Both Sides of the Border


Mexican immigration isn’t just transforming the U.S.--it’s also transforming Mexico.

October 18, 2007

By Linda Lutton

In 1920s Mexico, in the dusty town of Jaripo, Michoacan, lived a cruel and ruthless man named Juan Muratalla. Muratalla had been an enforcer on a hacienda before the Mexican Revolution. Now, from a chair in the town plaza, his rifle propped between his legs, he terrorized Jaripo’s poor villagers as a hired gun for the cacique—the local political boss and one in a long list of powerful elites who’ve controlled life in Mexico, from Aztec emperors and Spanish kings to viceroys, dictators, caudillos, and the regional heavyweights of today.

One day Muratalla shot a rancher, and the rancher’s son, Antonio Carrillo, begged his mother for his father’s pistol to avenge the killing. Fearing for his life, she refused. So Antonio left for the United States, found work, and bought a pistol there. Then he returned to Jaripo and put an end to Muratalla. “That gun was Antonio Carrillo’s alternative to submission,â€