Word: paso
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...much has to cross a border before it might as well not be there at all? There is no Customs station for customs--for ideas and tastes, stories and songs, values, instincts, attitudes, and none of those stop in El Paso, Texas, or San Diego, Calif., anymore. The Old World fades away--salsa is more popular than ketchup; Salma Hayek is bigger than Madonna--and the border is everywhere. One day soon it may seem a little backward for someone in the U.S. not to speak some Spanish, even the hybrid Spanglish of the Southwest: "Como se llama your...
...buses every morning to meet people coming over for everything from dentistry to dialysis. The school district in Mission, Texas, among the state's poorest, sends its old furniture over the border to help Mexican schools that are lucky to have a roof, much less desks and chairs. El Paso is redesigning the kilns of Juarez brickmakers to cut the soot from burning old tires; the twin cities have signed more treaties than their national governments can keep track of, let alone ratify. "The only way the cities in this region can make it," says Juarez mayor Gustavo Elizondo...
Good health care has always been scarce here, but the border boom makes it worse. A third of all U.S. tuberculosis cases are concentrated in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. In the El Paso hospitals, 50% of the patients are on some kind of public assistance, mainly Medicaid. Just about the only patients paying full freight, up front, are rich Mexicans who cross over to see a specialist. "Border towns have a double burden of disease," says Russell Bennett, chief of the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission, "those of emerging nations, like diarrhea, as well as [First World] diseases...
...poor on both sides are united by a struggle just to survive what most Americans can barely imagine. Mothers in the rural El Paso outpost of Revolucion cross into Juarez to buy methyl parathion, a pesticide so lethal it is banned in the U.S. They sprinkle it around their shanties, and it kills the roaches and tarantulas for a year. But their children play in the dust and dirt, and when they get sick, their parents take them to Juarez doctors, who are cheaper and stay open into the night. If the children die, they are buried across the border...
...order us to educate any child who appears on our school doorstep but not give us the money to do it? Where are we going to find enough water? The congressional Hispanic caucus wants $1 billion in spending on roads and bridges and Customs officers; El Paso state senator Eliot Shapleigh and other Texas lawmakers have called for a Marshall Plan for the border; El Paso Congressman Sylvestre Reyes wants Bush to appoint a border czar who can cut through the red tape and make things happen...