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Europeans conquering North America hustled west, where the open land lay.
The first illegal immigrants to be hunted down in Desolation by the earliest form of the Border Patrol were Chinese.
“Wets” are also called “tonks,” but the Border Patrol tries hard to keep that bon mot from civilians. It’s a nasty habit in the ranks. Only a fellow border cop could appreciate the humor of calling people a name based on the stark sound of a flashlight breaking over a human head.
If it was the Border Patrol’s job to apprehend lawbreakers, it was equally their duty to save the lost and the dying.
Don’t talk to strangers. In hamlets like Naco, San Luis, Nogales, civilians often won’t make eye contact. Chicanos don’t like you. Liberals don’t like you. Conservatives mock and insult you. And politicians… politicians are the enemy.
The Washington, D.C., desk jockeys are considered the ultimate brush-out masters.
Now, however, the term preferred by the Arizona press is “undocumented entrant.” As if the United States were a militarized beauty pageant.
Rural Mexicans don’t have the spare money to drown their food in melted cheese.
With a high rate of infant and childhood mortality, the lower castes, the workers, and the tribal people of the Third World tended to rely on their own procreative gifts for survival.
Four children, with children of their own, might suddenly represent a small army of twenty, all working, all pitching in, all offering a tithe of food or money or water or tequila. True communism, on a family level.
the myth ran north. The Mayas pushed north, and the Aztecs pushed north once they’d formed an empire. Later, the Spaniards pushed north. The wide open spaces lay northward.
Along with great adventures in the west, Americans yearned for riches. The Gold Rush and the Land Rush come to mind. For the Mexicans, the Gold Rush lay in those mystical lands up there, above: Orange County, Cicero, Dubuque, Odessa.
But the two things that most unify the two sides are each one’s deep distrust of its own government, and each side’s simmering hatred for the human smugglers, the gangsters who call themselves Coyotes.
The Sasabe sign, which many of the walkers can’t read, is the only thing Mexico is doing to try to stop them from crossing. The
Some of the new Latino middle class once crossed that very land in a mad scuttle; now, teens in the neighborhood climb up on their backyard sheds to watch the action in the Tijuana River floodplain.
Gangs are so in control now that walkers who want to go alone, without a pollero to guide them, must pay a fee just to enter the desert.
Guias now give their walkers cocaine to make them walk faster and longer.
This kind of smash-up bears a wry acronym among law enforcement wags: DWM (Driving While Mexican).
on the Devil’s Highway, you had to almost die for anybody to notice your face.
In some of their ancient beliefs, north was the direction of death. North was the home of winter, and the underworld could be found there.
the move cut them off from their union representation.
In fact, the towers are built, raised, maintained, and paid for out-of-pocket by those bleeding-heart liberals, the Border Patrol agents themselves.
“What kills the people,” he says, “is the politics of stupidity that rules both sides of the border.”
illegal immigrants actually depress wages. They help keep the minimum wage down.
