U. S. National Security Threatened By Mexican Drug Cartels ... AP Photo/El Debate de Culiacn-Carla Sajaropulos A dozen bound and tortured bodies were discovered dumped on the side of a remote highway in Michoacán. Police found the latest victims of the ongoing battle between rival drug traffickers on Monday...
Chance: That tune, they been playin’ it all day. What is it?
Dude: Oh, it’s some mexican piece. I heard it farther south....
Colorado: Well, they call it “The Deguello,” the cutthroat song. The mexicans played it for those Texas boys when they had them bottled up in the Alamo. Played it day and night ‘til it was all over. Now do you know what he means by it?
Chance: No quarter, no mercy for the loser.
—Jules Furthman (1888–1960)
I have to change how people view themselves in the world. I have to get people to believe they can in fact make a difference.... We view ourselves ... as people trained to develop people. Issues are only tools. Think about the guy who works in a factory. He’s on the assembly line. He’s a nobody. He doesn’t do the kind of work that’s ever gonna get him recognition. Take that same person and he’s a key leader in the parish or in a union. Suddenly that same man, who from Monday to Friday stands on the assembly line at General Motors and is a nobody, is somebody over here. People look to him. He makes a difference and he knows it. He counts.
—Mary Gonzales, Mexican American neighborhood organizer. As quoted in The Great Divide, book 1, section 2, by Studs Terkel (1988)
Our party to the diplomatic corps was all that could be desired.... The exclusion of wine from the list of refreshments has turned out exceedingly well. There is a good deal of dissipation here. At the receptions of the British Minister, and at that of the mexican Minister, disgraceful things were done by young men made reckless by too much wine. Hence the necessity for our course is obvious, and is commended in unexpected quarters. Many of the foreign gentlemen speak of it with approval. We shall stick to it.
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)