prickly

There's just not much knowledge of Arizona in our country.

You think about Arizona and you think of the desert. What can the desert offer us?

Sergio Garcilaso, an international business professor at Panamerican University in Mexico City, commenting back in February in the Arizona Republic about the chasm of indifference that exists between Arizona and Mexico.

The piece made an effort to encourage economic activity between Arizona and Mexico -- and to point out to Arizonans the advantages of paying more attention to Mexico as a whole country, rather than banking on its relationship with Sonora alone:

For years, Arizona has tied its economic development with Mexico to that of neighboring Sonora, a sparsely populated state that accounts for only 2.3 percent of Mexico's 103 million people and 2.6 percent of its gross domestic product.

This would be the same state of Sonora that just boycotted their annual trade meeting with Arizona for the first time in 50 years. They did so in protest over “the country’s most retrogressive, mean-spirited and useless anti-immigrant law” -- as it was called by the Archbishop of L.A. (according to the Economist).

Noticeably, there was very little headline coverage of Mexican President Calderon's denouncement of the law in U.S. papers, even though the International press gave it full spread attention. The Guardian is just one example »

Criminalising immigration -- which is a social and economic phenomenon -- this way opens the door to intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse in law enforcement. My government cannot and will not remain indifferent when these kinds of policies go against human rights.

-- Mexico's President Felipe Calderon

speaking of Eisenstein

Video: ¡Que viva México! footage by Sergei Eisenstein

Come to find out Eisenstein set out to make a film in Mexico in 1932, during the depths of the Depression, bankrolled by the American author Upton Sinclair.

A mountain of reels were shot and Eisenstein expected that they would be shipped to him in the U.S.S.R. for editing. The Soviet government prevented their delivery, and the film was never finished.

But the footage -- most all of it quite stunning, if misguided in its portrayal of the modern Maya -- was cobbled together by another hand and has been posted in nine parts to YouTube by Documentales Mexico »



Update: The cameraman on ¡Que viva México! was Manuel Alvarez Bravo »

derecho de no migrar

I am an artifact of the global economy. Within a spread of about three hundred years the economies of Norway, England, Ireland and Wales strained to support their people, and my people got on boats and came to America.

My great great grandfather Soren landed a job in this box factory, owned and operated for many years by Nabisco in Marseilles, Illinois. Other kin opened boarding houses in Chicago; manned stage coach stops, opened saloons and mined copper in Butte; farmed the earth in Virginia and Kansas; operated grocery stores and washed laundry in Seattle; picked fruit in California; fished for salmon in Alaska; built highways and factories across America.

They fought for America in our wars, they gave birth to her children. They worked.

They were exiles and aliens. They were immigrants. They made the best of it.

In the latest issue of Orion Rebecca Solnit points out:

Seldom mentioned in all the furor over undocumented immigrants in this country is the fact that most of these indigenous and mestizo people would be quite happy not to emigrate if they could earn a decent living at home; many of them are just working until they earn enough to lay the foundations for a decent life in their place of origin, or to support the rest of a family that remains behind.

Derecho de no migrar means the right not to migrate. It’s the call of a protest movement in Mexico that calls attention to the necessity of migration to North America to survive the economic strains of life in Central and South America. The movement of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB) insists that the right to stay home, and make a living in the place of one’s birth, is a human right. One that is violated by government policies that inflict economic harm on a whole countries.

I point this out because of the disturbing news of a Jersey youth who, with his friends, regularly engaged in “beaner jumping” in which they drove around the streets of their home town until they found an individual of Latin descent who they would then collectively pummel.

On November 8th they targeted Marcelo Lucero, a legal immigrant from Ecuador. Seven boys attacked Mr. Lucero without provocation, and Mr. Lucero died.

Let us remember that most of us are immigrants. Let us remember what it’s like to be far from home; to miss the family and place that defines us. And let us wonder at the courage it takes to travel far from that place in an effort to make it better for the ones we love.

Let's remember a place called Plymouth Rock.

the 4 million mile

We are going to be out of business unless we get some relief. The operation will stop.

W. Ralph Basham, the commissioner of the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection division, at a Congressional hearing on Wednesday when he asked for more money to cover the increased costs for building the Fence along the border that the U.S. shares with Mexico.

As reported in this morning's New York Times.

The expected $4 million per mile for pedestrian barriers has been upped to $7.5 million, and the anticipated $2 million per mile for vehicle fencing has increased to $2.8 million.

Estimated projections for the project now total $400 million.

That's a little bit less than the $500 million that our presidential candidates are expected to spend in their efforts to get to the White House.

And it's just a smidge more than we're spending per day in Iraq (at least as of February 2008).

I have yet to hear either candidate mention or take a position on the Fence, which may well become the most costly Maginot line in history.

To date 341 miles of the Fence has already been laid along our 2,000-mile border.

By design the Fence is intended to stop illegal immigrants from Central and South America, as well as the free passage of the endangered jaguar.