SB1070

Get your Gringo Mask! It's another political diatribe! Up and at 'em, folks, we're going to talk about racism!

I suppose this is as big of a news item back in Califas as it is here, the new Arizona law that allows regular police to do what the immigration police are supposed to do (deport visaless workers). Here, obviously, it is very unpopular. Based on the photos of the protest in LA, opposition over there is pretty damn gigantic.

Since remittances (money sent from across the border) are the second most important source of income on the national level (http://www.americaeconomica.com/portada/reportajes/enero07/120107/clmexicovi.htm, right behind petroleum and right ahead of foreign investments and tourism), I can see why people are upset, even outside the basic offense of declaring that by existing in a certain place at a certain time, suddenly people are criminals. I mean, economically, it's essential that Mexico send people north of the border: people here have referred to this mechanism as an "escape valve" that keeps the lower classes from starting a second revolution. This is why the Mexican government is falling all over itself to condemn the law.

The people I talk to day in day out, however, have more basic human reasons to denounce the law. It appears to give "probable cause" to any pig on the street to stop, search and demand papers of any brown person they may happen across (like the Gestapo in Nazi movies, "Papiere, papiere!!"), which is kind of giving the green light to racial profiling, and furthermore potentially humiliating to a lot of innocent people (though I'll stick my neck out and suggest that illegal immigrants are not in fact "guilty" of anything other than a totally gnarly commute).

My co-worker Alejandro started to lecture me about how crossing borders is a very important legal issue, and how the gringos have the right to exclude people, because, you know, how would you feel if some random came into your backyard... I didn't bother explaining how my backyard was basically a hangout for randoms, weirdos, homeless folks and can collectors, drunks, addicts, dirt hippies, children, and abandoned roosters. I went straight to the point: you're a big fat malinchista! (Let it be known that I didn't make this comment in mala onda and that he is neither big nor fat, though malinchista maybe a little...). But... I had to bring up that the palefaces are indeed tecnically illegal immigrants themselves, and of course to support my point I used this cartoon. It's valid to support your arguments with cartoons, right?

Anyway, so I read recently that Sonorenses (folks from Sonora, Mexico, the state just south of AZ) are boycotting (haciendo boicot) Arizona stores, which has actually made a significant impact on the borderland's economic landscape, according to the Mexican newspaper El Universal. A Mexican-American baseball player on the SD Padres has refused to play a game or tournament or something in Arizona... it's a pretty big deal.

So... defend human rights: snub Arizona.