Perspective: Border Opinions Differ

Every few weeks I receive the following picture via e-mail. Every time it arrives, I think "hate speech" and move on.


The "Yours / Not Yours" image appears to be a screen capture from Google Maps with some very rudimentary photo editing.

It is usually accompanied by some inflammatory writing.

As I write this, I sit about 45 miles from "Yours." I lived here, in Las Cruces, N.M., for 5 years. As I've bored readers here many times, I edited the NMSU student newspaper for two years, and I worked at the daily newspaper for more than a year.

Perhaps for this reason, I just don't understand the vitriol. The line between "Yours" and "Not Yours" is simply arbitrary, and to treat it as anything more is foolish to me.

Of all the problems in our country, this just does not rank for me. I've walked the streets of Ciudad Juárez with camera in hand. I've walked down the streets that the tourists do not walk down. I have seen the poverty and despair first-hand. Wanting to leave that for the chance to break one's back picking chiles in Doña Ana County just does not strike me as a crime against humanity.

Yet this is the issue for many Americans. Hence the semi-regular arrival of the photograph above.

Last week, however, I saw the image below courtesy of my friend and fellow NMSU alum Joy Victory. Joy lives in Mexico City and posted the following photograph of an Absolut Vodka billboard on her excellent blog this week.


Photo courtesy of Joy Victory, El Blog de Joy.

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According to Joy, "This billboard sits above the corner of Nuevo Leon and Sonora, a busy intersection in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City."

The billboard, quite clearly, is part of Absolut's In an Absolut World campaign.

According to Absolut's Web site, "The starting point of the advertising campaign was simple ‘what if everything in the world was approached with the ideal in which we approach ABSOLUT vodka?,’ " according to Karl-Johan Bogefors, Global PR Manager, ABSOLUT Vodka.

Therefore, one is to infer that Absolut interprets the map on the billboard as the "ideal" cartography from the Mexican point of view.

What a stark contrast to the image above.

Clearly, the economics of Mexico City are far different from border towns. The money of the United States acts like a vacuum to the worst elements of a poorer nation (and those south of it).

As far as I can tell from this Web site, the map on the billboard includes:

• Present day Mexico
• Republic of Texas (1836-1845), which was apparently claimed by the U.S. from 1845-1848.
• Mexican Cession (1848)
• Gadsden Purchase (1853)

At present, I'm sitting about 8 miles from the border of the Gadsden Purchase. A little more than 150 years ago, I'd be on the virtual Mexican border.

This map shows a series of somewhat arbitrary political and military decisions. Twenty miles or so south of here is the town of Anthony (New Mexico and Texas). It's a poor town by U.S. standards. But the quality of life there is vastly different than Juárez, another 25 miles or so to the south.

My point is simply that many of the people living in Anthony are surely descendants of those people who lived in that area 155 years ago. They are American citizens because the border crossed them, not the other way around.

Those ancestors likely played no role in the Gadsden Purchase. I doubt they voted or were polled. Instead, they got lucky.

And if the history of the matter really is that arbitrary, it is difficult for me to muster any passion for the position that looks at the Rio Grande river as if some demarcation of truth where on one side you are entitled to a better education and a much longer lifespan. On the other side of the line, poverty and despair. That's "yours."

And I am supposed to believe this is "not yours."

I'm sorry. I just don't.

Health Care on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Decisions have never come easy for me. I have trouble letting go of the road not taken.

There was, however, one decision that was amazingly easy for me.

When I started college, it was my goal to become a physician. I was -- and am -- fascinated with human physiology and the brain. When you're a pre-med student, they urge you not to focus upon a specialty before you get to medical school, but I was interested in the brain. I was thinking psychiatry, but I'm betting that I would have ended up in neurology.

All was going well. I was checking things off the pre-med checksheet.

Until one day my wife was sick. A routine cold, I think. Perhaps a flu. We went to see her primary care physician.

As she was called back to see the physician, I sat there for a moment looking around the room. There were people of all shapes and sizes -- and degrees of cleanliness. They coughed, sneezed, and generally were sick.

And that it hit me.

I DON'T LIKE BEING AROUND SICK PEOPLE!

My would-be career in medicine died that moment. And I have never looked back.

Yet sometimes I am fascinated by how the turns of life bring us back again to where we once were.

Sometime about three years after that fateful day in the waiting room, I was hired to cover education and health care for the Las Cruces Sun-News. It was now my job to explain medicine although I had no formal training in it.

I liked this job. I care about sick people. I care about making it better. I just don't want to actually touch the sick people (my friends and family are laughing as they read this).

A promotion and then a bigger circulation paper took me away from that job.

Six years or so later, I found myself in Annie Lang's lab at Indiana University studying cognitive science and performing funded research on health communication.

That scratched my brain itch.

Now a few years later I'm sitting in West Texas increasingly thinking about health communication. Texas Tech is aggressively seeking full funding for a new 4-year medical school in El Paso, which borders Mexico.

And the more that I think about it, the more that I realize how much I care about border health. Perhaps it's the old health care reporter in me.

In the TTU Health Sciences Center's institutional goals, they say, "we must position our new four-year medical school in El Paso as the national leader in border health. No other medical school in the nation is as well-positioned or ideally suited to impact border health, which is quickly becoming a health disparity issue with enormous national implication."

I left medicine behind in that waiting room more than a decade ago. Somehow, however, medicine keeps finding me.