The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez Read Online Free PDF

is sponsoring a resolution condemning Turkey for slaughtering Armenians in 1915, and Livingston is hired to block it. “Turkey is not for genocide,” he says. The trucks running through the border towns, carrying mufflers from Mexico and television sets from California, have superseded visions of terrorists or of most any other deaths in Congress. Money wins again.
    And in Mexico a new president is worried about immigrants coming into southern Mexico from Guatemala and Honduras. For the northern border he sees a program of guest workers, and Mexican farm labor groups in the United States squall that under this, a guest worker would not be allowed to join an American labor union. “Ensured slavery!” they shout.
    Once, virtually all Mexican immigrants made it into the United States safely. At El Paso, the entrance was made from the colonias ,the shantytowns as hideous as anything in places like Rio or Rwanda, on the edge of the city of Juárez. This was accomplished by fording the shallow brown water of the Rio Grande. Many coming from Juárez who didn’t want to come up the river so far took the “ferry,” an inner tube pulled by rope across the river, which was wide at this point. The border agents were up on the bridge between Juárez and El Paso, guarding the United States border.
    The largest number took the obvious path through Tijuana. They came off the planes on Rodriguez Field, where the air was filled with the magical sound of the song of America, cars rushing, truck horns blaring, smaller and insistent car horns, all of it on U.S. Highway 35, visible from out there on the runways. You can see the American road! The road ran from the large customs and immigration border inspection station at San Ysidro, just yards away, with twin plaques marking the borders of each country. The border is marked on the roadway pavement by a twin line of small metal nipples running across the twenty-four lanes. A dozen southbound lanes go to Mexico, and another dozen lanes go up the coast to San Diego, only miles away, and on to Los Angeles, to the airports, to all of America, to New York. From Rodriguez Field, they slipped through the bushes and across the sand leading up to the highway. Usually, they gathered at 4 P.M. , at the changing of shifts of the American border guards, whose schedule they knew as if it were a town prayer. They had only to go over a weak wire fence with barbed wire at the top, barbed wire that could be nullified by one jacket draped over it. Then the whole pack would go up and over; it could be a couple of hundred, suddenly sprinting across the border line wherever you looked, and with speedy little strides covering twelve lanes to the center divider, a step over that, and another run for life and riches across twelve more lanes to the other side. The Mexicans who made it across the highway were new Americans. They melded in with the residents of the apartments and startedwalking toward San Diego as if they were heading for a store around the corner.
    Frequently there was the shriek of brakes and the bare lights of emergency workers; a Mexican, crumpled like a piece of paper, was dead on the highway. Month after month, the Mexicans came off the airport runways. Night after night, Mexican after Mexican went high into the air as they were hit by a car, a trailer truck. So many that Jesus Garcia, the state of California’s transportation director, erected a twelve-foot-high heavy wire fence on the highway divider to make it impossible for anybody to get across and be killed while making their run for America.
    This way of crossing a border ended with the wave of a gun. A force of nineteen thousand Border Patrol guards spread across the Southwest, from San Diego through Nogales and Douglas in Arizona and Laredo and Brownsville and Corpus Christi in Texas. The towns carry the names of famous western stories, most of which never happened or, if anything did, one shot in real life became a thousand in cheap