"One doesn't just cross a physical border, one crosses many borders: borders that are in your head, borders between people."

Over a weekend in late May 2006, a group of activists traveled by bus from Austin, Texas to the maquiladora towns of Northern Mexico. They went to listen. What they heard this time was something new. Maquiladora workers told grotesque tales of management techniques aimed at psychological degradation. This is an interview with two of the traveling activists.

Getting Started on Borderland Solidarity

The jukebox sings in Spanish. At a tacqueria in Austin, a waitress takes orders for chicken mole, chile rellenos de queso, and dos tacos al pastor. Judith Rosenberg and Howard Hawhee have settled in across the table, prepared to share their recent experiences with the workers of Northern Mexico. Rosenberg is a founding organizer of Austin Tan Cerca, a group that sponsors regular “listening tours” across the border, so the first question goes to her.

Greg Moses: How did the group get started?

Judith Rosenberg: We have an origin myth. It has to do with the miraculous appearance of three maquiladora workers at an Eastside church in Austin. They were actually on a speaking tour, going through the central region of the Unites States, from the border in Piedras Negras right on up. They came to the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe through a tour organized by the American Friends Service Committee, and not a huge audience arrived to hear them, but I did. I stole a couple of minutes from my graduate program. In those days I didn’t usually allow myself any time away from studies, but I felt compelled to go. Also, there were a number of activists from the Austin Peace and Justice Coalition.

So they spoke at the church, and they were kind of amazing. They were some of the maquiladora workers who had helped to organize the Comite Fronterizo de Obreras [Border Committee of Workers] (CFO). One of them was Julia Quinones, their national coordinator, who is still a major articulate force in Mexico. My reaction was this is David talking about Goliath with this optimism of, you know, we can handle this, and with complete conviction. It was a beautiful experience to hear that much conviction coming out of this community of workers. And then it happened that -- I'm trying to use biblical language, since this is our origin story…

Howard Hawhee: It came to pass.

JR: It came to pass. We're a good team. I have a degree in rhetoric, but Howard has his life in rhetoric or something.

HH: Yeah, there you go.

JR: It came to pass that this was the day of the month when the Austin Peace and Justice Coalition regularly formed a picket at The Gap on Guadalupe, when they were there years ago. So it occurred to some individuals to invite the maquiladora workers to picket with them at The Gap. And a fabulous photo exists of this taken by Alan Pogue of the Mexicans and the Austinites in front of The Gap.

And then it came to pass that the idea occurred among these activists that if we're so concerned about sweatshop labor in Southeast Asia, why are we not concerned about sweatshop labor in our backyard, three hours away? Doug Zachary, the former executive director of the APJC, thought of the name of the organization very quickly. Austin Tan Cerca (Austin So Close). It echoes the phrase of Porfirio Diaz, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!”

So that was 1999 in October and by November already the first delegation was organized to go. You know this word solidarity has been buzzing around, and there were solidarity delegations and the idea was to go and listen. It may be that since the workers who came there had such a gift for analysis, advocacy, organization, and connection, that there was sort of a natural thing to think let's go and listen, that's enough. And in a way that's what we've done.

We've also since 1999 committed to sending them money, $600 a month. Where we get it from is, you know, it kind of turns up. It's pretty amazing, but that's another story. At first the idea was to send a monthly living wage to support a full time organizer or promatora and then we added money after that to contribute something for their rent, because they have an office in Piedras Negras that's been extremely significant for them as a physical space, a home, the solidity of an institution that's on their side, not against them.

So that sort of answers how it got started. And I think the other question is harder. You know, what do we do? Or what do we intend to do? Because solidarity across as many borders as we cross is never a simple thing. And we work on it all the time. I think this latest delegation which Howard led revealed some terrific instances of our struggle for solidarity. For example in Archie's story, which was such a testimony to his own consciousness and struggle (we'll return to this later).

But the way I feel about it, having also written my dissertation about it, is that if you really cross the border it changes your identity, and it causes you to question all kinds of assumptions that you have about who you are in this world and what it means to be a citizen of this country in relationship to the people who you meet there. It really goes to some basic identity questions that we all carry around in different ways. And therefore it's transformative. And it's also educational.

Archie's Story or How You Never Cross All the Borders

GM: Well, let me ask Howard a question. Let's talk a little about the most recent trip. Judith mentioned Archie's story. What's that?

HH: First a little background about who Archie is. Archie teaches Spanish. And he is what you would call an old Latin American hand. I mean he has lived for years in various countries including Mexico. He knows the culture very well. He's a very progressive person. And yet, Archie's point was that one doesn't just cross a physical border, one crosses many borders: borders that are in your head, borders between people. And his point was that even he, when he goes across that border, he's never going to be anything but a Gringo, you know, a guy from here, no matter how long he lives there or how in tune he is. And he recounted an incident with a waiter, just the last time we were down there, where he got kind of angry at the guy for acting kind of, what was it?

JR: It was a very subtle story the way he told it but I think the gist was, to exaggerate his very delicate telling of it, that he was kind of showing off with his great Spanish.

HH: And how well he knew his way around.

JR: Yeah, and ordering for everybody, and explaining the cuisine, and talking to the waiter, and all of that.

HH: And he forgot to pay! Yeah. And the waiter came running up, and in broken English says, “Mister, the money”. And Archie says he just got angry at the waiter, until he thought about what was going on.

JR: Yeah, the waiter sort of blew Archie's cover, exposed him.

HH: Yeah, I think you'd have to hear him tell the story in order to get the subtlety of it, but his point being that it's hard to cross borders in the sense that it's hard to ever really be across.

JR: And solidarity means crossing the border and developing a relationship of equality, and that's kind of tough because we all bring our ideas of we're bilingual but you're not, or I've traveled all over the world and you haven't, I'm educated, and I have this really sophisticated global analysis and you don't. But this is absolutely not true. There is a level of consciousness there among working people with whatever their high school education that is astounding.

HH: And the ability to reason about it and articulate it also. It would put just about any American you could think of to shame.

It's about Dignity and a Promise of Better Tomorrows

GM: Which brings us to the question of this being a kind of listening tour to begin with. What are you hearing when you listen at the border?

HH: One of the things you hear is that people are realistic about what's going on and what's possible. And when you really get down to what it is they are really looking for, what they are after, where they see themselves, you'll hear this said in various ways: “We're looking for some human dignity. We're looking to be treated like human beings. And we expect to have a modicum of well being in our lives, and especially for our children. And we really don't mind doing this kind of work, working really hard, and that sort of thing, but we want to be treated right and we want to think that this is going somewhere.”

JR: And we want to be able to feed our children.

HH: The children always come up.

JR: I listened to this confrontation between 70 maquiladora workers and an Alcoa CEO one time in Ciudad Acuña in 2000. And usually if there is a maquiladora worker speaking to a CEO, they're at the Alcoa shareholders meeting, and they're way outnumbered. In this case the CEO was way outnumbered, and they spoke, and they were very organized, but they couldn't get it through his head. He was saying for example on the question of salaries, “Well, resorting to the market, we're paying above the market rate, you know, God bless the market, it tells everybody what's right”. And they're saying, “Yeah, but we can't feed our families”. And they couldn't understand that he couldn't understand that the point of working is to feed your family. And it was like this standoff. They kept coming back to it and he sort of struggled in a really inadequate way to hear them. So that's one thing they said.

The other thing that they say that I love is a kind of rhetoric if you will or a kind of analysis which is that “we create the wealth, why are we in misery?” And they say in misery rather than in poverty, because they assume everybody's poor, but they're worse than poor, they're in misery. And you know it's like a quick analysis, an economic analysis, like “you're nothing without us”.

HH: One thing to bear in mind is that doing right by your children or giving your children a better life is not just on a material level. I mean when they talk about that, they are clear that one of the reasons they do this is because their children need to see that example. For instance, at that meeting that Judith was at they had their kids there with them. I mean their kids are observing what's going on with their parents, and that's pretty common I suppose due to the more family centered nature of any society except the US. But it's also...

JR: Lack of child care.

HH: Yes, lack of child care, but it's also just the way the children learn and observe and imbibe things that’s important, and the parents are aware they're doing that. I don't think that's unconscious on their part.

JR: And I see, following what's going on with them over a period of time, that there are some examples, among the women, mother-daughter examples, where the mother will be an activist, maybe in land issues for the South in Mexico, and the daughter will then be an activist in the factories. And there's this reference all the time not just about a very fierce commitment to justice but also having been taught. So there are traditions.

I think of what we see as important human stories that tell us about a reality that we're badly, sorely missing here in the United States. Now in the United States, in our isolation here, our isolation from understanding, we're beginning to see very abundantly the immigration problem, and we look at the problem as it occurs only when people get to this side of the border and what's missing always from national debates or even local conversations is everything in back of those people.

They're the same people that are in the maquiladoras within Mexico. Tons of them are migrants. Reynosa in Tamaulipas has so many migrants from Veracruz, they actually call it Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Veracruz; the populations of these cities over the past ten years have doubled. In Reynosa two-thirds of the people were born somewhere else. And so the border is just immigration one step earlier. And the maquiladoras are too. People come to the border. They might learn to advocate for their rights. They frequently get fired for speaking up. Some of them then get blacklisted. They come to the United States, but they don't like it here. They go back when maybe things have cooled off.

There was an explosion in 2000 when Alcoa fired a whole bunch of people, and they did all kinds of things, tried all kinds of strategies for survival. Some went to the United States, some went South again to where they had families. Some of them just sort of hung on and were able to start their own businesses. When the shit hits the fan, then you see what people do. That's part of the total picture of human churning, you know, where to go for a job and stay alive.

GM: Let me come back to that in a minute. First I want to return to Howard's comment that one of the things that people want to see is that they are going somewhere. What do you mean by that? What do people mean by going somewhere?

HH: Well, they want the sense that ultimately, however long it takes, and they have a long view of it, I mean they talk in terms of a generation or two, but they want to think that life and the conditions of life, the material conditions of life and the social conditions of life, how they are treated as human beings, will have improved significantly by the time their children are their age. And I think they do that in a way that has taught me how to parse the difference between the idea of hope and faith on the one hand and just blind optimism on the other.

They're quite realistic. And in fact things have gotten worse in the past ten or fifteen years. This whole area has participated in the global race to the bottom that we all hear about, and they know that, and they can feel that. But when you talk to people they have this sense that they know what the next thing to be done is. They're not going to give up just because things look very discouraging and maybe even harder. You know they do get discouraged, but they never give up.

That said, you have people coming in and out of being more involved with the CFO, so that over a period of years when we go down there is a slightly shifting cast of characters that you will run into and talk to, although there is a core of people. As a good example of that, there was a very eloquent and powerful, mentally and otherwise, individual, who we had known for a number of years and then he kind of dropped out for a while, but just this last period he showed up again, in fact we were over at his house and talked to him. Well, he had decided things had been getting difficult and so he had taken off and lived in the United States for a couple of years, and he had just gotten back, and he was ready to help the CFO again.

Resistance and New Calls for Research

GM: Let me follow up on that and come back to Judith in a second, but one of the things you talked about is they always try to keep an awareness of what the next thing to do is. And I guess you mean in a general sense always looking for the next thing, but I'm wondering specifically since you just made a trip, what are you hearing about the next thing?

HH: Well, there is a lot of discussion between people, a lot of analysis. The next thing in a general sense I think is that people are becoming aware that right now the squeeze is always on from the employers. And there has always been a lot of harassment on jobs, but the form the squeeze is taking right now is psychological harassment. It's taking the form of companies trying to get out of some of the legal obligations to people when they have to lay them off or transfer them. Maybe they will transfer them, but they will make them lose all their seniority, or something like that. So the workers are starting to see tricks where the employers are just trying to break peoples’ will so that maybe they'll get exasperated and quit. You see that. So right now a lot of the discussion focuses on that and focuses on things like how we can do some economic analysis here.

I mean this was kind of a new thing to me, I hadn't heard this before, but we always ask them at some point if there is something we can do to help, and they said, “Well we're working for some of these North American and Japanese and European companies and they give us these stories about how things are really hard for them and how they are going to go to China any day just to keep us off balance.”

So right now there is a period where they are looking to figure out how to do some economic analysis. So they're saying, “Okay Delphi is supposedly in bankruptcy, but can we get some more information? We want to know what that means legally in the US. How does that play out in the United States for workers there when a company goes bankrupt like Delphi? What kinds of tricks get played? And economically speaking, realistically, where are they? Is this going to be just a reorganization or are they going to fold? What should we be doing on this end?” They've got some very specific pieces of information they want so that they can do an analysis and figure out what buttons to push and what buttons not to push.

JR: The other thing that the CFO does, they work on this logic that companies can't run around the world looking for lower cost labor if international labor is talking to each other and putting up stops in various places, so for years the CFO has worked with US unions and other places, particularly since Alcoa operates so globally. In the United States, Alcoa is represented by the steel workers and the CFO has a relationship with the steel workers and goes to their international meetings. And this year Julia Quinones, their national coordinator, went to the Alcoa shareholders meeting in April, and she's been there before, but this year after the CEO gave his presentation, the order of speakers was the steel workers president, then Julia, then it was a Brazilian, but anyhow, the US steel worker said a lot of platitudes.

And Julia is very focused and she spoke briefly and made points like a lawyer, but she said, “Wow I'm really surprised to hear that Alcoa had a perfect year. Your growth in net profits, and all that, because we hear the opposite stories at the border in Acuña, in Piedras Negras, and therefore why, Alain Belda, does Alcoa refuse to allow a union in their Ciudad Acuña factories?” And she sort of had him there in front of the shareholders and the board of directors. He wriggled out of it. He said something like, “I'm not against the unions”.

And I have to say everybody knows that unions aren't the solution to all the problems. They say in Ciudad Acuña a series of mayors has basically made a deal with the unions, stay out, we'll pay you off, and we have this union free climate to offer investors, and everybody will be happy. So that's been an opening for democratic grassroots organizing. They call it a workers committee, or they call it all kinds of things. So the CEO said, “We're not against unions, I myself (he's from Brazil) worked in a union for years”. And so he dismissed it in that way.

And the woman who was translating for Julia is actually an Alcoa employee in San Antonio; these relationships form very interesting networks. And the translator said, speaking for herself, “I think Julia is talking about the fact that what you're saying and what local management says often contradict each other flat out.” Of course, this is their good cop, bad cop routine, and that's what happens, I don't know what it gains for anybody. But it was a beautiful confrontation where it was possible to make points. I think it goes along with your story. They work from the grassroots level but they also pressure the top and they study the top and they are playing it both ways. And that's been a strategy, pressure at both levels, and it has been pretty consistent over the years, and effective.

Like the Nazis: A New Psychological Regime

HH: For instance on our last trip a couple of weeks ago, we came upon a moment where some new tactics have been employed on the other side, and we got to see people talking about it and mulling it over, “Gee, this is going on and this is why they are doing it”, and having a discussion about what to do. These tactics are a new level in the psychological game, to get people used to the idea that they are kind of owned and really don't have any worth apart from the company. I heard people say things like, “When you go through that factory door your rights end, the company's rights begin”. I hear them say that. Or, “You're not really a wage earner, you're simply a slave for ten hours a day”.

Two examples of those kinds of tactics. One is they would have a whole section of people in a factory that for instance manufactures seat covers or seat belts. And they would do a whole day's worth of work, you know, sew everything. And the next day when they came back their job was to un-sew it all. Just to make the point that “okay, we don't need you. We just got you around because we like having you around, and that's all”.

Another worker, and I think I heard more than one example of this while I was down there, he said he'd been insisting on some rights that he had under the Mexican Federal Labor Law, which we should probably discuss at some point too. And the management had been telling him no, so he kind of dug in his heels and wasn't backing down, so he'd show up to work for his shift and he'd be there for a full day and get paid, but his job was that they would take him to a small room, maybe a six by ten foot room and lock him in. And that's what he did. And they'd only let him out on breaks and at the end of his shift.

JR: These kinds of stories are very bizarre. These are management techniques that someone compared to Hitler.

HH: One of the workers said this rivals what the Nazis were doing. And then traditionally, since the workforce is largely female, there is a lot of sexual harassment, the kind you can imagine. And that's also a form of control. Women at some point for instance were encouraged in humiliating ways, forced to prove that they weren't pregnant, you know, things like that.

JR: By showing they were bleeding.

HH: Or undergo very invasive examinations by male doctors.

JR: They are very distasteful management techniques. And you have to call them that because they are used very methodically. This business with the sanitary napkins is outrageous, and people feel the attack on their dignity, the women do. And the men do too.

HH: Or the whole thing about going to the bathroom. In a lot of plants for instance it's a big deal. You're only allowed a certain number of bathroom breaks a day, and if you want to go, you have to ask your manager for a big kind of medallion or a plaque that you hang around your neck and I think the color or number on it tells whether you are going to do number one or number two. Since a lot of the workers are young women who are very embarrassed about this, a lot of them just don't go.

JR: And then there are kidney problems. I mean it just compounds itself.

HH: So there are these techniques for kind of keeping people in line psychologically and emotionally. And I think they had had some responses over the years and some plants had taken care of some of these. When we got down there they were in the process of discussing some of these new tactics, what they were going to do about that, or how they felt about that, or what they thought the management thinking was, in terms of what the tactics were supposed to accomplish.

In Back of the Immigration

GM: You mentioned the Mexican Labor Law, we'll come back to that in a second. First, I wanted to ask Judith about everything in back of the immigration. What kinds of stories are people telling about where they are coming from?

JR: Well actually some of those stories are being told in Austin, you know, the people who cross three or four times and pay a coyote to come, and the stories are incredible.

GM: But you are looking at a population that has already been pushed to the border.

JR: Right. Some of them may be about to cross. Some of them may not. And I'll tell you, some of them have, like Doña Angela in Ciudad Acuña who came to the border about eight years ago with a whole bunch of children, some of them old enough to work, and little kids. They came from Veracruz. And they had no relatives in Acuña, and they more or less squatted. And somebody said, “We have a piece of land and you can live on it. It's got no electricity, and it's got no water, but it's land and you can live on it”. So they built a house there, it had an earth floor, and it was made out of wood pallets and a couple of pieces of corrugated steel and cardboard and whatever they could have. And so they were able to live somewhere.

So they became rooted in Acuña, and some of the children grew up to have children themselves, and there were big life changes in a short time, eight years. But they go back to Veracruz, and they say things like, at least in Veracruz if you're eating a chicken, you know where the chicken came from, because you saw it running around a little while ago, and you killed it. Her son, whose girlfriend had a baby, built a cement block house, which is a much more substantial place to live, with a concrete floor, so Angela lives in that. But the son, the girlfriend, and the baby moved back to Veracruz where they broke up.

So people don't know where to live or where they want to live. They can make money at the border, but it's very expensive to live there, so it's not clear that it's an improvement. They acknowledge that at the border you can make money and get an education, which apparently you can’t back home. And so these are the values of the people, the education is really important, because of their future orientations. One story they're telling is that they are disoriented and alienated by the borders, and it comes out in little ways. But again, in that same family, one of the women said about Veracruz, well you can get used to anything but hunger. And that's why they come.

So they're really in a kind of no-man's land. At least that family, and that family has been the most articulate about it. And there’s this other thing with new recruits to the border, who are often outraged because companies will go down to recruit workers, or they did a few years ago, and they make all kinds of promises in terms of jobs, they bring people to the border on the bus, let's say to Piedras Negras or to Ciudad Acuña where I heard about it. And then they'll just drop them off in the town square with nothing; no place to live, no job. And they have immediately created a desperate workforce right there, and then anybody who wants to offer them a job at ridiculous wages, it's pretty much done. I don't know anybody who has actually come to the border under those circumstances, but people talk about that. And they talk about being alienated, just sort of disoriented. Just to walk into a maquiladora and to be subject to the kind of pressure there of the assembly line. The lack of training, the lack of safety, and the pressure on production. It freaks people out.

Mexican Labor Law Great on Paper

GM: Is this a good time to talk about Mexican labor laws?

HH: Oh yeah, and Judith can probably enlighten better than I can. The reason I thought it might be a good thing to bring up is because contrary to what people might assume just from looking at the situation, Mexican labor law on paper is some of the most progressive labor law in the world, certainly more progressive than what we have in the US. In the Mexican Constitution, they are guaranteed a living wage. I mean all kinds of things that we'd be hard pressed to fathom. The problem is as I guess Hamlet said, it's more observed in the breach than in the practice. Obviously, it gets winked at, or more, it just gets completely ignored. And part of what employers have always relied on is what they perceive as the workers ignorance.

So one of the main things we see, one of the main educational things that the CFO does is they get a bunch of copies of this thing, I mean it's like a telephone book, okay? And they go around and have meetings with people. Because they can't organize very openly, you know they don't need to draw attention to themselves or get workers in trouble, they kind of go door to door, knocking on doors in workers neighborhoods and saying, “Hey, does anybody here work in a maquiladora, and want to talk about things that have been happening here?” And when people do, and they get enough people together, they have meetings. And they have these study sessions, where people go through and they focus on let's say time off. Okay, how about time off? And they look. And they learn the article and the paragraph and all that. And we hear a lot of anecdotes when we are down there about somebody saying, “Gee, you know, I went to my boss, and he said I couldn't have my overtime pay or something like that and I said ‘I'm sorry but article such and such’, and he was like, ‘oh, okay’”. So that's one of the tools in their set, teaching people that awareness, what they have going for them legally and learning how to advocate for themselves. Teaching each other and figuring out the best way to do it.

JR: It's something that other Latin American countries don't have. Labor in other Latin American countries doesn’t have this big fat book of labor laws that are mostly for their protection; a certain amount of responsibilities, but definitely many, many rights. And so it's leverage points. First of all it's a wonderful empowerment to think I have rights and the other guy is violating them, but it's on paper, and it's the law of the land, and that must hold some water somewhere. And they do initiate court cases, but they also settle questions very quickly in the moment on the factory floor, and it can have a kind of unsettling effect on the boss to know that the worker knows her rights. So it's really important for lots of groups in Mexico, not just the CFO, to do that. And the same strategy is used in the United States among immigrants. You're an immigrant, but you've got rights.

HH: Just to add a concrete example, while we were there, over the weekend, I guess it was the 19th, 20th, and 21st of May, and we were told that the following Wednesday a delegation from the International Labor Organization would be coming there to talk to people because of issues they had been able to raise, and complaints and suits that they had brought forth. So they were looking forward to that. I haven't heard how that went.

Going South for Answers

GM: Well, there are a lot of ways to go here, and I would like to talk further, but let me bring this session to a conclusion by talking about when you're planning to go next time and what people can expect if they joined you.

JR: We go four times a year, and the next trip is October 13th, 14th, and 15th. We don't go when it's real hot. It gets too hot over the summer, we don't go. We take small delegations, and that's intentional, there are lots of benefits in that. It also reflects the time constraints on both our organizations. We're all volunteers. They're all volunteers. They get hundreds of requests from researchers, all kinds of people, so we have a modest program. We keep it that way. But this one in October is likely to be filled up by lawyers. The National Lawyers Guild is having their annual meeting in Austin around that time, and they're booking seats. And then a bunch of law students from Northern Illinois University. We work closely with their professor, and they'll be coming. But we have a regular schedule. After that it will be January, March, May, October, sort of around an academic calendar.

And what people can expect is to go places and make connections with people that we can't make in any other way. And I think that's a big statement: you can't do it in any other way. In doing that you are benefiting from our ongoing relationship with people and with the workers there. We go to three or four cities and have relationships with people in all those cities. And time and again delegates say, when they come back and talk about what really impressed them, it was being able to hear people speak about their own lives, their individual stories, and being able to visit them in their homes and really getting that very close sense of how people live, which is pretty amazing.

There's a whole bunch of borders crossed there, and a whole lot of hospitality offered, and a lot of eagerness to share and to be heard. Nobody listens to them, so they really love to be listened to. Some of them don't know what to make of us, but the more experienced ones do. So there are certain kinds of formal presentations that they will do. There will be a tour of the outside of the maquiladoras. We never go in. It's harder and harder to get in. But either way, you get a public relations tour and we've never wanted to do that. We have this position that if you want to know what's going on inside the factories, ask the workers. And don't ask them while they're in the factories, because they won't be able to tell you then. There's somebody breathing down their neck.

HH: They'll perform skits for you if you want. They'll do role playing and the whole thing.

GM: How would you sum up just briefly what you learned on the last trip?

HH: What I learned on the last trip? I think it was my fourth trip with this group, and what I learned was not something I would necessarily verbalize. It was more, I got closer to a feeling, you know, person-to-person things. In terms of what I know cognitively there are a lot of things that got reinforced. Here's one cognitive thing. I learned that maybe there is some work to be done here, some collaborative work in terms of helping people do research. But in terms of a deeper level, I got the feeling for the emotional importance of family, which I guess one always knows about, but how this is tied in for people. All of this is tied into that in a way that I maybe haven't felt as strongly before. I got more of that part this time.

GM: Judith, last word?

JR: I don't know what to say. It's been a very important thing for me, and I did my dissertation on it. And I spent a long, long time in the Northeast before I came down here, and I didn't even know where Texas was. And I feel like I got the map from triple-A and came here and it's really been the most important thing in my life to learn about that border. I think it's historically extremely important to all of us, and we don't know about it.

Greg Moses is editor of online projects, the Texas Civil Rights Review and Peacefile, and he is author of Revolution of Consicence: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. He can be reached at gmosesx@prodigy.net