Maping the Migrant Trails on the Arizona Border

Good article: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Currents/Content?oid=oid:101396

Ed McCullough retired as a geosciences professor at the University of Arizona 10 years ago, and he stepped down as dean of science way back in 1992. But retirement hardly keeps him out of the field.

On a blazing morning at the end of August, he's bouncing north along Old Ruggles Road just west of Arivaca, a little town of ranchers and hippies some 10 miles north of the Mexican border. The dirt road might as well be called Old Rutted--it's that rough--but McCullough doesn't seem to mind. At 75, the snowy-haired scientist still loves driving his giant 4x4 into the wilderness--the "tulies," as he calls them--and getting out to hike through the spiny desert.

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Plenty of scholars predicted the onslaught of these largely rural migrants from Mexico before NAFTA was enacted back in 1994, McCullough says. With corn flowing freely from the United States into Mexico, researchers calculated that hundreds of thousands of farm workers would lose their livelihood, and the means of supporting their families. And that's just what happened. The displaced workers fled in torrents, to take up new American lives as crop pickers, meat packers, construction workers, nannies and housekeepers.

"Papers were written, predictions were made that people would come to the U.S.," says McCullough, who visited the southern state of Chiapas last year to see firsthand the villages emptied of working adults. "The whole thing was just ignored."

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<this touched me>

And he's gotten kindness in return from travelers. One group of robust young people in their 20s, alarmed to find this white-haired grandfather miles from nowhere, offered him their own precious water.

Lots more: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Currents/Content?oid=oid:101396

:blush: and I see my spelling error that is now too late to edit