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I Know Where the Mexicans Are
by James Glaser June 20, 2007 This past weekend I drove 550 miles north by the interstate highway system to Charlotte, North Carolina for the Conference of the Lambs, which I will write about in Friday's Weekend Column. I drove back to Tallahassee, about 900 miles using the State Highways, and crossing Georgia in a diagonal from the northeast to the southwest. I think a lot, maybe most of the illegal aliens from Mexico have set up house keeping in rural Georgia. Like in the rest of America, rural Georgia has seen hard times the last fifty years. Wal-Mart has destroyed many once vibrant downtown shopping districts. In Georgia many of those shopping districts were in a town square, many of them had been there since the Civil War. Now you drive around, and all you can say is "Wow, are those cool buildings or what?" The buildings are cool, and nobody will ever be able to afford to build like that again. Brick and marble, huge glass display windows, fancy lighting, and lots of decorative cast iron make these town squares worth walking around. Most of the stores are gone though, and those still there are probably in business because the building has been paid off for a couple of generations, making overhead manageable. Signage will tell you a lot about how things are going. Old signs are not redone, and many new business signs are painted by those with no experience with letters and brush. One new business that is thriving throughout rural Georgia, is the Mexican Restaurant. Some signs are in English, trying to attract tourists passing by, but many more are written in Spanish, because the Spanish population is large enough to keep these places in business, and many of them are growing. Many towns now have Fast Food, Mexican, and Chinese Buffets to choose from. It seems that all the local café's are now a thing of the past. While sitting in a mall waiting for Wanda to finish up at a dress store, I was amazed at how many people were speaking Spanish. I didn't do any sort of a count, but believe me, they were not uncommon. The same can be said for all of rural Georgia, where I saw low-rider cars looking all polished cruising around town, with the drivers looking like Sal Mineo, in a 1960's street-rod movie. They say we now have somewhere between twelve and twenty million illegal aliens living in our country, and most of them came from Mexico. After the big cities filled up, it was only a matter of time until they had to spread out to the rural areas. Well, they have sure made their presence known in Georgia, and that would be all of Georgia. |
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