Mexican Women Beg: "Close the Border"

This is refreshing. Ordinary people on both sides of the border whose lives are adversely affected by the policies created by "their betters" know the score!

Believe-it-or-not, not all Mexicans want to come to the United States. I don't blame them. The culture and climate are radically different, English is a difficult language to learn, and Americans tend to have a harder edge than do Mexicans. But those are not the reasons for the women's request. Here's their story by David Yeagley at FrontPageMag.com:

As I have indicated in another post,

Not all Mexican women want to have “anchor babies” in the Unites States. The real Mexican women of Tecalpulco want their migrant men to come back home and take care of the babies they left behind. “Close the U.S. borders!” they say. “Send our men back home!”

Tecalpulco is a small village in Guerrero, Mexico, on Mexico’s southernmost border. It is just north of the city of Campuzano. Tecalpulco is famous for hand-made craft and jewelry. There is an internationally known artisans establishment there called ArtCamp. Vacationers know the place. The artisans run a coop, and they’re subject to the pressures of global market manipulation.
 
But their men don’t care. They’ve all moved norte, to join the mass trespassing movement in America.
 
And the women of southern Mexico are tired of this nonsense. They have expressed their protest to BadEagle.com, where a number of pieces on Mexican issues have been posted in recent weeks. BadEagle.com has received direct mail from the artisanas campesinas, the women who make the famous jewelry.
 
I’ve gotten permission to post this correspondence. The women write from the heart in imperfect English, as one might expect.
 
Here is the first, from May 4, 2006:
 
When our men went to the United States they were young and adventurous; They have had their adventure, now we want them to come home to us and to their families and to their home country. Close the border so that the ones who are here do not leave. We have work now and the men can help us to sand-down and polish the jewelry.
 
Our group is of women from the village of Tecalpulco. The tradition of our village is handcrafted fashion jewelry. Since the men have left, we women have organized a good business of fashion jewelry production in cottage industry. The men can help us, they don’t have any excuse to stay [in America].
 
Thank you very much from the hearts of the women of Artesanas Campesinas.
 
Rosalinda Mejia Baron
Eva Albavera Viveros, Contact Person
ealbavera@yahoo.com.mx
Telefonos:
001 762 62 73481
001 762 62 22758
 
So, the women of southern Mexico, far south, have lost their migrant men to the craze of invading America. Their husbands, the fathers of their children, have abandoned them for some grand “revolutionary” fling up north.

As do women everywhere, they have learned to live without men and to support their children, a good sign. But children need fathers, even if they are "dead beat," and interested in sowing their oats on a grand adventure to the North.

Here's more:

Here’s more, from May 9:
 
We want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for acknowledging us as persons, we are so grateful that you recognize us for who we are, village women of Mexico.
 
We, the women in Mexico, are living under very depressed conditions for a long time. Most of the man in the villages have gone to the United States to work there and have left the women here with the children. At the beginning they were sending money but that was every 6 months or every year, and they weren’t always sending us enough to cover our basic needs. Frequently, these men drop out of our sight all-together.
 
We are campesinas, we have our cornfields and do work them, but we have learned that in modern times we can’t live off of them. We have to buy cooking gas, daily food, shoes for the children, school materials, etc. Now that the kids went into school again we barely got enough money to buy their uniforms and we are now working hard to pay the school every month and saving money to buy the rest of the materials that they need. It is impossible to live like this, yet we have no choice except to survive, even though we are inside a pattern where everything is costly.
 
We never asked anything from you, still we want to ask you to close the Mexico border to illegal migration because our men go north to get money and they remain up there sometimes with another woman and we don’t like it; we want our men to be deported since they are breaking the laws. Please isn’t there a way to have these men deported back to their homes and families in Mexico? That would be the best to happen for us! because we need their help in sanding and polishing the jewelry we have been producing.
 
Thank you, thank you so much in the name of the Rural Artisans Women of Taxco!
 
Sincerely
Tamara Hernandez Danel
 
This is as plain as it gets. Among the so-called migrant hordes of banditos are deadbeat dad, carelessly leaving behind their wives and children to fend for themselves. So, where’s the voice of international protest here? 

The women are from the less-developed southern part of Mexico, home to indigenous groups, many of whom don't speak Spanish at all and whose culture is more traditional. These are hardworking mothers, intent on creating a better life for their children in Mexico. Hopefully their fathers will have moved past the need for wanderlust and adventure for their sake.

David asks, "Where are the feminists," where are the North American women that should be protesting the abandonment of their Mexican sisters. But that's a story for another essay.

The originalcontains internal links.