Dallas Morning News
Originally posted: Nov. 18, 2014
Thursday night vigils will be held in support of Mexican families of 43 missing college students
Forty-three. Cuarenta y tres. It’s the figure growing in protest symbolism in Mexico. It represents the number of students from a rural teachers college in southern Mexico who are missing — or massacred.
Now, the 43 students are the focus of several vigils to be held Thursday evening by Dallas area groups who want the Mexican families of the students to know they’re supported in North Texas in their sorrow and anger. The vigils at Southern Methodist University, at Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, and outside the Mexican consulate are being held along with other events in Mexico, where there’s a call for national protest on the Nov. 20th holiday of Mexican Revolution.
The 43 students are part of pool of many more who have died or disappeared in an indefatigable drug war launched with fury in Mexico eight years ago. There have been about 100,000 collective deaths and disappearances in Mexico, by some accounts. Much of the blood spilled has been at our Texas border in Juárez, across from El Paso.
Those deaths haven’t triggered the swell of protest we’ve now seen in U.S. cities such as Dallas, San Francisco, New York and El Paso. In recent weeks, there have been five vigils in Dallas, home to a large population with Mexican ancestry. Fully a tenth of the U.S. population is now of Mexican origin.
“We are here to stand in solidarity with the 43,” said Magda Cruz, a 21-year-old SMU senior whose parents are Mexican immigrants. “We like to think of them as fellow student activists. They were studying to be teachers. They were going to raise future leaders and now they are gone.”
Cruz is a member of a student chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC. The North Texas district council, a collection of LULAC chapters, is a co-organizer of the event.
So is the SMU Embrey Human Rights Program.
“We have our eyes all over the world, but we are turning a blind eye to our neighbor,” says Roberto Corona, part of the SMU human rights staff and an organizer of three other vigils for the 43 students. Corona also leads a community group called Pueblo Sin Fronteras.