“A story filled with sex, violence, and drugs, even love, a story of treachery, where only power and money ultimately are valued.” Author Belden Butterfield was born in Argentina, educated in the United States, sent to Mexico by Time Inc. and now lives in San Miguel de Allende and Mexico City. In his new novel, The […]
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Crossing with the Virgin: Stories from the Migrant Trail By Kathryn Ferguson, Norma A. Price, and Ted Parks The University of Arizona Press, Tucson: 2010 Available from Amazon Books: Paperback Crossing with the Virgin: Stories from the Migrant Trail is a powerful book! Four thousand people — men, women, and children — over the past ten years have died […]
Continue ReadingMoving to Mexico isn’t a matter of simply relocating to another country with your belongings. No indeedy. Of the many experiences you will have south of the border, the most emphatic will be Cultural Shock. Here are nine suggested steps toward complete recovery from this unavoidable condition: Having lived either full- or part-time in Mexico […]
Continue ReadingMoving to Mexico was the easy decision; bringing my dogs with me was harder. First, how would I get them there? I didn’t trust airplanes transporting animals. I thought they might lose my two big dogs who would surely end up in St. Louis or Jersey City or Mule Shoe. The train was out, too, […]
Continue ReadingThe English-speaking people of the world aren’t always as smart as, say, Stephen Hawking who writes about cosmic stuff like time, black holes and the universe, but wouldn’t you think the people in charge of U.S. security would at least be able to measure distance? I’m not talking about the distance from earth to the […]
Continue ReadingWhen Elvira Arellano illegally crossed the U.S. border in 1997, she had no idea that one day, she would become a beacon of light in the darkness of U.S. immigration politics, nor that Time magazine would name her one of the People Who Mattered in 2006. Like Victor Hugo’s fictional Quasimodo who sought sanctuary within the cool […]
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The mean streets of Tijuana have at last dispatched something other than media reports of killings, kidnappings and cartels. The bloody, dusty, bullet-ridden streets of Tijuana have wached Cejas emigrate, even without proper papers. You may be wondering, Who is this Cejas of whom she writes? Is he a Mexican hero? Is he a famous […]
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Old is good, especially when it’s a freshly discovered newspaper from April 1929. It’s exciting to read things that happened even before the stock market crash was to occur that coming October, leading America into one of the bleakest periods in our history. That sad period also saw the close of the oldest institution on […]
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Less than 500 metres south of the U.S. border, in front of a ochre-stuccoed shopfront signed ‘Café Nueva Asia’, a technicolor banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe hangs side by side with a red paper lamp bearing Chinese characters. Although nearly three months have elapsed between the Feast Day of Guadalupe and Chinese New Year, […]
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Regardless whether you translate la frontera as “border” or “frontier,” the images evoked are often negative: lawlessness, dusty streets, harsh climes, and a general disregard for human life. Even in an historical context, frontier life means living on the edges of civilization. When outsiders first encounter a Texas-Mexico border town, such images are often brutally reinforced. The […]
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