ALONG THE BORDER : Educators Stand Guard at Bridge : Mexican ‘Drop-Ins’ Trigger Texas School Crisis

Several times a semester the teachers in this little town do a routine chore that would seem bizarre at a school anywhere except on the Mexican border.

“What we call it,” Alejo Salinas said, “is an unannounced bridge raid. It’s sort of a game. We don’t always win, but we give it our best.”

Salinas, the 40-year-old Hidalgo school superintendent, explained:

“We get permission from the immigration people and stand out on the bridge at 7 o’clock in the morning. The teachers try to spot their pupils among the carloads who come across from Mexico to go to school.

“Then we try to locate their parents. If their parents are not where they’re supposed to be, which is on this side of the border, living in the school district, we dismiss the student from school.

“It sounds cruel, and it is sad,” he said. “But it’s necessary. I have no choice. There are a half-million kids across that bridge who want to come here to school. I don’t have enough room for the 2,000 students who are legal, much less the ones who aren’t.

“What am I to do?”

Hidalgo is a small town about 70 miles upstream from the mouth of the Rio Grande. Across the bridge is Reynosa, Mexico, a city of 800,000 people and appalling poverty.

Hidalgo’s school crisis--and it is nothing less than that--is no different from that at nearly every other town, small and large, in the Rio Grande Valley.

The state of Texas calculates that it is spending $76 million a year, and rising, to educate more than 29,000 offspring of illegal Mexican aliens.

Exploding Enrollment

In the four years that Salinas has been superintendent at Hidalgo, enrollment has doubled. The same is true up and down the river. Upriver, the town of Roma has had to build 25 new classrooms in the last year and a half.

“These kids are right out of Mexico, and most of them, as many as 70%, don’t speak a word of English,” Roma School Supt. Eleuterio Garza said.

“They can’t keep up. We will have discipline problems, then they will drop out. The dropout rate in the valley is 40%. I’m sure ours is that high. Not a very rosy outlook, is it?”

The answer is not as simple as catching an illegal entrant and sending him back to Mexico. The Border Patrol does that literally a million times a year.

Salinas figures that about 200 of the 2,000 students in the Hidalgo district are there illegally. Nearly all of those have Mexican parents who do not want U.S. citizenship for themselves so much as a U.S. education for their children. The children, in fact, often are American-born and thus U.S. citizens, lacking only a legal address in a U.S. school district.

“It’s commonplace in the Rio Grande Valley,” Salinas said, “for families to have relatives on both sides of the border. I have. So, what many of the Reynosa kids do is list the address of a relative here in Texas as their own address. But they don’t live with the relative. They commute. Hence, our unannounced bridge raids.

“Another common practice is for Mexican parents to get together and rent a house on the U.S. side, maybe even buy one in a colonia.”

Colonias are dirt-street shanty towns that have sprung up on the outskirts of border towns in recent years with the swelling tide of immigration.

“One parent will stay in the colonia with eight or 10 kids from several families,” Salinas said. “They all list the one house as their address. The kids go to school Monday through Friday, and they all go home to Mexico on weekends.”

Even if they were interested in learning English, it would be difficult for new arrivals here to do so because the language they hear on both sides of the border is the same--Spanish. A student may hear English in a classroom, but the language of the playground, downtown and home is Spanish.

English Not Accepted

In fact, nowadays along the border, even on the American side, a person without at least a smattering of Spanish--or “Spanglish,” in the border idiom--will not always be able to ask directions, instruct a repairman or order lunch. Even the U.S. Navy advertises for recruits in Spanish.

And, in the city park in Hidalgo is a bronze statue, dedicated in 1976, of the town’s patron, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. A plaque on the pedestal explains that he was a padre de nuestra patria , a father of our country. Mexico.