Has your family crossed borders?
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In 2010 Adriana Carillo, a member of the Mexican sen-
ate, derided President Barack Obama’s plans to
strengthen the 700-mile fence between the United
States and Mexico. She explained that Spanish-speaking
peoples, many of them of Mexican descent, constituted a
third of the population of New Mexico, California, Texas,
and Arizona. No fence, she declared, should separate the
southwestern United States and Mexico, a region bound
by economic and cultural ties. On the other side of the
fence—literally and rhetorically—U.S. Senator Lamar
Smith of San Antonio, Texas, complained that Obama
was not doing enough to stem the flood of illegal immi-
grants into the United States.
As the debate raged, few noted that the United States
had built the fence to prevent Mexicans from passing into
lands that had once belonged to Mexico. In 1821, when