By Bill Bigelow

Rethinking Schools has just published The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration by Rethinking Schools editor Bill Bigelow. The book is based on curricula and teaching that have grown out of a series of educator trips to the U.S.-Mexico border sponsored by Rethinking Schools and the human rights organization Global Exchange. In this issue, we publish some excerpts from the book. Along with all Rethinking Schools publications, The Line Between Us may be purchased at our website, www.rethinkingschools.org, by calling 800-669-4192, or by writing us at 1001 E. Keefe Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53212. See ad, p. 62. — the editors

On a gray February afternoon, I stood on U.S. soil next to the "fence" of enormous concrete pillars dividing the United States and Mexico. About a hundred yards away, a second fence, this one of corrugated iron, kept Mexicans on "their" side of the border; giant stadium lights towered over the dusty no-man's land between. Just beyond, cars raced along a Tijuana highway.

Without these barriers it would be impossible to determine, simply from the landscape, where the United States ends and Mexico begins. There is nothing natural about this border.

I was traveling with 16 teachers on a four-day tour, a collaboration between Rethinking Schools and the San Francisco-based human rights organization Global Exchange. Our mission was to explore life at the border and learn how globalization plays out in this corner of the world — and to bring our insights back to our students. We were based in downtown Tijuana and took day trips to working-class ejidos (collectively owned communities), migrant shelters, a squatter neighborhood, maquiladoras (foreign-owned assembly plants), and the toxic site of a former battery recycling plant abandoned by its U.S. owners. We talked with labor, environmental, and women's organizers, as well as factory managers and U.S. Border Patrol agents. Our Tijuana-based hosts were Mexican labor activist Jaime Cota and artist-activist Carmela Castrejón, two graying but feisty, still-hopeful veterans of countless campaigns for social justice.

Mexico was to be the great success story of globalization, the showcase for the benefits of free trade, foreign investment, and development. President Bill Clinton promised in a 1993 speech that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would "provide an impetus for freedom and democracy in Latin America." He predicted that by embracing globalization, Mexico would "generate more jobs," and Mexicans "will have higher incomes, and they will buy more American products."