Taking Care Of Business, Part II

Calif. School Targets Mexican Students

CALEXICO, Calif. (AP) - "Children are more likely to shield their faces than to smile when Daniel Santillan points his camera.

Santillan's photos aren't for any picture album or yearbook—they help prove that Mexican youngsters are illegally attending public schools in this California border community.

With too many students and too few classrooms, Calexico school officials took the unusual step of hiring someone to photograph children and document the offenders. Santillan snaps pictures at the city's downtown border crossing and shares the images with school principals, who use them as evidence to kick out those living in Mexico.

Since he started the job two years ago, the number of students in the Calexico school system has fallen 5 percent, from 9,600 to 9,100, while the city's population grew about 3 percent.

"The community asked us to do this, and we responded," school board President Enrique Alvarado said. "Once it starts to affect you personally, when your daughter gets bumped to another school, then our residents start complaining."

Every day along the 1,952-mile border, children from Mexico cross into the United States and attend public schools. No one keeps statistics on how many.

The 62-year-old Santillan (pronounced sahn-tee-YAHN) was hired in He is an unlikely enforcer. Posters of Cesar Chavez and Che Guevara adorn the walls of his ranch-style home. The Vietnam War veteran and labor activist is an outspoken advocate of amnesty for illegal immigrants and fills water jugs in the desert for Mexicans who trek across the border illegally."

But of course the Yellowstream Media now includes pronunciation guides...NOT in ENGLISH, mind you, but in Spanish. Chances are if you're of Greek, Polish, Italian, Irish, Scottish, Hungarian...you name it...ancestry, somewhere sometime, someone has mis-pronounced your family name. We give that up when we become Americans because America has its own standards of pronunciation. I've never once heard a non-Italian pronounce "pizza" the Italian way, let alone something as difficult as "spaghetti", but who in their right mind cares? We are Americans.

BUT...

Let someone pronounce a spanish word in anything but the way spaniards pronounce it and life as we know it comes to a standstill.

Round them up. I don't give a good damn how long it takes. The ones who remain and go through the legal wringer, then welcome them as Americans. But never, ever, tell me to learn how to talk anything but English.