“One more empty desk…” in Terlingua
Maybe in larger communities, it’s easier to turn a blind eye to Homeland Security. You “big city folks” have more uniformed types walking around, and the green-shirts don’t stand out like they do in our small communities down along the border.
Unlike many, I don’t think they’re the Gestapo… the Gestapo were secret police, and there’s nothing secretive about the Border Patrol. Think more SS — the guys who ran the concentration camps (and doled out the contracts… the old fascist corporate state thing, or, as we like to call it in the U.S., making it somehow sound different, “the military-industrial complex.”).
The Border Patrol is not just bureaucrats with guns — high-falutin’ traffic cops — but a full-fledged paramilitary organization. Go into any small town along the border, and they’re impossible to miss (one morning I counted 12 BP vehicles at the Fort Hancock — pop. 2550) Shell Station) and the newest edifice in every town (or, rather — perhaps by design — the edge of town) is the Border Patrol station.
You can’t overlook them in a place like Alpine. The new houses out where I live all have Border Patrol Tahoes parked in the driveway. Who else in moving here with money to spend?
Alpine has about 5500 people. Imagine what it’s like in my county’s third largest “Census Designated Place” — a couple of tiny communities so spread out that just managing a central school district is about as close as you get to some kind of local government.
The whole community is only about 275 people (mas o menos), but does size matter when it comes to basic civil rights? How many miles from the border (or from a big city) does one go before becoming a second-class citizen? Am I, living 90 miles from the border, in a community of 5500 entitled to more rights? Or, maybe, more rights because my native language is English, and I’m paler than some of my neighbors?
Martha Stafford’s original Letter to the Editor appeared in the 1 February 2008 Alpine (TX) Avalanche:
“The men in uniforms stood outside the house without knocking. She could see the doorknob turning. Thank God my aunt had locked the door or they could have just walked in! She took the baby and hid in the other room. She was afraid the baby would cry and they would hear. She stayed there hiding until she heard them drive away.”
A new thriller? A Holocaust story? Lesson on the evils of communism?
Wrong. Personal narrative, Terlingua, Texas, January 2008.
Yes, most of the rumors circulating through the Big Bend area are true.
The Terlingua-Study Butte-Lajitas communities have been targeted by the Department of Homeland Security. Our Hispanic community is being watched, followed, questioned, harassed, detained and picked up. Unofficial counts show that at least a dozen Hispanic children are being denied an education because their productive, grocery-buying, gas-using, sales-tax-paying families – which have been here for decades – are now living in exile in Mexico because of the fear of being separated.
Our most vulnerable and valuable resource – our children – are the first casualties of our country’s attempt to secure our borders and make our citizens safe. When a child is unable to secure a quality education, what choices will he or she have as adult? Are we going to have judges, artists, doctors, realtors, teachers, journalists and physicists as our closest neighbors to the south? Or will we have what we fear the most – the impoverished, the desperate, the resentful?
Solutions? I have none but desperately seek. But I do have a voice, a pen and a vote. And so do you. Meanwhile, I have one more empty desk, one more vacant spot on the basketball team, one more unopened science book, one more math problem unsolved, one less shy smile, one less giggle, one less book recommended and one less question. And so do you. Thank you. — Martha Stafford, Terlingua
mexfiles.net 
¡Qué triste! Ms. Stafford’s heartfelt letter to the Alpine Avalanche is the EXACT reason that the Border Patrol stormtroopers should be shut down, or at least brought under control in the United States.
Come on people! Do you REALLY WANT the United States to become the world’s biggest NAZI country? Or is it already?
Yes, cause we need all the mix-e-cuns we kin git..
Snap out of it… if I want to walk onto your personal property, set up a tent on teh lawn and then demand that you feed, house, employ, and offer my depedants all the above as well?
Hell no you wouldnt, and you know it. Illegals are donig just that, and I suggest that if you really feel determined to take care of teh thirs worlds needs, you open your house and property to free use by anyone and everyone, who can simply make their way there under their own power- if you dont, (and you wont)you are a hypocrite, who only wants to sound progressively liberal, as long as you are personally happy and comfortable, and its someone else who pays the price for the lawlessness.
BP wouldnt have to `plaugue` your community if teh USA wasnt being over-run.. by MILLIONS.. maybe you should demand that mexico stop exporting their impoverished mestizo`s so that the euro-mexi`s like Fox can avoid sharing with/providing for them. Why is it our job to offer jobs, housing, and open arms to illiterate mestizos who are bum-rushed out of their own nation by Vincente Fox?
Uh… I wonder if “Kemper Palumbo” (kempfal@asld.com) realizes that who he is referring to as “Mestizos” are the Lipan Apaches who have lived on both sides of the river around Terlingua since about the last ice age?
How long have the Palumbos been in the United States, I wonder?
Ya.. the Lipan apaches arent numerous enough to fill all the very small towns in west texas let alone overrun every small, medium and large city in the continental `untied` states.
The Lipan apaches also dont speak Mayan, Mixe, and Zapotec, genius, nice try though.
Mapa de lenguas de México.
The mestizo that ARE coming in unwelcome tens of millions while their own govt jealously guards it own borders against guatemalans ARE speaking spanish or Mayan deriviatives, while the Lipan Apache dialect nears its extinction-
Southern Athabaskan languages.
“Mestizo“ is a mixed euro-indian population which encompasses the lagest segement of mexican ethnography, followed by pure mayan/associated indians, and third by exclusively euro-desended mexicans like our `good friend` Vincente Fox, with black slave / mestizo mix being the distant fourth.
(Isnt it interesting that in nation where mixed euro-indians make up the majority, the leadership is controlled by a small segment of very wheel heeled mexican caucasians, who are applauded for monoplizing the nations wealth while sending the brown mestizos off to seek what they can scrounge in a foreign nation, while a white guy in iowa who simply wants his nations laws enforced against foreign nationals the same way they are against him, come tax time every year, is the bad guy to you freaks?)
Defending illegal invasions while hiding behind the unwilling carcass of the american apache I am sure wil not endear you to the legitimate apache population(s), nor,.. due to its falsity, is it particularly effective.
When did my ancestors come to american?… WHEN IT WAS STILL LEGAL, and a lot of immigrants who couldnt pass health screenings or were incapacitated or feeble got sent back at Ellis Island, and didnt cry, moan or sue to force the US to adopt them.
What is the relevance of the language spoken by the Lipan to anything? Iroquis speak mostly English or French, and very few speak anything else.
Who are these “wheel heeled ‘white’ Mexicans”? Perhaps, given their round heels, they’ve been promiscuous with the locals?
At any rate, Vicente Fox, as far as I can determine is the only Mexican president in the last 150+ years to have been of European descent… with the possible exception of Pedro Lascurain, whose presidency was a matter of hours, if not minutes (during Huerta’s 1911 coup).
Certainly, as Malcolm Forbes once pointed out, the best way to earn a fortune is to inherit one, and several large fortunes in Mexico are in the hands of those whose grandparents arrived as refugees from the Nazis or from Francisco Franco with sizable liquid assets and skills — but their grandchildren are hardly what those hung up on DNA would call “white Mexicans.”
And, did your relations actually come through Ellis Island. And, seeing Ellis Island’s use as an immigration facility was only for a few years (1892-1954), those immigrants were “johnnies come lately” and foreigners to those of us whose ancestors — like mine — came through Baltimore and Philadelphia shortly after the American Revolution. And didn’t start speaking English for about a hundred years.