+ + + Sign of the Crossing + + +

Dear Jeanne, I’m searching for my notes about Albuquerque, not to argue about the Latino vote there, but to make a point about our disagreement.  After your remarks about the vote there, I went to get all the data I could (not much), and I was convinced that the data available was inconclusive.  It did offer soft support for your conclusion, in the sense that I could follow your argument about the data; but there were significant holes, and I thought one could fit the data into a nearly opposite conclusion.  (The Latinos did not carry the day for life: true.  Also true: the vote became a partisan vote, and pro-lifers failed abysmally to reach across party lines: that was the most obvious lesson from the polls.)  I am disinclined to get near the same kind of fight about interpreting statistics about immigration and abortion in the way you propose.  I think that the data available shows that the abortion rate has been climbing rapidly all over Latin America...

I’ve been thinking about a friend's assertion that Latino culture is a threat to American (norteamericano) culture. I guess that immigration seems okay to me – emotionally – in part because of some specific accidental details in my history.  The first time I noticed an “inter-racial” marriage (cripes – there’s only one race – but that was what we called marriages between people of different ethnic backgrounds) was in high school.  I had a friend whose mother was Austrian, and whose father was Chinese.  Paula: she was lively, quick-witted, intelligent, funny, friendly, and head-spinningly gorgeous.  When someone called it to my attention that she was part-European, part-Asian, I thought we should establish an exchange program to make that happen a lot more.  When I was teaching at Rockville HS, there was a student who was very much like Paula.  This beautiful girl, Annie, never had a class with me, but she was in the National Honor Society, which I advised...