Word: mexicans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sheer economic interdependence is, of course, the main tie that binds the people living on opposite sides of the border. Mexicans cross the checkpoints, often daily, because there are more jobs and higher pay in the U.S. Merchants on the American side depend heavily on sales to Mexicans, who often find items of greater variety and higher quality than in their home cities. Lately, the strong U.S. dollar and the devalued peso have sharply cut Mexican buying power and caused havoc for some U.S. border businesses. Many American shoppers in turn have been flooding into Mexico in search of bargains...
...mutual reliance has grown spectacularly in recent years with the increase in maquiladoras, so-called twin plants on the Mexican side of the border. These are creations of U.S. companies, which set up factories to take advantage of cheap and once abundant labor to turn out products, ranging from computers to jump ropes, that are shipped back into the U.S. Both nations have reduced various export and import fees to aid this development. There are now some 700 such plants, providing Mexico with about $l.3 billion in earnings annually and a foreign exchange income exceeded only by its oil exports...
...impressive progress in modernizing its business section, and San Diego (pop. 2 million), an adjacent Sunbelt city with many military personnel, both active and retired, and relatively few Hispanic residents. The canyons and ravines on the south side of San Diego have become a no-man's-land, where Mexican bandits, many of them drug addicts, prey on their countrymen crossing the border illegally. U.S. Border Patrol agents and San Diego police trying to control this violence have run into Mexican police in the canyons who, they suspect, have participated in the robberies. On at least two occasions the officers...
Serious as such incidents have been, they have not reversed the long-term trend toward symbiosis and cooperation. In a few small U.S. cities, the Mexican influence has even made Americans a minority. In Los Ebanos, Texas, 80 miles northwest of Brownsville, Postmaster Lucio Flores was asked how many of the town's 800 residents are Anglos. Flores held up one finger and said with a grin, "We call him El Gringo." What is happening along the border, says University of Arizona Anthropologist Tom Weaver, is "the Americanization of Mexico and the Mexicanization of America." It is a relatively painless...
...with hands holding a freedom torch on top. It will represent not just the Vietnamese but all the minorities who have come here. Just look down Broadway. That guy is Indian, next to him is a Greek, next to him is a Thai, and next to him is a Mexican...