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Amalda -> RE: Having U.S. "anchor babies" is a business! (3/21/2010 1:10:40 AM)
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I just love the fact that you mention people not being able to read newspapers... newspapers all over the world are not being able to make people to buy them because of internet. From the WSJ to Prada to O Globo, Le Monde... Mr Murdoch had spend long meetings and billions figuring out how to capitalize, unified, control, induce and seduce NewsCorp audience on internet.
I'm not familiar with Turkey anchor babies in the US but what I see, from a personal point of view, left out from migration discussions are the details, the human histories and family steps that take from a geographical point to another.
I have no claim to the four states, California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, more than 50 per cent, 51 per cent of Mexican territory, lost from 1845 to 1870, roughly. I wonder how can we pretend that a history and geography of that magnitude can be forgoten. It has been only in the last 20 years that the US has enforced heavy territorial and legal restrictions to cross its border. With two civil wars in between, first the American and then the Mexican. On top of that there was a tradition up until the 60's that allow Mexicans to work legally in the US, some of those legal treates still in force.
My interest in posting in this threat arises from the fact that we tend to see numbers but not the human stories behind them and even more important, we get a tunnel vision that prevent us from realizing that human history is build over immigration.
During the 1930's and 40's Mexico was a refuge for Europeans: Spaniars from their civil war like Max Aub, lefty and jews Germans like Marianna Frenk, British like Leonora Carrington.
A decade later the Beat generation, Kerouac http://coa.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/2/209 Years later one after another militar dictatorships, most of them supported by the McCarthysm and postMc Arthysm policies make of Mexico one of the prefered refuges, Chileniean, Argentinian, Uruguaian, Guatemaltean, Brazilian etc and lately, the Argentinian financial 'Corralito'.
Yet the reality of immigrations is not written in capitals and big historic facts as in the personal and family decisions. My mom Grandfather was a Cornish minner, barely twenty years old was offered to be a Mine Capitan in a far away land in Mexico, less than twenty years and 7 children later, his feet step onto an oxidezed nail and died of gangrena in a mountain Mexican town. His tumb, barely noticiable is still there in a cementery called El Cementerio de los Ingleses.
When my father was a 'hottie' in his twenties, involved somehow in showbusiness and Mexico was a fashionable destination for a Jet Set hungry for Acapulco, a nice 'gringa' set her eyes on him. A summer later my oldest half brother was born in Houston.
I don't want to bore you with personal generations soap box stories. What I want to say is that immigration has been a human need and tradition. Few know about the Northamerican 'colonies' all along Mexico Cortes Sea Cost. Hundreds of Arizonians spend their retired years there without being attacked at all.
Immigrations stories seem to be in the front pages of newspapers all over the world. Mexico has them about Chinese and other nationalities, US about Mexicans and almost every other nationality, UK about East European, Asians, Middle Asians, Africans...
Every culture and nation wants to hold tight to a mythical begining of purity and unity. Before the Aztecs arrived to Mexico's City valley in the 1300 the nahuatl world was a 'paradise' of nahuatlism. The Aztecs were rude, rough, imperialistic, voracious, ignorant... Nevertheless history and prehistory is a sucession of migrations even more now that our minds, bodies and hearts, internet-travel before our bodies catch up.
Disclaimer: I've worked for Mexican companies in two different countries. My favorite one is not the US and not European. I never tried to migrate, legally or illegally anywhere, lack of creativity or ambition probably and enjoy and suffer the pleasures and the irritations of a global world as anyone else.
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