Last week, I realized that I love southern Africa because I grew up on the U.S.-Mexico Border. If this makes no sense, you haven't lived on the U.S.-Mexico border or you haven't lived here for very long.
I love this dry desert land, in the very most southern borders of our country, just as I love the deserts and forests and jungles of Africa. My sense of justice is outraged by everything here, just as much as it is outraged by everything there. For a long time, I didn't understand that my vehemence over the problems and solutions in Africa directly correlated with my vehemence over the problems I saw in this land where I grew up.
Growing up white in El Paso, Texas meant growing up as a minority. Growing up as a white minority in El Paso also meant growing up privileged, loosely similar to growing up white and privileged in colonial Africa.
Sure, here on the border, democracy prevails and you can vote no matter the color of your skin. Sure, we've never had draconian apartheid-like laws; and segregation is not an issue, at least not in 2002. I don't wish to make the comparison between the U.S. Border regions and Africa too black and white. But the underlying similarities still exist.
I know Mexican-Americans my parents' age who were punished for speaking Spanish on the playground.
Recently, the state of Arizona, which has one of the highest numbers of Spanish-speaking citizens in the U.S., did away with bilingual education. I work at a publishing company that specializes in bilingual children's books (www.cincopuntos.com). In June, an elementary teacher who teaches in Tucson visited us and complained that, though she loved our books, she didn't dare buy them because they were written in both Spanish and English and she wasn't allowed to use Spanish in her classroom, even to explain assignments to students who don't know English.
(Language has been an issue in colonized Africa, too. In 1977, school kids in Soweto, South Africa-a township near Johannesburg-rebelled against a new law that required schools for blacks and coloreds (mixed race) to teach in Afrikaans. Afrikaans was the language of apartheid, of the oppressor, and the children demanded that they be taught in English. The struggle lasted off and on for about a year and numerous children were murdered or wounded by South African police as they protested.)
