Posted on 11/17/2005 4:09:45 AM PST by Crackingham
The high-top sneakers cost $215 at a San Diego boutique, but the designer is giving them away to migrants before they cross to this side of the U.S.-Mexico border. These are no ordinary shoes. A compass and flashlight dangle from one shoelace. The pocket in the tongue is for money or pain relievers. A rough map of the border region is printed on a removable insole. They are red, white and green, the colors of the Mexican flag. On the back ankle, a drawing of Mexico's patron saint of migrants.
On this side of the border, the shoes sit in art collections or the closets of well-heeled sneaker connoisseurs. On the other side, in Tijuana, it's a utilitarian affair: Immigrants to be are happy to have the sturdy, lightweight shoes for the hike - or dash - into the United States. Their designer is Judi Werthein, an Argentine artist who moved to New York in 1997 - legally, she notes.
On recent evening in Tijuana, after giving away 50 pairs at a migrant shelter, Werthein waved the insole and pointed to Interstate 8, the main road between San Diego and Phoenix.
"This blue line is where you want to go," Werthein, 38, said in Spanish.
"Good luck! You're all very courageous," she told the cheering crowd of about 50 men huddled in a recreation room after dinner.
"God bless you!" several cried back.
Werthein has concluded that shoes are a border crosser's most important garment.
"The main problem that people have when they're crossing is their feet," Werthein. "If people are going to cross anyway, at least this will make it safer."
Only 1,000 pairs of the "Brinco" sneakers (it means "Jump" in Spanish) have been made - in China, for $17 each. The shoes were introduced in August at inSite, an art exhibition in San Diego and Tijuana whose sponsors include nonprofit foundations and private collectors. Benefactors put up $40,000 for the project; Werthein gets a $5,000 stipend, plus expenses.
Some say Werthein is encouraging illegal immigration - but she rejects the criticism, saying people will cross with or without her shoes.
Eloisa Haudenschild, who displays a pair of the sneakers at her resplendent San Diego home, said the shoes portray an uncomfortable reality about the perils of crossing the border.
"It's a reality that we don't like to look at," she said. "That's what an artist points out."
Please tell me this is illegal.
What do Moslems and Mexicans have in common? Muzzies do not recognize America as a soverign nation and neither do Mexicans.
I guess this patron saint wants them out of Mexico?
I think she just painted a bullseye on the back of anyone dumb enough to wear them.
Boycott all her designer shoes!
Aiding and abetting a crime....
Sounds like a charge of "accessory before the fact" would be appropriate to me.
Wheres a good shoe bomber when you need one.
It just makes me want to neutron bomb mexico and most of the rest of the world. (Of course I've wanted to neutron bomb most of the world since the early 80's but this just reinforces that desire)
Ridiculous nonsense ping.
Sickening.
I had the misfortune of having to make another trip to Springdale yesterday. I leave that city PO'd every time I go. It is just awful how many of the businesses there are painted in the colors of the Mexican flag...and Mexican owned, likely as not bought with taxpayer money...or at least with money earned illegally. Anyway, I was on my way back out of town yesterday and I saw a Greyhound sized bus. All the writing on it was in Mexican Spanish, it was stopped in front of one of these God-awful green, white and orange painted buildings, whose signs and ads were also in Mexican Spanish. While I was sitting there at the stop light, a whole busload of them disembarked. What? Are we importing them by the busloads now? It wouldn't surprise me to learn that these buses are Tyson financed. Tyson is the single largest employer of illegals in the state, and it has destroyed the NW corner of Arkansas. The place is barely fit to visit, let alone live.
Here you have the perfect opportunity to round them up and ship them out. But so we do that? Noooooo....we have a special census for them so they can get more goodies at our expense....and be represented in government.
Springdale could hit jackpot with new census count (Special Census for Illegals)
When did they invent this "patron saint of migrants"?? I know there have been illegal aliens "crossing" for dozens and dozens of years, but I can't believe they have a saint for breaking the law (and in 2005 it most certainly is breaking the law).
That is incredible; of all states I'd never have known it was so bad there. What's up with the gov - isn't he Republican? Why is he allowing this (rhetorical question)?
Nice "assimilation" too.
Huckabee is a RINO.
Interstate 8 goes east to Casa Grande, not Phoenix. From Casa Grande, you can then take I-10 west to Phoenix.
The woman's actions are inexcusable. I wonder how she'd make out in a woman's prison?
ping
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