Word: wetbacks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wetback: illegal immigrant from Mexico, so called because a common means of entry was to swim the Rio Grande...
...recoiled. Crammed into the airless, oven-hot space were 47 Mexican laborers. One was dead, two dying. Fifteen others had to be hospitalized for heat prostration. The truck driver had fled. For the hapless Mexicans, it was the end of a dream of jobs in Chicago as illegal wetback immigrants. Each had paid 1,250 pesos ($100) to be brought into the U.S. by smugglers who operate like latter-day slave traders...
Green Cards. Wetbacks from Mexico have been entering the U.S. in a rising flood. Last month border patrolmen of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service seized more than 14,000-1,000 more than the monthly average. Thousands more filter past roadblocks and airplane spotters or wade the shallow Rio Grande in search of jobs as "stoop" laborers on farms. Most wetback workers make it across the border on their own. Illegal labor contractors smuggle others across...
...patter of slang Spanish is counterpointed by the bellow of lurid hot-rods driven by tattooed pachucos. The occasional appearance of a neatly turned-out Agringado (a Mexican-American who has adapted to Anglo styles) clashes incongruously with the weathered-leather look of the cholo (newly arrived, often wetback Mexican laborer). To the barrio dwellers, the rest of the world is Gringolandia. Few venture forth except to attend the fights at Olympic Auditorium, where their ebullient olés and accurately hurled wine bottles give much needed support to Mexican club fighters with more guts than science...
...creaking economy moving again. Not everyone was convinced that Wilson's new budget (TIME, April 16) can do the job as well as he hopes. One banker reminded the Prime Minister of the fate of King Canute who ordered the tide to recede - and ended up a wetback. Replied Wilson cockily: "I, unlike Canute, have waited until high tide before giving my command...