The City of Tucson vs. Robert D. Kaplan :: Essays Papers

The City of Tucson vs. Robert D. Kaplan Robert D. Kaplans articles Travels into Americas Future present a description of Tucson, Arizona as it stood in 1998. His articles ar based entirely on his personal experiences with the city and with its Mexican neighbors to the south, and while somewhat entertaining, contain vast oversights and discrepancies that make his foreigner standing obvious to any native reader. The article begins with Kaplans journey northward from Mexico City and describes many of the sights he sees along the way. He describes mark roads lined with trash, and cinder-block houses with corrugated roofs. Then he goes into great expand about the economic divisions between social classes and the booming America-bound drug patience that causes the division. Kaplan spends a great deal of time discussing the local historical conditional relation of Coronado, Cortez and Compostela. He speaks of the hero worship the Mexican citizens display for these men in each city he visits, and then calls these men crude zealots who massacred Indians, construct Christian altars where they had smashed idols, and went mad at the sight of gold, while he calls the white protestant settlers on Americas east glide children of European Enlightenment. While somewhat interesting and slightly strange, this information seems to constitute little bearing on the rest of the article. If he understood what the logical implication of this information was, he failed to make the connection apparent to his audience. He does not discuss any historical figures with connection to the American Southwest and hence any relevance is lost. It almost appears as though he was sidetracked for terce or four paragraphs. When Kaplan enters the United States at the Nogales port of entry, what he calls the grey-haired Iron Curtain, he speaks of a transformation in socioeconomic structure, which he basically summarizes by comparing to h otels. A Mexican one, only both years old where the doors dont close properly and the walls are cracking, and an American one, which after more than a quarter century is becalm in excellent condition, from the fresh paint to the latest-model fixtures.