Annotations for Subject: Immigration

The changes in the U.S.-Mexico relationship may be more attitude than policy. Immigration was a big focus in talks between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Mexico's Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda.

Your book is entitled Upside Down, and it's looking at your perspective on the world, but certainly your perspective also on North America, on the United States. And I'm wondering then how you see this migration, this constant migration of Latinos to this country, if this country from your perspective is so upside down. How do you interpret that they all continue wanting to come here?

Well, the entire world is upside down. It's like a giant school teaching lead to float and corks to sink. But being the United States, the center of prosperity nowadays, it's perfectly understandable that people try to come here and improve their lives in the center of paradise. This is what the publicity says. Anyway, it's the invasion of the invaded, because all these people are coming from countries that have been invaded several times by the United States.

So when you walk the streets of New York, for example, and this has happened to me more than once, where I will be walking down Broadway and I will hear my paisanos, mexicanos, my Mexican compatriots speaking in Nahuatl, or Zapotec. And to me, that's almost the upside down world, that they come here and now they want to dress like New Yorkers, and yet they're walking the streets of Broadway speaking centuries old languages.

I like this melting pot. I mean, I like hearing so many different voices. I like diversity. The problem is that nowadays money is much more free than people, and then people have not the right to decide where to live.

They are being expelled at the frontier, many of them. Have all these tragedies of people trying to come here who cannot even arrive to the coasts like happened some months ago. I remember it was just a small news in the newspaper, but for me it was so expressive, so eloquent. It was the case of some Haitians, people coming from Haiti in a poor boat, 60, and they were drowned. They died. They were eaten by the Caribbean Sea. And what attracted my attention was the fact that they were, all of them were farmers. Farmers from Haiti that have been cultivating rice during their entire lives until to the moment in which an expert from the International Monetary Fund went there and said, no more subsidies for the rice. And Haiti began eating U.S. rice, which is highly subsidized by the U.S. government. And there is no IMF expert who goes to the White House and says, no more subsidies for the rice. This immigration process also hidden sometimes in some of these tragic stories about the unequal relationship between countries.