On the rim of Mexico: encounters of the rich and poor 9780813337340, 9780429978203, 9780813334998

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On the Rim of Mexico |

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3 On the Rim of Mexico Encounters of the Rich and Poor

Ramon Eduardo Ruiz

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright © 1998 by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

Published in 1998 in the United States of America by Westview Press, 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877, and in the United Kingdom by Westview Press, 12 Hid’s Copse Road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ruiz, Ram6én Eduardo. On the rim of Mexico : encounters of the rich and poor / Ramén Eduardo Ruiz. p- cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8133-3499-3

1. United States—Relations—Mexico. 2. Mexico—Relations—United States. 3. Mexican-American Border Region—Social conditions. 4. Mexican-American Border Region—Economic conditions. 5. Mexicans—Mexican-American Border Region—Ethnic identity. 6. Mexicans—Mexican-American Border Region—Social conditions. 7. Mexicans—Mexican- American Border Region—Economic conditions. I. Title.

E183.8.M6R83 1998

303.48'273072—dc21 98-23319 CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

PERSEUS

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He compuesto este estudio con viejos recuerdos de mt madre, de nombre Dolores Urueta, quien fué hiya de un ranchero de Chihuahua y, gracias a la providencia, vivi6 atios fortuitos en ambos lados de la frontera norte.

Se que es muy decente ser un escritor bien, pero estimo de mayor decencia ser un escritor honrado. ... Y por ese motivo escribo lo que pienso y lo que siento, sin preocuparme porque mis opiniones coincidan o difieran de las comtinmente aceptadas. — Mariano Azuela

Preface xi #} Part One

1 The Shifty Peso 3 2 Asymmetry 19 Mexicans and Their Neighbors

3 Black Legend 42 4 The Global Economy 61

6 Identity 100

5 The Disparate Society 83

=} Part Two Dimensions Binational

8 La Migra 148 9 La Maldicion 169

7 Unwelcome Strangers 127

10 Man Against Nature 194

11 Dependency 217

Sources247 235 Index vil

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Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near to the United States. — Porfirio Diaz

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Preface This is a book about the people who live on the other side of the southern border of the United States—a sprawling landscape of mostly arid lands and deserts that stretches from the Mexican city of Tijuana, cheek by jowl with the Pacific Ocean, to Matamoros, in the neighborhood of the Gulf of Mexico—and their links to the other side, where Americans make their homes from Brownsville to San Ysidro. It is one of the longest international boundaries in the world, setting apart two entirely different countries for more than two thousand miles. Nowhere else does a poor, Third World country like Mexico share a common border with a wealthy, powerful neighbor. As any reading of American journals readily informs, the borderlands, to employ a term coined by the historian Herbert E. Bolton, are headline news: Witness the hullabaloo attached to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the global economy, the pundits who label assembly plants the saviors of the Mexican poor, the accounts applauding the capture of Mexican drug lords, and column upon column devoted to stories about illegal immigration, to call to mind just four topics of the day. For Mexico and the United States alike, border relations should be a matter of special interest. Both California and Texas, two of the biggest and richest states of the American union, front on Mexico, as do Arizona and New Mexico. Every day, more and more people inhabit both sides of the international line. A huge majority of Mexicans depend for their livelihood, either directly or indirectly, on the United States, but just the same, American border cities would slumber were it not for cheap labor and customers hungry for American goods. The exchange of goods and services underlies the dynamics of border economics. The subject of the Mexican border brings back memories of my youth and forebears. My mother, her father and mother, and her grandparents, as well as patriarchs before them, were born and matured on the outskirts of Parral, a mining town in the border province of Chihuahua that dates from the early seventeenth century, where most of them were also overtaken by death. My mother and two of her sisters were the exceptions;

they married, migrated north, and then succumbed on this side of the x1

xi Preface

border. One of the sisters, who dwelled for decades in Ciudad Juarez, is buried there. Her oldest daughter, after divorcing a captain in the Mexi-

can army, married a fat, and probably corrupt, policeman in Ciudad Juarez. For my part, excluding time spent flying aircraft in the army air force during World War II and memorable years in Massachusetts, I have spent most of my life within hailing distance of the Mexican border, at one time or another calling Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California home. El Paso and Ciudad Judrez, as well as the two Nogales, I know from my youth—a long, long while ago—when my parents decided that I should study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico; those were the days of train travel to Mexico City by way of those ports of entry, lonely journeys for someone young and away from home for the first time. In the 1960s, when my family and I had a home in northern Mexico, we passed through Nuevo Laredo countless times, as well as Piedras Negras, Ciudad Acufia, and Brownsville. My memory of Tijuana goes back to the early 1930s, when my father,

whose idea of a Sunday was to visit Mexican friends, would drive his family there. On the way home, he stopped at the Long Bar, the longest in the world, as the sign over its doors proclaimed, to drink a bottle of Mexicali beer and decry, one foot on the copper railing, the injustice of Prohibition. My wife—who is also of Mexican stock and speaks Spanish as I

do—and I have lived all over Mexico and in the border states, in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, on a ranch in the municipality of Arteaga, Coahuila, and in the industrial citadel of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. I grew up in a small town on the outskirts of San Diego, which had no more than

250 thousand inhabitants, and I recall Tijuana, the home of our eldest daughter, now an anthropologist at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, when it was a “typical” border town, as Americans were wont to say. The saloons on Avenida Revolucién outnumbered respectable places of business, but it was also a place to meet girls at the Sunday-evening dances at the palacio municipal, where mothers kept a watchful eye on their daughters’ virtue. Much of what I write about comes from people I met during my visits and travels, men and women ready to share anecdotes and eager to explain why they would not live anywhere else.

The hilo conductor, or theme, of this book is the borderlands themselves—what they are, how they came to be, and the salient aspects of life in this region of the world. The focus, as outlined earlier, is on Mexicans and their neighbors, but with Part Two, which begins with the chapter on unwelcome strangers, it shifts more and more into binational themes. All the same, for Mexicans who live and die next door to the almighty Uncle

Sam, nearly everything, as we shall see, has a binational ring, even the matter of personal identity, not infrequently at the center of intellectual discourse.

Preface xi

I am indebted to multitudes of scholars, writers, and travelers, whose books and articles did the spadework for me, as well as to the countless border Mexicans whom I have known over the years and to residents of the other side I meet from time to time. This book is richer for their help. I

am grateful especially to John Hart, who read the entire manuscript, as did Samuel Schmidt and Rodolfo Acufia; I also thank Jorge Bustamante, who placed at my disposal the resources of the Colegio de la Frontera Norte and, for hours on end, shared his knowledge of border affairs with me. I thank, too, my daughter Olivia Teresa Ruiz, an anthropologist and

expert on border life, who read chapters and set me straight when I strayed from the facts. I am also grateful to my friends and former colleagues at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, particularly Humberto Felix Berumen, its librarian and an authority on all things literary along the border; I thank as well the Colegio staff and the women of special collections of the libraries at the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Texas at Brownsville, who were always ready to find what I was looking for. Ram6én Eduardo Ruiz

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