Griego: This river churns relentlessly, tossing two cultures together

Friday, April 27, 2007

Were you to measure this street - Border Street, as it has been called here, though it appears on city maps by another name and in neighborhood memory by yet another - you would find it to be just under one-tenth of a mile, a short block by most standards, a hyphen in a neighborhood of sentences.

Border Street is not much more than a collection of small plain houses with wood siding and tar-shingle roofs, but it has many trees and sits on a hill and with the coming of spring, it is possible to stand at one end of the street and look down its length, over the heads of the houses in the next blocks, to see a leafy blanket of tree tops and beyond them a ribbon of road and farther still, the Rocky Mountains, which from here appear as a benevolent blue. The person who built the duplexes on this same end of the street may have been inspired by that view when he painted each apartment blue, but the buildings have not held up well, and the color now appears drab and institutional. It cannot do much to inspire the weary and impoverished women who sit on the wooden steps picking idly at the peeling paint flakes while their children chase each other in dirt front yards.

In the spring, when the morning light ignites the pink and white blossoms of the fruit trees and the dewy grassy smell rises, longtime residents of the block recall the days when they looked out their windows to see open fields of buffalo grass and their children, grown now, playing baseball. The people of Border Street are not generally given to nostalgia. They are accustomed to living close to the bone where there is no room for sentimentality. They are practical and if they indulge themselves in memories of a sunnier past, it is largely because it helps them to set the standard for how they would like to live, especially now, when they look out to see trash cans overflowing and broken glass glinting in the street, and when, more recently, they were awakened by the sound of gunshots fired from a passing truck.

Like other lower-income blocks, Border Street is easily overlooked. This has proved to be an irritant to those residents who believe living conditions would improve with a particular kind of attention, the kind that carries with it the ability to write tickets and issue stern warnings for assorted misdeeds so Someone Important will notice. But to others on the street, it is just as well no one usually does. This is true of the longtime residents who returned from military service to blue-collar jobs and who figure that if a man wants to sit in his yard and relax with a beer or two, that's nobody's business but his own. It's true of the young mothers who never finished high school - their babies coming early, their men leaving often. It is true, too, of the people who should not be living on this street at all, the workers and their families who come from the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Jalisco and Puebla, who slipped undetected across deserts or waved fake papers in front of border agents, leaving behind half-built homes and mothers who cried to see them go.

American, Mexican, white, Hispanic, citizen, legal resident, illegal immigrant, Spanish-speaking, English-speaking, they share this short strip of asphalt. It binds them when they do not wish to be bound together. It defines them when they defy easy explanation. Like most borders, this street exists as both fence and intersection between cultures. Sometimes people cross it and are gone before anyone notices. Sometimes they embrace at its heart. Sometimes they collide.

The knot of illegal immigration

The Reporter Lady arrives on Border Street before dawn. In nearly all circumstances, the prospect of waking at 4 a.m. to see a street awaken would not appeal to her, but she finds herself rising early, eager, and she is not sure why, except that she has seen the block in many lights and from many angles, but never from this one. Even after a year, there is still something that compels her about the life of this street.

It is a beautiful morning. Quiet. A breeze is blowing. She can see stars past the strong amber glow of the single street light in the middle of the block. She drives past the home of the children who named her the Reporter Lady, parks in front of the Mexican Grandma's abandoned house near the corner and walks back up the street, holding her notebook, scribbling: Wind chimes. Bird sings. Garbage can sitting in the curb, belching beer cartons, paint cans, fast-food wrappers.

Well, that hasn't changed in a year, she thinks. Even with all the people who have moved since last April – about 35 adults and children, most of whom haven't been replaced – it's still a little street with a lot of people.

A pastor's offhand comment brought her here. Illegal immigration is much more complicated at the street level than either side of the debate wants to acknowledge, he told her.

The Reporter Lady lives in a gentrifying neighborhood on a quiet street of brick Tudors and Victorians and bungalows. Her neighbors are retirees and professionals, nearly all of them homeowners with no children. She rarely hears Spanish.

She calls a City Council Member. I want to see how immigration affects a single street, she tells her. I need one block where Mexican- and American-born meet, our border, I guess you could call it. Do you know of one?

The City Council Member says she's been receiving complaints from a block where longtime residents say their Mexican neighbors play music too loud and hang laundry on fences and fill their houses with too many people. Do something, they tell the Council Member.

The workday street comes alive

An alarm clock is beeping. It takes a moment for the Reporter Lady to pinpoint it in the darkness. She stops on the sidewalk outside the Patriarch's house. There. The Patriarch has to leave by 5:30 for his job at the recycling plant. Beep. Beep. Beep. Down the street, a Mexican construction worker drags his garbage can to the curb. He starts his truck with a roar. At 5:15, the Teacher's mother will be getting up. She'll slip down the hall to start the coffee before her husband and daughter awaken. She'll make her husband eggs and potatoes and pack his lunch. She's been doing that for the 43 years they've been married. He's always been a good provider, she says. He's 10 months away from retiring as a truck driver, but he keeps telling her he's not sure he can adapt to staying home.

Work is what I know, he tells Eddie, his longtime neighbor. He and Longtime Eddie have a lot in common. Both are Hispanic New Mexicans who spoke Spanish before English. Both grew up on farms; both had to leave to find better work in the city. It does not escape Eddie that they also share these experiences with many immigrants on the block. We may have some things in common with the Mexicans, the Teacher's mother would say, but don't call me one. I'm Spanish American.

Eddie might still be working in construction or maintenance had not his knees and back given out. Now, he supplements $963 a month in Social Security with his occasional pool tournament winnings, which he records in a spiral notebook because he has always been organized when it comes to money.

Eddie plays pool with a young Salvadoran restaurant cook who entered the U.S. illegally, but is now a legal worker. They talk a lot about illegal immigration. Eddie gets fired up when he hears someone say illegal immigrants do jobs Americans won't and he hates hearing Mexicans say Chicanos and blacks are lazy. Excuse me, he says, see all those houses, those streets, those sidewalks? We lazy people built those before you got here.

Eddie takes The Salvadoran to the immigration offices in Aurora to get his visa updated. He respects how hard his young friend works. Do you know, Eddie says, that he learned English by writing words on his arms? When the Reporter Lady writes about their friendship, Eddie shows him the story and the Salvadoran cries.

Pervasive sense of unfairness

The Reporter Lady has always been sympathetic to illegal immigrants. Some people assume this is because she is Hispanic, a New Mexican. She believes her sympathy has more to do with the realization that if she were in a struggling Mexican's shoes, she, too, might cross the border illegally.

I'm on Border Street to have my assumptions challenged, she announced, somewhat grandiosely, in April 2006.

That was before she was confounded by 15-year-old Maria the Younger, pregnant and in love with a 26-year-old man she would follow back to Mexico with their newborn citizen child, and before she understood the depth of the frustration longtime residents feel with city officials who they believe ignore them because they have no money or connections and therefore no power.

That was before she saw that while wealthier Denver goes about its business, it is largely oblivious to the ongoing struggle for dominance in neighborhoods like this one, the elbowing to get to the head of the line. How many times, she would later wonder, did she hear, "it's not fair," when one group believed the other had gained an undeserved advantage. This would prove to be particularly true among the American-born Hispanics who grew up in a time when they were punished for speaking Spanish and who are growing old in a time of oprima el numero dos.

That was before she became frustrated by the way in which Hispanics and Mexicans on the street judge each other, will not talk to each other, blame each other. And before she began to understand that what she first perceived to be a nonexistent relationship between the two groups is actually a series of very complicated ones.

We are like a river, says the Teacher. She is speaking of all the coming and going of residents over the last year. But, the metaphor works on many levels. Like a river, you could watch this street for a year and still only begin to understand its complexity.

Living in an unknown land

Beep. Beep. Beep. The alarm is going again when the Reporter Lady walks back up the street. The Patriarch's house is small. The alarm could be anywhere in the house. More than a year ago, the Patriarch's daughter, son-in-law and three grandsons moved in with him and his wife, his wife's niece and son. The Patriarch's daughter and son-in-law sleep on an air mattress on the living room floor between the couch and the big-screen television. The Mexican bricklayer down the street who told the Reporter Lady that American families don't help each other the way Mexican families do never met the Patriarch and his wife.

The bricklayer was an illegal immigrant who left his wife and daughters back in the Mexican village where he was born. Mexico is where my future lies, he told the Reporter Lady. He lived on Border Street in a home nearly identical to the Patriarch's - three bedrooms, one bath - with his mother, the Mexican Grandma, and 10 other relatives. Then work became scarce and some family moved out and those remaining could not pay the bills. The Mexican Grandma would not admit this even as she sat in her living room next to a pot of beans cooking on the gas grill her son dragged from the front yard into the kitchen. They left not long after a police officer warned them that they had been spotted dragging an extension cord across the street to steal electricity from a recent foreclosure. They live in a suburban apartment now.

The Mexican Grandma tells the Reporter Lady that she does not think about the house they walked away from on Border Street. She says this from behind the window of the visiting area of a county jail. She grips the phone on her side of the glass tightly, a plastic I.D. bracelet dangling from her wrist. She speaks in rapid, slangy Spanish the Reporter Lady has always had difficulty understanding. Immigration, the Mexican Grandma is saying, thank God no one from immigration came.

The Mexican Grandma's family drove the Teacher's family nuts with their kids and their drinking and their loud late-night conversations on the front porch. They did not adapt to the neighborhood. When the Reporter Lady visits their hometown in Mexico, she gets a sense of why that might be. The Reporter Lady once wrote about a student from Mexico who said that after he arrived in Denver he felt like an astronaut exploring an alien planet. It's so quiet, he said. The streets are so wide. No one is outside. After visiting the Mexican Grandma's village, the Reporter Lady imagined the Grandma must have had the same reaction.

The Reporter Lady had never given much thought to illegal immigration as seen from the Mexican side of the border. She is saddened by all the broken families, by the young woman who tells her she would approach her father, a man she has never met and who now lives in Denver, with her heart in her hands. The Reporter Lady finds it impossible not to view the Mexican government's failure to provide for its people without cynicism. The government lacks motivation, a prominent Mexican businessman tells her. "The illegal immigrants send money home. They help their families. They keep the government comfortable."

Later, the Reporter Lady walks through a cactus field with a 12-year-old boy who once lived on Border Street, and she remembers something Longtime Eddie said not long after she met him:

"Sometimes I tell my Mexican friends that our government is just like other governments - it uses people. Our government didn't want to pay us more, so, it opened the borders. It let them all come in and here we are, stuck in the middle."

Sorting out the human factor

Beep. Beep. Beep. The dining room lights go on inside Longtime Eddie's home. He's lived on the street longer than anyone except Woody's son, whose father built the house on the corner. Woody's son is a white man, a landscaper who works with Mexicans.

He once told the Reporter Lady a story about how he worked in a gas station in a black neighborhood and was robbed while on the job. He paused before delivering the last line: "By a white man." He is the first, but not the last person on the street to teach her something about jumping to conclusions.

Longtime Eddie is the street optimist. He is not sure how this happened, except that after his wife divorced him and he got sober and his younger son died in the same week as his mother, he went a little crazy. When Eddie reemerged into the world, he tried to focus on whatever bright spots it might reveal to him. He makes his morning coffee, and when the sun rises, he will carry his cup outside and pick up the trash that has blown across his front lawn from his neighbors' garbage cans.

His neighbors are two Mexican families who live in the same subdivided house. One lives in the front; the other in back. Both are here illegally. The man in back works as a landscaper. One day, he sits on his fence and imagines American society as the inner workings of a giant clock. He says he would like to become a legal resident and become a recognized part of the machinery. He also says that if he were in charge, he wouldn't allow that to happen. He would permit illegal immigrants to become guest workers, but not citizens. The Reporter Lady is surprised. Your sisters were brought here as children, she says. They have spent half of their lives here. You would deny them? Oh, he says, waving her off, you are looking at this from a human perspective. I am looking at it from a political one. If you allow the illegal immigrants here now to become citizens, the first thing they will do is sponsor their families in Mexico and more people will come. The United States has to control its borders and right now it has no control.

This does not go over well with the Construction Worker, who lives in the front of the house. Dress like an American, the coyote who led him across the hills near Tijuana told him nearly seven years ago. The Construction Worker and his Fast-Food Worker Wife, come from the Mexican city of Puebla. They take English classes. They keep their yard neat and house clean. Last year, in the hope of becoming legal residents, they filed several years' worth of income taxes - though they did not claim all of their income. Their run-ins with the neighbors stem from his penchant for playing loud music. The Construction Worker calls himself "a Mexican trying to become an American." He would like to open a small business here one day.

No, that's not a good plan, he says, incredulous, of the landscaper's guestworker solution. My life is here now.

Turnover creates instability

The Reporter Lady believes some of the tension on the street is generational. The longtime residents have raised their children and they cherish their peace and quiet. The newcomers are in their 20s and 30s and they have many children who run in the street and ride their bikes off plywood ramps and bob from house to house. It is also generational in the way of immigrant stories. The elders seek their place in the mainstream, position themselves within it, only to find their acceptance threatened by the ignorance - and, at times, arrogance - of the newcomers.

The Reporter Lady thinks the street's disconnection, its isolation, has a lot to do with its turnover. She tries to picture 35 people leaving her block in one year, four homes going into foreclosure, another two sitting on the market for just as long. More than once, she has imagined that if it were not for the five families who have lived on the block for 30 years, Border Street would simply evaporate. It is their memories that keep it anchored, she thinks, and their persistence.

In her experience, the kind of turnover Border Street sees accompanies, typically, poverty. Border Street is a hardworking, blue-collar block. Most of those struggling are young American mothers. For some, the struggle is compounded by depression or alcoholism or drug use. Some are involved with Mexicans living in this country illegally. Marriage no longer easily confers the benefit of citizenship, and so the women retreat further into the shadows.

The Reporter Lady once counted more than 52 people living on one side of the street and 48 living on the other, including children. At times, she finds more American- than Mexican-born. At times, she finds the opposite. The Reporter Lady guesses that at least 15 and as many as 35 illegal immigrants lived on the block at one time during the year. She is certain of the lower number because all 15 had roots or connections through marriage to the Mexican Grandma and her village. When those families left Border Street, the population of illegal immigrants plummeted.

A few neighbors tell her that with the arrival of Mexicans and illegal immigrants the quality of life on the block has deteriorated. This charge comes up repeatedly and it strikes the Reporter Lady as somewhat off-base given that there are longtime American-born residents who live on ramshackle property, who have made room in their small houses for family members. She knows, too, from police calls that the drug problems that worried neighbors were isolated to the homes of American-born citizens who have since moved. She finds herself nodding when Woody's son says: I'm a firm believer that the problems that occur among people are not ethnic-related. There's just good people and there's bad people.

Still, she can see illegal immigration is a problem where it contributes to poverty and density, to the block's turnover and noise, to its civic invisibility. It's the river again. What you see on the surface tells only part of the story.

Differing symbols of the flag

The Patriarch's house falls silent. The Reporter Lady smells warm corn tortillas coming from an upstairs apartment on the corner. Just after 5:30 a.m., the Patriarch walks out into the morning darkness and drags three brimming trash cans to the curb. He coughs, spits, drives away. The outdoor lights blaze on the front porch of the Fed Up neighbor as he passes. The lights illuminate one, two, three American flags clustered around her front door. One is pasted to the inside of the screen door. "United We Stand," it says. The Teacher once believed that when the Patriarch, a Vietnam vet, displayed his American flag, he was making a statement along the lines of: "This is the U.S., not Mexico. If you're going to live here, follow our rules."

This was, in fact, not the case, the Patriarch being neither political nor subtle. "Get your ass over here," he will shout to one of his rambunctious grandsons not caring who hears. Live and let live, he likes to say, and then light a cigarette or fix a neighborhood kid's bike or order a grandson to check the oil in one of the trucks because the Patriarch is a believer in self-reliance, not to mention that, by his own admission, he is a cheap son-of-a-gun.

The Teacher's assumption about the flag would apply, however, to the Fed Up neighbor. She lives on the louder, more crowded end of the block in an impeccable home, the home where she raised her four children after her divorce. The Fed-Up neighbor is Hispanic, born in eastern Colorado, raised speaking Spanish. She tells the Reporter Lady that she doesn't care how people get here or who they are, she just wants them to follow the rules once they arrive, to respect their neighbors. But, she also gives Eddie a copy of a sarcastic e-mail touting the benefits of being an illegal immigrant.

In the past five years, she says, this whole neighborhood has gone downhill. I'm sick of it, she says, her lips tightening. If Eddie is with her, he will nod and say something like, how did we end up in the skids? He views the Fed Up neighbor with something approaching awe.

For several years, the Fed Up neighbor lived next to a Legal Permanent Resident and seven of his family members, all of them here illegally. The Legal Permanent Resident ended up sending them back to Mexico, and a couple of months later, he walked away from his mortgage payments. The house sat empty for months before the bank sent someone to clean it up. The man in charge of the job mopped the floor and shook his head. "This house was not loved," he said. Soon, it will be light enough for the Reporter Lady to see a new flier in the window announcing the bank sale and empty wine bottles littering the front yard.

A car turns down the street and stops long enough to pick up a man standing at the curb with his cooler. Other residents leave. An asphalt paver. A security guard. A towing company desk worker. A heating and cooling man. A construction crew supervisor. A housekeeping crew supervisor. A fast-food restaurant cashier.

Border Street empties of its workers.

First impressions fade in time

After the Reporter Lady finds the Teacher's father engrossed in an earnest conversation with the Mexican landscaper about politics, and Longtime Eddie tells her how the Mexican family down the street sent him food, and after she meets the American Spouse who is married to an illegal immigrant, and after she remembers how Woody's son didn't think twice about letting the Mexican Grandma's family use his electricity, and the Mexican Grandma's son tells her that his American boss warned him he needed to get another Social Security number, and after another American boss puts up bail money for one of his illegal immigrant employees, she begins to see how wrong her first impressions of the street were.

Where she once concluded that Mexican and American had little to do with each other, she now sees many intricate relationships. Husband and wife. Mother and child. They are the most basic relationships. But there are others, not all of them friendly, but not necessarily hostile, either. Like most neighborhood relationships, they are based on convenience or necessity, existing just below the surface.

The anger in being ignored

It is nearly 8 a.m. The Teacher has a planning day at school - no students. She is one of the last people on the day shift to leave her house. She teaches at the same elementary school she attended as a girl, and staying in the neighborhood was part of her plan - a brown-eyed woman with a Spanish last name teaching a class full of brown-eyed children with Spanish last names, her presence telling them: If I can do it, so can you.

At one time, it might have been said that she represented the block's future, its first generation of college-educated professionals, but one of the most perplexing aspects of Border Street is how it generates so much energy and yet appears static.

The Teacher does not like looking at the problems of the neighborhood through the prism of ethnicity or race. It is the overall lawlessness and hopelessness that bother her. It is the failure of systems, political, legal and social, in neighborhoods like hers. She watches the election campaign signs for mayor and City Council go up around her and she fumes. Now, you notice us. When you need our votes. And when it's over, she says, you will not return our calls. You will not attend our meetings. You will forget us.

She walks past vacant houses. She walks by the homes of her students and a stack of discarded mattresses leaning against a fence in front of one of the blue apartments. Had she not known better, she could have sworn she had seen those same mattresses a year ago, but, no, that was a different apartment, different family, different furniture.

She wonders how things can change so much and still stay the same.

Being on the street one year

You don't believe everything everyone here is telling you, do you, Longtime Eddie asks the Reporter Lady. He looks amused. No, she says. She does not expect they will tell her everything, even with the anonymity she has promised in exchange for their candor. If she were in their shoes, she would not. But, in time, she will hear the stories of almost everyone on the street. She will know more people on this block than she does on her own.

A few residents will stop speaking to her. They will be angry because they believe she did not draw enough attention to their street or because they believe she drew too much.

The neighbors of Border Street learn about each other through her. You changed the street, Eddie tells her. This does not make her feel particularly comfortable, but it is not unexpected - it is impossible to spend so much time in a place and not affect it, or be affected by it. The Reporter Lady loved being on the street. And she hated being on it.

Border Street proved to be relentless in its struggle and need and conflict. Some days, it seemed to offer nothing but despair and she left it slump-shouldered. But, Border Street had a way of surprising her, too. She remembers first watching its children play with each other, these white and Hispanic and Mexican kids, these children of American citizens and illegal immigrants, hanging out in gaggles in the middle of the street, chasing each other down the block, sweating and screaming in delight, fighting one day, sharing popsicles the next. She imagines that in their youth they are still unaffected by this river, but perhaps she is wrong. Perhaps they are learning to master it, to negotiate its currents, learn its hard lessons and welcome its unexpected gifts. When, at the end of the year, a white couple, a Christian couple, buys a home on Border Street, they, too, are captured by the sight of the children, by their fluidity. Such potential lies here, the wife will say. Such promise.

It is 8 a.m. on a work day on Border Street. The Reporter Lady walks back to her car and the sun rises over her shoulder, falling upon the canopy of trees and the city's other Border Streets stretching out before her, lapping at the feet of the Rocky Mountains like a hundred hungry rivers.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

• March 25, 2008

  8:46 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  arby writes:

  I liked the last two paragraphs. They summed up the article. I don't think Reporter Lady is so naive that she doesn't know about the things that go on after dark. The point is we have to keep on keeping on. I don't know exactly where Border Street is but I'm pretty sure I was raised there.

• April 3, 2008

  11:41 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  wdmll writes:

  You can’t beat a birth rate. At the present rate of illegal immigration, anchor babies and growth of the legal Latino population in this country, the day is coming when the US will be a “Latin American Country”. I am not talking about a culture base on the Founding Fathers, but on a “Spanish” speaking people, “Latin American Country”. Where in the Hispanic countries of this hemisphere do you find a country close to our values? We don’t live in a perfect country and our country’s history is filled with injustice. But compared to the rest of the world, we have the best government and nation. Many of the Hispanics coming to this country are seeking a better life, but if they don’t assimilate and are not kept at a reasonable rate of growth, the excess baggage (corruption and poverty) that they bring with them will overtake this country. Do we want our children and grandchildren to live in a country of five hundred million people dominated by the values of Latinos such as Hugo Chavez or other leftist leaders? What about the old dictators like Juan Peron or the corrupt governments of Mexico? What about the poverty? No middle class, unabated crime, drugs, prostitution of children and the killing of young girls. The United States of America is heading down the road of a “Third World Country”. Are we as a people going to standby as our leaders (both the Democrats and Republicans) sell their souls for the “ Latino vote” and the corporate dollar made off of “Latino cheap labor”?

  We have to proactively take back our country at the ballot box, close the borders (with the military and/or a fence) and remove the incentive for illegal immigrants to easily find work without proper documentation. Adapt some kind of seasonal and/or limited visiting work permits (agreement by both the US and Mexico by which Mexican laborers would obtain work permits in Mexico before entering the US). Penalize and incarceration of US employers who break the law by hiring undocumented workers. Apply the same laws to illegal immigrants as are applied to US citizens (plus deportation when required). In addition, pass or enact laws forbidding illegal immigrants access to free medical care and other services now afforded to illegal immigrants (other than for humane purposes or through the visiting work permits). The application of the Fourteen Amendment, as it was originally designed. Review the guidelines for legal immigration such as quotas and require assimilation of legal immigrants (learning English and etc.).

  IF we don’t take action now before it is to late, then we will become a balkanized country ripe for an uncertain future.
  
  Taken from the article Illegal Immigration

  Also, read the following articles:

  In The Year 2030

  Will we all be speaking Spanish in the near future?

• April 3, 2008

  12:04 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  wdmll writes:

  Continuation from the last comment of wdmll

  Taken from the article, Illegal Immigration:

  http://www.zimbio.com/Non-Politically...'s+Crisis/articles/14/Illegal+Immigration

  Also, read the articles:

  In The Year 2030

  http://www.zimbio.com/Non-Politically...'s+Crisis/articles/10/In+The+Year+2030

  Will we all be speaking Spanish in the near future?

  http://www.zimbio.com/Non-Politically...'s+Crisis/articles/4/Will+speaking+Spanish+near+future

• April 8, 2008

  9:02 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  wdmll writes:

  Reconquest, Reconquista and Al-Andalus

  Written by wdmll on Apr-7-08 1:10pm
  
  Reconquest, Reconquista and Al-Andalus are names that pertain to the New World and Europe. I’m not a historian but I’m an observer. If one stops and looks around, something is happening. There is a change, a transformation of the ethnic makeup of the United States as time marches on. The Southwest is becoming even more Hispanic. The Southwest has a long history of Spanish and Latino presence. The Spanish Conquistadors carried out the first European conquest of the Southwest. Later, Mexico replaced the Spanish. But not only is the Southwest becoming more Hispanic, the Nation as a whole is becoming Hispanic. If a person happens to look around, he or she will see the large aggregation of Hispanics in states beyond the Border States of the Southwest. If one goes to the Midwest, the presence of Hispanics is apparent. It also appears that the Northwest, the Eastern Seaboard and the Northeast are all seeing an increase in the numbers of Hispanics.

  Through the eyes of the Latinos, The Southwest was lost to the Gringo through war, illegal immigration and colonization. To the Hispanics, their people are the result of mixing the bloods of the original Spanish immigrants and the Native Americans. One thing that is conveniently overlooked is the wholesale near extermination of millions of native peoples in South America, Central America, Mexico and the Southwest of the United States. The result was the mixing of the bloods of the Spanish European and the remaining native peoples. So the mixing of blood was preceded by the spilling of blood on a grand scale.

  So what is the concept of Reconquista? It derives its historical meaning from the Spanish and Portuguese word for "Reconquest". The Reconquista was a period of time of about 750 years in which the Christians gradually took the modern countries of Spain and Portugal back from the Moorish Muslims. The original Islamic invasion of Iberia started in 710. The Reconquista period of time from 722 to 1492, has an ending date that parallels the start of the beginning of the conquest of the Americas. The Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe is occupied mainly by Portugal in the central-west of the Peninsula and Spain in the remaining part of the Peninsula. The southern part of the Peninsula is just across from the continent of Africa and the Muslim Nation of Morocco. The Greek name “Iberia” in Latin is “Hispania”. During the time of the Moorish occupation, Iberia was called Al-Andalus. So the names Reconquista and Al-Andalus resonate through Hispanic and Muslims cultures. To Hispanics, Reconquista means reclaiming parts of the United States, to all of the United States.

  Read full story on:

  wdmll http://www.zimbio.com/Non-Politically...'s+Crisis/articles/189/Reconquest+Reconquista+Al+Andalus