Word: wetbacks
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...member into the station for a chat--a kid he is trying to rescue after meeting him at an alternative school. The 17-year-old has a tattoo of an X under his right eye and an 8 under his left. It's his gang ID. He runs with Wetback Power's 18th Street crew. "It's crazy out there now," he says. "You could be walking down the street, and some little 12-year-old will shoot you." Last year he was shot in both legs by a member of the Mafia Crip Gangsters, and he pulls...
...litany of humiliations most Americans ignore: the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo forcing the sale of Mexico's northern half; a 1911 U.S.-supported coup; American invasions in 1914 and 1916; the expulsion of as many as 1 million Mexican immigrants from the U.S. during the 1950s' Operation Wetback. Now California's Proposition 187, aimed at denying education and health services to undocumented immigrants, is seen as an exercise in ethnic cleansing. ``History is taught one way in Mexico and another way in the U.S.,'' says former Public Education Secretary Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, consul in Los Angeles...
Because most Americans are themselves descendants of immigrants, there has traditionally been a laissez-faire attitude toward all forms of immigration. While there is a growing backlash against stereotypical nonwhite illegals -- the Mexican wetback, the smuggled Chinese -- one group for which undocumented status is generally just a temporary inconvenience is the Irish. Thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990, which included a liberal green-card lottery pushed through by Irish-American politicians, thousands of Irish have been legalized. Most of the estimated 37,000 illegal Irish in the U.S. who have not yet won a green card...
...frightening," says Mancillas. "There is a general concern that the economic standing of whites is slipping, and so the undocumented worker becomes a target of their fears." Before long, the competing protests have degenerated into shouting matches, with Hispanics chanting, "Racists go home!" while whites call back, "Wetback lovers...