Cowboys and Indians
	The Border Patrol came up with a slogan a couple of years ago in its campaign to deter would-be illegals from crossing the border into the United States from Mexico: "Stay Out, Stay Alive." It was the BP publicist's equivalent of hanging the bodies of the dead on the border fence. But what most people I've met on the migrant trail have learned is the opposite: To Stay Put these days is To Die, and to Move is to Live.
	The "illegals" have indeed violated national boundaries. Having done so is precisely what has insured their survival­­economically as well as culturally. In the U.S. media, Mexico looms large, and it is not a pretty picture. For the most part, it looks like America loathes Mexico these days. So much so that it reveals just how much of its loathing is actually desire. Yes, Americans must admit it: so much repulsion can only mean ravenous desire. You see, Americans want Mexico, but on their terms. They want the goodies­­Free Trade discounts, plus the usual touristy perks like lusty señoritas, dark beer, powder-sanded tropical beaches. But they also fear that the alien will change them in the process­­and then they would no longer be "Americans," would they? (Gringos lament the rise of nationalism all over the world, never realizing that they too suffer a good dose of it.)
	But the Mexican Indian is already in the American Heartland. And America, via its pop, is irrevocably encrusted in the imagination of the Indian Country down south. There is no serious discussion of withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement, mostly because no one in the United States can point exactly to what drastic negatives have resulted from it. (On the Mexican side, the discussion is much more poignant: massive out-migration can be linked these days to rural areas where subsistence farmers have gone under precisely because of the economic reforms Mexico had to undertake to make the deal palatable to the Americans.)
	The Mexican economic crisis not withstanding, migrant optimism dies hard in the south: if anything, the crisis mindset makes Mexicans cling to hope all the more­­it is all they have. Moreover, logic dictates that Mexicans continue moving north because there are indeed wide-open job markets in all manner of industries, from agriculture and light manufacturing to the massive American service sector (restaurants, hotels, etc.) The Mexicans will not be denied optimism in their darkest hour.
	And so a curious thing has happened to the Americans and the Mexicans, to the Cowboys and the Indians. Cowboys were once the optimists, Indians the fatalists. But who is on the move now?Who is acting defensively, who dreams of scaling the social and economic ladder, who harbors paranoid fantasies, who passes Prop. 187, who passes a double-nationality law?
	Take a stroll down Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, and what do you see? Cowboys, I mean Indians dressed like cowboys: Stetsons, jeans, snakeskin boots. (Meanwhile, curiously, it has been popular in the last few years for the "white man" to seek the Great Spirit in "redskin" sweat lodges.) Are the Indians dressing in Cowboy drag? The Indian rides the Cowboy's horse: in Greyhound stations across the land, Mexicans wait for buses whose placards read St. Louis, Chicago, Raleigh, Houston. So if They've Become Us, then Who are We?
	All our backs are wet . . .
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