I’ve just finished a fantastic novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain. Boyle’s perceptions of the “us” and “them” are sharp and refreshing. This “Post-Modern” novel is at once sarcastic and ironic while capturing the deeply human spirit of Steinbeck.

“He’d read about beggars in India mutilating themselves and their children so as to present the horror of the empty sleeve, the dangling pantleg or the suppurating eye socket to the well-fed and guilt-racked tourist. Well, wasn’t this Mexican cut from the same mold, throwing himself in front of his car for the thin hope of twenty bucks? Of course, dinner had been ruined. By the time Delaney got over the shock, said his goodbyes to Jack and swept out into the rush-hour traffic and back up the hill to the new gate and the newly installed guard waiting there to grill him on the suitability of his entering his own community, the marinara sauce had been scorched to the bottom of the pan, and the mussels, though he’d turned off the flame beneath them, had taken on the consistency of Silly Putty.”

There is hardly an issue in American politics today that isn’t effected by the “Tortilla Curtain”. Let’s see if we can connect the tortillas.

Sean-Paul has a post about the violence in Mexico spreading to Montery (Mexico’s 2nd largest city).Meanwhile, the fence to keep them out, or us in, or…continues. But tougher travel restrictions like the new requirement to carry a U.S. passport when traveling to and from Mexico should make us all feel a bit safer. If that isn’t enough, Williamson County, Texas is the home of a domestic concentration camp , run by a private corporation, Correctional Corporation of America, which earns money incarcerating small children and babies of illegal immigrants. According to their website, “CCA is the nation's largest owner and operator of privatized correctional and detention facilities and one of the largest prison operators in the world.” Wow.

Should I remind you of Halliburton’s recent contract to build “Immigrant Detention Centers”?

This from the NY Times, Mexico’s Latest War on Drug Gangs Is Off to a Rapid Start

"It has been a hundred years since a Mexican president appeared in military garb, and the choice seemed no accident to most people here."

Just a South of the border version of the police state’s war on drugs, nothing new for us heh? When will “El Decider” be donning his own military garb?

Check out this very telling piece from La Jornada, via Watching America, The U.S. Strategy for Food Supremacy.

"For the United States to achieve this practically hegemonic position has required foreign workers, and to transform them into a reserve industrial army in their home countries by making it possible for them to migrate [north], which has devastating effects on Mexican farming. The great irony of all this is that we now import food products and export our work force, which favors U.S. competitiveness and leaves us at the mercy of the ups and downs of their economy"

and this,

“Mexico is in the grip of the worst tortilla crisis in its modern history…Tortilla prices have tripled or quadrupled in some parts of Mexico since last summer.”

At the same time, “WTO Members Line Up To Challeng U.S. Corn Subsidies” Hmmmm.

This is billions of dollars in subsidies and it isn’t money going to families like “The Joads" either. That paulty amount of charity is left to "Farm Aid" to mannage. This is Billions going to subsidize all those downtrodden, poor agri-corporate monopolies so they can help the “free market” along.
The “scores” of Mexicans “pouring” over the border are desperate. They are the victims of a suppressive economic system (see NAFTA for instance), sponsored by the U.S., and supported by their own elite class of Robber Barons. Millions more Americans are heading for the same fate. Many millions have already joined them. How desperate shall we become before we are all living behind the “Tortilla Curtain”, “searching for the ghost of old Tom Joad”.