Transcript
John Phillip Santos
Writer/Producer
Can you talk about how Mexicanos are pulled by Mexico, and
what it does to their well-being?
Well, I am struck and I have been fascinated by this conversation. We
were talking earlier about the newness of some of these issues, or their
new prominence in the community here in the Western States and the northwestern
part of the United States. These are things that we live much more intensely
in places like Texas, in New Mexico and Colorado and Florida in the last
30 years. And those of us who live closer to the homelands of origin,
whether Mexico, Colombia or Puerto Rico, I think have some benefits in
terms of our ability to share those sources of culture. And in Texas,
we often refer to it as the occupied territories of the American Southwest,
and we think of it as being a kind of a secret Mexican polity; San Antonio
was a kind of secret Mexican city. There was a great deal of tolerance
and welcoming for non-Mexican people over hundreds of years. I think that
a lot of that spirit is being lived in new parts of the country, in Wisconsin.
The recent census showed enormous growths in Latino populations in places
like Charlotte, North Carolina. I think there was a 600% growth of Latino
populations there, so what we are seeing is an emergence of issues and
conversations in parts of the country that we've lived for a very long
time in the border lands, the lands of La Frontera. So, again,
it is a challenge for those of us who have had those experiences to speak
to a larger community and to try to diminish the sense of fear, of apprehension,
of conflict, that our brother in the other row had expressed earlier in
the evening.
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