Battle Ground Descriptive

Battle Ground Descriptive BY YE Luis Alberta urea was born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother. He grew up In San Diego and attended the university of California. After graduation and a brief career a movie extra, Urea worked with a volunteer organization that provides food, clothing, and medical supplies to the poor of Northern Mexico. In 1982 he taught writing at Harvard. His most recent novel, Into the Beautiful North, was published In 2010. Border Story In this description of the Mexican-American border from across the wire: Life and

Hard Times on The Mexican Border (1 993), Urea uses the device of a second person to place his reader in the scene. By making you" the "illegal", he seeks to dramatist and humanism the plight of the poor seeking a new life in the united States. 1. At night, the Border Patrol helicopters swoop and churn In the alarm all along the line. You can sit In the Mexican hills and watch them herd humans on the dusty slopes across the valley. They look like science fiction crafts, focused lights raking the ground as they fly. 2.

Borderlands locals are so Jaded by the sight of nightly people-hunting that It doesn't even register In their minds. But take a stranger to the border, and she will see the spectacle: monstrous Dodge trucks speeding into and out of the landscape; uniformed men patrolling with flashlights, guns and dogs; spotlights; running figures; lines of people hurried onto buses by armed guards; and the endless clatter of the helicopters with their harsh white beams. A Dutch woman once told me It seemed altogether "UN-American". 3.

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But the Mexicans keep on coming- and the Guatemalan, the Salvadoran, the Panamanian, the Columbians. The seven- mile stretch of Interstate 5 nearest the Mexican border is, at times. So congested with Latin American pedestrians that it resembles a town square. 4. They stick to the center Island. Running down the length of the Island Is a cement wall. If the "illegal's" ( currently "undocumented workers": formerly' "wetback's") are walking north and a Border Patrol vehicle happens along, they simply hop over the wall and trot south.

The officer will have to drive up to the 805 interchange, or Dairy Mart Road, swing over the overpasses, then drive south. Depending on where this pursuit egging, his detour could entail five to ten miles of driving. When the officer finally reaches the group, they hop over the wall and trot north. Furthermore, because freeways arrests would endanger traffic, the Border Patrol has effectively thrown up It's hands In surrender. 5. It seems Jolly on the page. But Imagine poverty, violence, natural disasters, or political fear driving you away from everything you know.

Imagine how bad things get to make you leave behind your family, your friends, your lovers; your home, as humble as it might be; your church, say. Let's take it further- eve said good-bye to the graveyard, the dog, the goat, the mountains where you first hunted, your grade school, your state, your favorite spot on the river where you fished and took time to think. 6. Then you come hundreds- or thousands- of miles across territory utterly unknown to you. ( Chances are, you have never traveled I OFF of trucks, spent part of you precious money on bus fare.

There is no AAA or Travelers Aids Society available to you. Various features of your Journey north might include police corruption; violence in the forms of beatings, rape, murder, torture, road accidents; theft; incarceration. Additionally, you might experience loneliness, fear, exhaustion, sorrow, cold, heat, diarrhea, thirst, hunger. There is no medical attention available to you. There isn't even Ext. 7. Weeks or months later, you arrive in Tijuana. Along with other immigrants, you gravitate to the bad parts of town because there is nowhere for you to go in the glittery section where the gringo's flock.

You stay in a rundown little hotel in the red-light district, or behind the bus terminal. Or you can find your way to the garbage dumps, where you throw together a small roadbed nest and claim a few feet of dirt for yourself. The garbage-pickers working this dump might allow you to squat, or they might come and rob you, or burn you out for breaking some local rule you cannot know beforehand. Sometimes the dump is controlled by a syndicate, and goon squads might come to you within a day. They want money, and if you can't pay, you must leave or suffer the consequences. 8.

In town, you face endless factorization if you aren't streetwise. The police come after you, street thugs come after you, petty criminals come after you; strangers try your or at night as you sleep. Many shady men offer to guide you across the border, and each one wants all of your money now, and promises to meet you at a prearranged spot. Some of your fellow travelers end their Journey right here- relieved of their savings and left to wait on a dark corner until they realize they are going nowhere. 9. If you are not Mexican, and can't past as tastiness, a local, the tough guys find you out.

Salvadoran and Guatemalan are routinely beaten up and robbed. Sometimes they are disfigured. Indians- Chicanes, Masticates, Guavas, Capote's, Mays- are insulted and pushed around; often they are lucky- they are merely ignored. They use this to their advantage. Often they don't dream of crossing into the United States: a Mexican tribal person would never be able to blend in, and they know it. To them, the garbage dumps and street vending and begging in Tijuana are a vast opportunity over their former lives. As Dona Paula, a Chicane friend of mines who lives at the Tijuana garbage dump, told me, "This is the garbage dump.

Take all you need. There's plenty here for everyone! " 10. If you are a woman, the men come after you. You lock yourself in your room, and when you must leave it to use the pestilential public bathroom at the end of your floor, you hurry, and you check every corner. Sometimes the lights are out in the toilet room. Sometimes men listen at the door. They call you "good- looking" and "pitch" and "impact," and they make kissing sounds at you when you pass. 1 1 . You're in the worst part of town, but you can comfort yourself- at least there are no death squads here.

There are no tortures here, or bandit land Aaron riding into your house. This is the last barrier, you think, between you and the United States- Los Humanities Estates. 12. You still face police corruption, violence, Jail. You now also have a variety of new option available to you; drugs, prostitution, white slavery, crime. Tijuana is not easy on newcomers. It is a city that has always thrived on taking advantage of a sucker. And the innocent are the ultimate suckers in the Borderlands. This passage and this question Urea had called the border a "battlefield. " How does his description illustrate this view?

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