In Spanish, there is a word for people whose lives and family trees span the US-Mexico border: "fronterizos." The closest we can come in English is "borderlanders," but this word does not conjure the rich and painful history that the Spanish word suggests. In the 1930s somewhere between 400,000 and 1 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans returned to Mexico "by their own decision or through officially voluntary – though often coercive – repatriatio n programs directed by state and local governments and charitable aid agencies," this according to the USCIS . I know many people whose parents or grandparents were forcibly evicted in this way - in effect, they were deported without due process. Now, eighty years later, according to the Washington Post , US federal authorities are sifting through the birth certificates of fronterizos born twenty, thirty, forty years ago and demanding that they provide corroborating documentation (hospital bills, rental a
Life & Death, Faith & Doubt, Here & There