Crossing the Border

I think that this has been my favorite reading because the material becomes so personal when told from first-person accounts. Every chapter strengthens the intricacy of my image of the Mayan people from Guatemala. In every chapter there is a concensus of fear for the government and being accused by the government as a subersivo (subersive). The Guatemala civil war has been in progress since 1954 when the Guatemalan military led a CIA-backed coup against the administration of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the country's popularly elected president. During the last forty years, the military has been levying a campaign of terrorism and genocide against these groups, most of them Mayas, in order to distribute native peoples' land among plantation owners. I just watched the movie La historia actual and cannot help but make connections between Genaro's depiction of the Mayan town that does it's best to hide the graffiti that has unfortunately been painted all over a nearby bridge so that they are not all accused of being subersivos and the way a man could be found suspicious of subversiveness and his entire family would be taken in Argentina during the Dirty War. The Dirty War (Guerra Sucia) refers to the state-sponsored violence in Argentina against left-wing guerrillas and their sympathizers from roughly 1976 to 1983 carried out primarily by Jorge Rafael Videla's military dictatorship but continued until the return of democracy in 1983.

"Borders are not just lines on a map. They are mental as much as georaphical constructs, states of mind, not mere arrangements in space (13)." A way that both Guatemalans and Argentinias escaped the fear of their government was by crossing the border into another country. Genaro had to cross the border three times before being sent all the way back to Guatemala. Today, even if Guatemalan's say that they are from Mexico, if they do not have the right attitude and accent in their Spanish then they will not fool the border police and will be sent back to their country. This raises the question of border patrol...who does and does not get to live in the United States? Immigration into the U.S. is an issue that makes for strange bedfellows. Supporters of current immigration levels include corporate interests that profit from cheap foreign labor, ethnic lobbies seeking to increase their political base, and religious activists, humanitarians, and civil libertarians who focus on human rights and other ethical concerns. Opponents include nativists who view non-European immigrants as a threat to American culture, environmentalists who dread immigration-fueled population growth, and labor advocates who fear that immigration is taking jobs from U.S. citizens and depressing U.S. wages. On the right of the political spectrum, free marketers square off against cultural conservatives. On the left, civil rights and ethnic advocacy groups oppose environmentalists and job protectionists.