Sunday, 4 December 2011 (ORIGINAL PUBLICATION DATE)
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Guess What? (It's Fairly Predictable)
About the news about the boy who committed suicide because he was concerned about not being able to go to engineering school after leaving high school; It turns out that his family says that there was nothing left in any notes that would indicate such a thing. One brother said that in his good-bye note, one of several left to various family members, the only concern his now departed younger brother evidenced was about being drafted into the ever diminishing ranks of the cartels.
He feared and loathed the idea of being forced to be a mule. Several of his classmates have been menaced by gang thugs in the area. The gang thugs are always recruiting because their ranks are diminished by shootings, incarcerations, and flight from the area on a daily basis. They recruit, at times, by telling the potential conscript that if they refuse service to the gang, their family will be shot....their house will be burned down....their FFA project animals will be shot....their sisters will be raped.....etc.
That is the only reference made by anybody at the first level of relationship to the young man now departed. The Hidalgo County Sheriff's Department has taken possession of all notes and related items and is not commenting, due to the fact that, in Texas, this is a homicide. It is against the law to murder someone with clear intent and malice aforethought. So, since that is the quintessential characteristic of a suicide, such matters are always investigated between closely and extremely closely.
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We commend this to the attention of interested OROGs.
We assert that Congressman Ruben Hinojosa is the perfect example of a "feed the children for free". Tax, Tax, Spend, Spend, Elect, Elect is his motto. "I will put their money where my mouth is!" is another motto. "We have been denied too long," is another of his mottoes, although he comes from one of the oldest, colonial families in South Texas, a family that until recent times was very wealthy. He bases his call for passage of the "Dreamers' Act" on this sad event.
He is a mendacious, hypocritical slug. The idea of a person born of blue blood, and to the upper-class reducing himself to the level of carnival-huckster demagogue in one short generation is stunning. He began his political career as a puppet for big business and the United Farm Workers, a (such a confusing form of political convenience) and has steadily become worse.
The idea of walking on the grave of this fine young man....is disgusting. This tragedy should never have been taken into the public domain. With the most minimal intervention of class, dignity, social training, and deference it should have been obvious to anyone that this was a very private family matter.
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Finally, El Gringo Viejo was having a bit of lunch a couple of days ago, talking with a friend...an old competitor from our touring business days....and we were comparing notes and topics of interest. We have very similar backgrounds...Texas...university studies....Mexico, very conservative political and cultural notions....Anglicanism, etc. As we review this issue of the terrible suicide of this fine boy my friend brought up something that is known, but stored back into the recesses of the brain that pertain to school days back in the 1950s and 1960s.
Texas....which walks on the edge of having an independent foreign policy to that of the occupying authority.... enacted various reciprocal agreements years ago, back in the 1930s and 1940s, that permitted Mexican States to send citizens of their States to Texas public school and universities and pay in-State tuition so long as they reciprocated. In return, Texans were permitted to attend their schools under the same considerations.
This meant, for instance, that in the summertime, years back there would be a hoard of Texans staying in private homes in Saltillo, Coahuila and studying Spanish at the University of Coahuila during the summer-school period. The credits were transferrable on a university transcript and the experience for many was life-changing. It was better than Spring Break, and much less degenerate and/or expensive. The campus of the University of Coahuila in Saltillo looks like what Greece was trying to look like.
The States were, if the Gringo Viejo remembers correctly, Sonora, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Puebla, San Luis Potosi', Yucatan, and perhaps Oaxaca. There might be others. The program may still be extant.
Of interest, of course, is that various of these public universities had famously fine programs in archaeology, anthropology, Spanish language, Indian languages, and other liberal arts themes such as history and geography. Also of extreme importance, of course, were the medical schools, especially Nuevo Leon (Monterrey) and Jalisco (Guadalajara) and Yucatan (Merida) that were always between triple-A minor league and major league. With an MD degree from those schools (and some others in Mexico) and budding doctor, surgeon, dentist, or orthodontic surgeon would be ready for his qualifications on the International Doctors' Examination.....especially after one or two years of federal social field service in Mexico....especially in those years. Texans paid no out-of-country tuition, just the regular tuition like the Mexicans, and of course they paid the "laboratory fees" and "building use fees" etc. like the Mexicans. It was very inexpensive, in relative terms....and one normally stayed with a family or a "respectable private rooming arrangement" (usually two or three rooms w/ bath in some old mansion with a couple of ancient servants and a widow trying to preside over what had gone with the wind).
El Gringo Viejo's wife worked for one of those doctors here in Texas (a classical Anglo-type Texian)....he graduated from the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon. He would recount how "...the Mexicans were dumb enough to let me into medical school with my BA grades, and they were smart enough to make me the best doctor I could be. I can't let them down by doing a crummy job, ever". Then he would trundle off down the corridor to the next patient. He would laugh in his famously inimitable way after telling details of his adventures in Mexico in the early 1950s. He was a highly recognized and esteemed surgeon in matters of the throat and larynx. He also did other general surgeries and caught babies. He would always say that the time he spent in Mexico made him a much better person and the two years (he volunteered for one extra year) he spent in federal field service were the most rewarding time he had spent in his life to that point. He worked in some small towns around Monterrey and in some really outback places. His Spanish was excellent.
El Gringo Viejo also remembers Perla, the girl from Reynosa across from McAllen, who would arrive at Mirabeau Bonapart Lamar Junior High School in near-north central McAllen every morning. Her father was the Director of the new PEMEX refinery recently completed in Reynosa, across the Rio Grande. She had a big black auto, and a chauffeur who would get down and go around to open the door for her.....At the end of the day, he would return and pick her up. She paid the same out-of-district tuition as if she was from a neighbouring town in Texas.....around 42 dollars per semester.
She caused quite a stir because she dressed in near semi-formal...wore a hat and gloves normally....had "real lady's make-up"....and usually wore heels. At first she was something of an oddity...like a movie star or something...but gradually she was taken in by a cliq of girls and joined a couple of clubs and even served on the Student Council in the 9th grade. She came to study and to learn a good variety of common American English spoken by people of her own class, according to her father. Most of the guys remember her just as a knock-out with black eyes, milk coloured skin, a Jackie bouffant, and a wardrobe like Audrey Hepburn's. She was very down to earth, civilised, attractive, and...in a way...friendly.
So, yes that's the way it was. Rick Perry could have mentioned that, but he is probably unaware of it. He could have won the Republican nomination if he had only explained how cumbersome Texas government is....how little power the Governor has....how constrained the Congress of the Republic of Texas is due to our experiences with the Reconstruction and the unbridled tyranny that was brought by the Union Occupation.
And so....now people might understand how and why Texans are a little conflicted in all directions about some of the looser ends of the immigration issue. The Old Gringo is adamant, however about sealing the border, first and foremost. It is one of the few areas where the central government should not just do something...it should do an Israeli quest for perfect, hermitic penetration by unauthorized visitors. Liberal for those who comply with the rules, and hard on those who do not.
Feeling a bit restored, and grateful for your time and attention.
El Gringo Viejo
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