba in a Tijuana whorehouse. He has an air of authenticity and uniqueness that virtually every other face in the movie lacks. Bob brings Ritchie to the whorehouse, where the soon-to-be star gets the idea of expropriating the song behind the movie's popularity...
Thus ended last week one of the worst tragedies in the long and tortured history of illegal crossings of the U.S.-Mexican border. The lone survivor, Miguel Tostado Rodriguez, 21, told how he promised to pay $400 to a "coyote" (the term for smugglers who grow wealthy by sneaking Mexicans into the U.S.) for help in rafting the Rio Grande and hiding in a freight train headed for Fort Worth. All but two of his 18 companions had agreed to make similar payments. Those two were guides, working with the coyote...
Along the Arizona border, there are about 200 maquiladora operations, the mostly U.S.-owned, light-assembly factories on the Mexican side ((ECONOMY & BUSINESS, June 1)). I have strongly supported this business in Congress as beneficial to the U.S. and Mexico because maquiladoras help U.S. companies remain competitive in today's global market, enabling them to retain jobs that might otherwise be lost to Asian competition. Maquiladoras create badly needed work for U.S. citizens in areas along the border, where unemployment is often double the national average. The economic reality is that skilled labor is cheaper in Mexico than...