Don't ignore truth about U.S., Mexico

Friday, August 25, 2006 By WILLIAM McKENZIE DALLAS MORNING NEWS CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — If you only listened to the right-wingers in Congress and their angry followers at recent immigration hearings, you'd swear Mexico and the United States were as far apart as Israel and the Palestinians. Rants about thundering hordes crossing the Rio Grande portray Mexico as a menace, not a neighbor. But dig deeper, and you find relationships that get closer to the truth. Dwight Eisenhower liked to say Americans and Russians could find a way to live in peace if their governments would just get out of the way. That's happening in Juarez, where Mexicans and Americans work side by side in and around a border town of 1.2 million people. Juarez has spread farther into the desert, where rumor has it the city wants to locate its next million people. The desert looks as godforsaken as you would imagine — sand as far as the eye can see, interrupted only by the occasional scraggly tree, cardboard lean-to or unpaved road. But that's not where the story ends. You're likely to bump into some surprises when you drive into the colonias that ring the city. I was caught off guard when I rode around the bend of one bumpy road and came upon a two-story yellow-and-blue dormitory, conference center and cocina. Rich Mackey, who runs a border ministry in Juarez, says a wealthy Iowan donated the campus to help families with shelter and services. When we walked in, college students from Missouri were hanging out, part of a Rotary Club group that had come to build houses. A mile more of bumpy road later, another surprise: Ten green school buildings, a large playground and a new brick administration building. The story behind the campus captures the binational work that goes on across the border. Mackey, local pastors and a group of Presbyterian churches started working four years ago to rehab the buildings. They painted them, did carpentry and got them into working shape. The story goes even deeper because the work drew Juarez authorities' interest. Soon, education officials in Chihuahua's state government started paying attention. Before long, local pastors met with Chihuahua's governor. The next thing you know, the state put its own money into the property. Partners The point is that churches and nonprofits are working as partners with Mexican communities. While politicians quarrel over high-minded policy matters, people from both nations form the kind of cultural connections that knit neighborhoods together. Each side benefits from the exchange. The Rev. Frank Diaz, who works in Dallas with the First Presbyterian Church and El Divino Salvador, sums it up this way: The church groups work on the buildings; the Mexicans supply the teachers. This kind of thing happens across Mexico each year. Methodists, Episcopalians and other denominations send teams to work with Mexican counterparts. President Bush talks about "faith-based activity" at home, but it's alive and well across the border, too. As it takes root, deeper personal bonds engulf people on both sides of the river. Matt Morton of Rockwall, Texas, the son of one of my many editors, wrote in the most recent Harvard Summer Review about the unexpected camaraderie he and a buddy struck up with a young Mexican boy on a church trip to Juarez. The threesome sweated together building a house for the boy's family, played soccer in the streets and laughed together as the young Mexican — in that odd, kid-like way — saluted his buddies each day with a middle finger raised in the air. Friends part By week's end, when the church van started back to Texas, the boy raced down the street, jumped on the back bumper and waved farewell to his American friends — all five fingers pointed upward. This experience plays itself out across both countries every year. As the drama unfolds, it breathes life into two nations' relationship. It's hard to see that, when all you have are the verbal thrusts of angry politicians. But it's here, when you get below the surface. Mexico and the U.S. share a cultural fabric that the politicians may want to consider. It's going to outlast them and any debate over immigration. William McKenzie is an editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.