Word: paso
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sorry record in race relations was reaffirmed in September when a federal court in El Paso found that the bureau had systematically assigned Hispanic agents to low-level duties known as the "taco circuit." The court warned that it might impose reforms on the agency's promotions system. Now FBI supervisors may be making matters worse: lawyers for 20 of the 311 agents involved in the suit went to court last week to charge that a number of those involved in the case had been removed from their duties or harassed in other ways...
...cultures it bisects. That became ever more apparent during the four weeks I spent following the river westward and, then, when it turns north to New Mexico, keeping as close as possible to the 258 white obelisks that mark the remaining 750 miles of the border from El Paso to the California coast. There is fusion, especially where the two countries meet. But the region is also a fault line where the tectonic plates of nationalism grind away despite such tokens of integration as Big Macs in Mexico City and tortillas in Tucson. There certainly is no identifiable third country...
...head west to El Paso the next day, I think about why these dances are so rare and why both sides seem to misunderstand each other so deeply. "Neither of us ever hears what the other is saying," Octavio Paz once wrote. "Or if we do hear, we always think the other was saying something else." The roots of the two cultures are so deep and gnarled by time that it is not just language that cuts a deep scar across the continent...
...ramble through history ends as I arrive in El Paso, directly across the border from Ciudad Juarez (the two cities' combined population exceeds 1.5 million). But for the narrow concrete channel that guides the Rio Grande through the urban sprawl, it would be difficult to pick out the boundary. There is synergy everywhere, from the maquiladoras on the Mexican side, where American manufacturers pay less than $1 an hour to a largely grateful work force, to the shops lining El Paso's Bridge Street, where Spanish is the vernacular...
...many differences abound, suggesting that even here the border is much more than just cartographical whimsy. Two American youths from El Paso were arrested and accused of killing a Mexican policeman and wounding another during a night out in Ciudad Juarez. On the U.S. side, outrage erupted over perceived weaknesses in the Mexican judicial system, with newspapers carrying stories of Mexican police corruption and the shakedowns that supposedly occur so frequently south of the border. But Mexican newspapers highlighted the fact that the slain policeman was the father of three and accused youthful American visitors of an arrogant belief that...