Word: wetbacks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...other show, the script might have spelled disaster. There was the ambitious momma, dead set on getting daughter into show business-but with enough maternal instinct left over to mother a stray coyote, a spinster tourist and a Mexican wetback with a guitar. There was also the expected, easygoing dad, a navy officer son-in-law sore at momma's machinations, and a happy ending. But somehow, on the U.S. Steel Hour (CBS) last week, the thin substance of The Pink Burro stiffened into a commendable show...
...Littlest Outlaw (Walt Disney) is what the trade calls a "wetback," i.e., a Hollywood picture made in Mexico to save money. The story is all about a little Mexican boy (Andres Velasques) and a big chestnut horse that kiss each other. When the horse is condemned to death by its master (Pedro Armendariz), the little boy steals it and becomes what the title so stickily suggests. He hides the horse successively in a smithy, a barbershop, a ruined hacienda, a boxcar, a church. In transit, the camera takes the usual tourist shots of cactus, fiestas, religious processions, fireworks, cactus. They...
Calluses & Quotas. Serrano had no thought of becoming a wetback, a border-jumper. Instead, he wanted to be a bracero, a legal farm worker entitled to full protection of U.S. laws under the U.S.Mexican Migrant Labor Agreement. Of the two required qualifications, one came naturally for Serrano: callused hands to prove that he was a genuine farm worker...
Ancient & Entrenched. In both Mexico City and Washington last week, top officials anxiously agreed that Serrano* and thousands like him had a point. By beefing up its border patrol, the U.S. has cut wetback border crossings drastically; deportations, which averaged 80,000 a month in the 14 months before last September, are now running at less than 10,000 a month. The immigration machinery is running smoothly enough to handle an expected record number-350,000 to 400,000-of legal migrant workers this year. The coyote and his "bite" are left as the machinery's only serious defect...
...Alley, the Rio Grande is a sparkling, star-filled stream that incites cowboys and senoritas to romance. Normally, the river is a chocolate-colored ditch, treacherous with potholes where many an unwary wetback has drowned. It swirls between banks of cactus and mesquite down 1,800 miles of rich, irrigated farmland to the Gulf of Mexico. Last week most of the lower Rio Grande, from Laredo (pop. 51,910) to its mouth at the southernmost tip of Texas, was a dry arroyo; at Laredo, the river ran dry for the first time since the International Water Commission began keeping records...