Calexico: True Lives of the Borderlands

Foreword

   Foreword We can all learn from Calexico. You may know where Calexico is on the map, located on the border with Mexico about a two-hour drive east of San Diego. But Calexico is more than a dot on the map; it is a city that draws into sharp focus the often blurred images of what immigration means to our country. It does this by giving concrete images of lives lived and ideas born where cultures meet, conflict, and merge. Calexico is a city filled with stories reflecting fundamental questions about who we are as Americans, what our values are, and how our democracy works. Growing up in San Diego, I was introduced to Calexico by my mother, who took us on drives to that town and into northern Baja California. I remember sitting in the backseat of our 1968 Dodge Dart, poking my head out the window and being struck by the contrasts and poetry of the place: stretches of desert broken by long green strips of agriculture and canals flowing next to the roads and highways near Calexico that people told me were filled with catfish the size of my little brother. I remember, also, whispering over and over the names Calexico and Mexicali, its sister city, and thinking that the people who came up with those names must have had a magical familiarity with the borderland where Mexico and California merge. A place, as one person interviewed in this book points out, that was not quite United States and not quite Mexico, but something else. The sister names well fit the meeting place of the two nation-families. Wallace Stegner wrote that California is America—only more. Something similar could be said about Calexico: “Calexico is California—only more.” The issues of water, environment, language, education, immigration , and the relations with the nation of Mexico are all ones that Calexico experiences more deeply than do places in California less critically situated. In my work at the California Council for the Humanities, I hear stories from across California that describe the beauty, sorrow, xii foreword and joy that create the complex tapestry of life in our state. I hear stories that retell our past and provide clues as to how we can shape our future. Unfortunately, so far, few of those stories have come out of the southeast corner of our state—but it is to exactly this region and its unique combination of society and geography that we should be paying attention. Stories from this region are under-reported, yet they can vitally educate us about critical issues facing our state and nation. In the spirit of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Peter Laufer and his longtime journalism colleague Markos Kounalakis went on a journey to uncover what was on the minds of the people of Calexico, to better understand the complexities of life on the border. The people that they encountered and spoke with on this journey revealed compassion, humor, concern, and curiosity about the world around them. Through Laufer’s writing, the curtains are pulled back to reveal a people and a place that tell us as much about who we are as they do about who they are. Ralph Lewin President California Council for the Humanities ...