The Krentz Bonfire (an Arizona border story)

[Ptah]

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/the-krentz-bonfire/Content?oid=1945848


A little more than a month has passed since the death of Cochise County
rancher Rob Krentz, and the emotion generated by his murder,
the pure shock of it, has ignited a bonfire that still burns across
Arizona's borderlands—and all the way to Washington, D.C.

Now everyone is demanding troops. Now, with Gov. Jan Brewer's signature
on a tough new illegal-immigration law, the nation is embroiled in a loud
debate about racial profiling. Now everyone has a multi-point plan for
bringing some control to a border so porous that anyone who wants to get
into the country can eventually do so, as Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever
last week told the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Will anything change now?

When the bonfire cools, will we be able to look back and say, as the
heartbroken Krentz family hopes, that Rob's death wasn't in vain?

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Some perspective from Baja Arizona

[Ptah]

1. Another portrayal of the situation can be found in the novel Crossers, by Philip Caputo

Editorial Review - Kirkus Reviews Copyright (c) 10/8/2009 VNU Business Media, Inc.

The sins of the fathers are visited on their progeny with a vengeance in this somber novel
of life in paradise by Caputo (Acts of Faith, 2005, etc.).In the grasslands of the San Rafael Valley,
straddling the border between Arizona and Mexico, 13-year-old Ben Erskine rides out of the
settlement of Lochiel with his prize possession, a hunting knife that he must put to unhappy use
soon after the narrative opens on Aug. 8, 1903. Having tasted violence, Ben now seems condemned
to live a life of it, serving the law on one side of the international line and the Mexican Revolution
on the other, working as a soldier of fortune years after the hostilities end.

Fast-forward to the present: Trying to piece his life back together after losing his wife in the attack
on the World Trade Center, Gil Castle takes refuge in the Arizona homestead built by his great-uncle,
Ben's brother Jeff. Gil soon meets another man whose life was upended by 9/11. After an entire year's
crop rotted on the runway waiting for U.S. airspace to reopen, Miguel Espinoza's produce export
business failed and he became a northbound border crosser (counterbalance to early 20th-century
southbound crosser Ben).

Complicating bicultural, binational life are bad guys of many stripes, dealing drugs, smuggling in
undocumented workers, trading in human misery and, in the end, wrapping the once-quiet but never
innocent San Rafael Valley in fresh bloodshed. This is literary country well covered by Cormac McCarthy,
Robert Stone, Charles Bowden and other gimlet-eyed students of the borderlands, but Caputo adds to it
with his sharply observed portraits of the way people in stress actually think, act, talk and, sometimes, die.
He understands and cogently conveys the region's seductive beauty and the many dangers it poses.
A masterful tale about what comes of "trying to escape history"—from which, the author gives us to
understand, there is no safe place to hide.

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http://www.amazon.com/Crossers-Philip-Caputo/dp/0375411674/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2

[Ptah]

2. Double click

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