Unique among immigrant groups:

...Prieto himself refused to perform abortions, but he quickly came to see "how prevalent and intractable are the marital problems in a poor community...

...But this is surely unfair...

...many towns register over 50 percent at or near poverty...

...The demise of the umbrella organizations that these union leaders helped to create (the prewar Spanish-Speaking Congress and the postwar Asociacion National Mexico-Americana) did not come about because their goals were insufficiently "revolutionary" but because of red-baiting...

...All three illustrate the importance for Mexican-Americans of leaving the homeland behind, and the difficulty, to return to our earlier theme, of establishing contacts of a political nature between Mexico and her sons and daughters in this country...

...His father, an aide to revolutionary leader Alvaro Obregon, ran afoul of Obregon in the 1920s and fled to the United States, where he and his family endured the rigors of life as migrants in the Southwest...

...Mexican-Americans had their own problems and would not jeopardize their position by identifying too closely with the problems of the homeland...

...To add insult to injury, the goods produced in the area, from the oil and shrimp of its coastal waters to the citrus fruits of valley orchards to the products of the maquiladoras, are more expensive locally than elsewhere in Texas...

...The result is both frustrating and annoying...

...but he does Mexican-American leaders a disservice in suggesting that their reformist vision was somehow at fault...

...The four counties of the Lower Rio Grande Valley include about six hundred thousand people, 80 percent of whom call themselves Mexican-Americans...

...Basic infrastructure-paved roads, water and sewage facilities, garbage service-are in short supply throughout the valley, but particularly in the barrios and isolated colonias of the Mexican-American population...

...The long opposition of local physicians and lawyers to competition and "outside agitators" has meant scant access to medical services and legal relief for the poor...

...Prieto returned with his family to Mexico City in 1934 and again after college at Notre Dame, and earned his medical degree at the National University of Mexico...

...His story makes one long for the days when Catholic activism issued in something more catholic and less flawed than the prolife movement...

...A full-page ad in the New York Times (January 16) proclaimed "In Mexico We Say: No a las Drogas...

...The reasons, again, are both political and economic...

...The roots of this poverty are both economic and political, and they are fed by the very development that the valley has attracted...

...From civil rights and neighborhood practice in a Mexican-American community, it was an easy transition to activism in the struggles of the farm workers' movement, taking part in the Delano March and helping to organize the grape boycott...

...Castaneda, in particular, is adept at informative analysis of everything from how the Mexican school system shapes Mexican attitudes to the United States to the diverse problems of the communities stretched out along the three-thousand-mile border...

...At the same time, Garcia argues convincingly against the interpretation advanced by militant Chicanos in the 1970s, that the aims of the Mexican-American Generation were not "assimilationist" but pluralist: that being fully integrated into American life was by no means incompatible with guarding the language and customs of their parents...

...Burdened with ill health, he retired in 1984 only to be appointed president of Chicago's Board of Health by Mayor Harold Washington...

...society...

...The problem is rather that the authors have attempted to describe in their parallel chapters some of the tensions that characterize U.S.Mexican relations...

...But Prieto's real work was in Chicago, where he went on to accept the first Chair of Family Practice at Chicago's Cook County Hospital...

...The personalities involved and the crucial family and business linkages are scarcely touched...

...Whether they were the middle-class businesspeople and professionals of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), or the work-ing-class leaders of the militant International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, their aims were best cap-tured by the World War II slogan, "Americans All...

...The authors observe that so far Mexico has taken little interest in the Mexican-American community in the United States, other than to worry about the treatment of undocumented workers...

...Those who revel in the witch's brew of serious issues and childish bickering that characterizes international relations will find this book intriguing...

...It is not that this volume does not offer a wealth of information and insight on most aspects of the relationship...

...Though such characterizations apparently apply to most of the middle-class leaders of LULAC and to intellectuals such as University of Texas historian Carlos Castaneda, Garcia's account shows that Mexican-American union militants were anything but ignorant of the weight economic forces exerted on Mexican-Americans...

...Maril thoroughly documents the industrial and wage structure, the demographic characteristics, and the general plight of valley residents...

...In Limits of Friendship, Robert Pastor, an important player in the Carter administration's Latin America policy, and Jorge Castaneda, a former Mexican ambassador to France and an expert adviser on U.S.-Mexican affairs, do just that in regard to U.S.-Mexican relations...

...His accounts of "bossism" in valley schools and governments are, by contrast, mostly anecdotal...

...Under these circumstances, links with Mexico were few and tentative...

...While he gives the notions of a Jesse Helms the short shrift they deserve, Pastor's voice is seriously divided, at one moment emphasizing U.S...

...and Texas averages...

...Nevertheless, his account reflects the difficulties Mexican-Americans have faced and the efforts of an older generation to make their way in America while maintaining their heritage...

...By and large, this generation looked neither to Mexico nor to the closed, protective communities of the past for identity, but to an ongoing struggle on behalf of their rights as American citizens, including their right to continue to enjoy their Mexican heritage...

...were conditioned by a socioeconomic structure that had always treated them and their homeland as a source of cheap labor and was not likely to change in fundamental ways despite significant civil rights victories...

...Garcia is not, however, uncritical of the generation whose history he sketches here...

...This combination of a sweet-tempered compassion and a capacity for moral outrage did not leave Prieto as he took up residence at Columbus Hospital in Chicago and began ministering to the Mexican-American poor of Chicago...

...Pastor and Castaneda set out to represent distinctive viewpoints...

...misunderstanding of Mexico, at the next attacking Mexican intransigence, at the next celebrating the melding of economies and cultures at the border (an essay Castaneda skillfully overturns...

...In publishing this simple, charming memoir, moreover, Notre Dame Press celebrates one of Notre Dame University's glories, a distinguished public servant inspired as a student there to pursue a medical career in hopes of serving Mexican immigrants in the United States...

...Counties and towns in the region are governed through the patronage system controlled by small cliques of local elites, mainly but not exclusively Anglo, who have created a loyal middle-class following by dispensing scarce jobs and resources through the school system and city and county governments...

...Unemployment was at 12.5 percent in 1978 and 20.5 percent in 1986...

...and Mexican War of 1848...

...His life of service was capped by an honorary doctorate from his alma mater in 1984...

...intervention in Mexican affairs with Mexican intervention here...

...Superbarrio represents the most colorful of new efforts on the part of political groups in Mexico to mobilize Mexican-American interest and support...

...Even if this does not lead him to question the compelling "familism" of Mexican and Mexican-American rhetoric, it did drive him to question, then reject, the church's stand on birth control...

...However, a more constructive approach would have been to survey the differences from some higher ground and to realistically assess alternatives and trends...

...The generation who came of age politically in this era took on the task of integrating Mexican-Americans into mainstream U.S...

...Sponsored by the Advertising Council of the Private Sector Serving Mexico, the ad closed with the provocative "And Meanwhile, What Have You Done in the U.S.A...

...To our loss and to theirs, Mexican-Americans probably will not be able to play this role, for today, perhaps more than ever, and despite all their achievements, Mexican-Americans must be preoccupied with laying claim to a full citizenship that does not preclude cultural distinctiveness...

...The reasons these events stand out in the century-and-a-half triangular relationship among Mexico, the United States, and Mexican-Americans emerge clearly from Mario Garcia's study of what he calls the "Mexican-American Generation," the first generation of Americans of Mexican descent to struggle on a broad scale for civil rights, first-class citizenship, and a secure identity as Mexican-Americans...

...Prieto's story brings to life, if only imperfectly and partially, the struggles Garcia and Maril record in more distant terms...

...But prospects for the poor have increased only marginally over the years, and that only recently...

...Robert Maril's account of the plight of Mexican Americans in the "cra- die of the Mexican- American Generation," Garcia's term for the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, amply confirms the difficulties associated with the economic role Mexican-Americans early came to play in1 American life...

...Both Superbarrio and the Times ad offset for a moment U.S...

...His memoirs nevertheless reflect an abiding piety...

...At the same time, Mexico's response to the recent NBC miniseries on the Camerena drug affair suggests that Mexicans have become more willing to voice their opinions...

...The patronage system in the schools has made for the worst educational record in Texas...

...But, above all, development has depended upon the one resource valley communities have in abundance, cheap labor...

...He then fulfilled a year of required "social service" in a desert village in Zacatecas dominated by poverty and the region's wealthy- the one igniting Prieto's compassion, the other his outrage...

...Jorge Prieto's story is not a rags-to-riches account of one migrant's success, nor does Prieto figure in Garcia's Mexican-American Generation...

...In the 1950s his wife persuaded him to join a Christian Family Movement group, whence they moved easily into the growing civil rights movement...

...in turn, the Mexican-American community has done little to influence U.S.-Mexican relations...

...With the exception of one or two reformed communities, this is the system that has dominated the valley since the influx of Anglo settlers after the U.S...

...Economic development in the valley, from the irrigation projects of the nineteenth century to the maquiladora industries of the 1980s (plants set up on both sides of the border to take advantage of Mexican tax breakes and cheap labor), has been hailed as the solution to valley poverty...

...But it is here that Maril's pessimism ought to be shaken, for what he shows is the beginning of significant movement in the valley, from court actions banning the Texas Rangers' involvement in labor disputes to recent attempts to impose fair-school funding provisions on the Texas state legislature to renewed Mexican-American activism in the valley and elsewhere around the state...

...Unique among immigrant groups MICHAEL W. FOLEY Imagine two prominent scholars from two vastly different but bordering nations, each with extensive government experience, writing a book purporting to represent, frankly and openly, the perspectives of each one's society on the other...

...It is hard to know just how the system works, or to understand how it has withstood scrutiny all these years...

...These events suggest that one day the valley may be less a gateway to poverty for Mexican immigrants than an introduction to something more closely approximating American dreams...

...More than ever before Mexico needs a sympathetic voice in this country, one capable of moving us beyond the bickering so visibly on display in Limits of Friendship...

...and went on to detail the Mexican antidrug effort over the last year...

...They failed to recognize the extent to which the fortunes of Mexicans in the U.S...

...Prieto built the program from scratch, created three clinics in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and educated a generation of family practitioners in service to poor communities and his own generous principles...

...Prieto was born in the midst of the Mexican Revolution...

...This situation is perhaps unique among immigrant groups in America, another paradoxical product of that long, common border, and one which renders still more difficult the situation of both Mexican-Americans and Mexico...

...In 1983, median income in the four counties ranged between $3,700 and $6,600 per capita-that is, between 32 percent and 57 percent of both U.S...

...In recording the history of their persecution, Garcia underlines the obstacles to achieving genuine advances for the disadvantaged...

...For Pastor, especially, this sometimes means taking mainstream positions, even ones he does not hold...

...ultural distinctiveness...

...Mexican-American elites and, to some extent, its middle classes, have been incorporated into the system which has, nevertheless, functioned on racist as well as classist lines since its inception...

...The appearance in Los Angeles and San Diego last year of "Superbarrio" a community organizer from Mexico City's new urban movement who dresses up as a masked super hero, may signal a change...

...Poorest of Americans is a comprehensive survey and a biting analysis of their problems and the causes of persistent poverty in the area...

...The irrigation system that created one of the richest agricultural areas in Texas was built with the sweat of Mexican and Mexican-American laborers, whose wages could always be suppressed with the knowledge that tens of thousands of potential workers waited just across the border...

...In 1980, from 25 to 50 percent of valley residents fell below the official poverty line...

...Bolstered and transformed by the influx of roughly one million Mexicans fleeing the ravages of the revolution (1910-1920), Mexican-American communities by 1930 included a majority of American-born members...

...The maquiladora industries, on both sides of the border, offer little chance for advancement...