Roots of Indifference (Book) - 9/20/2017 10:37:23 AM
ROOTS OF INDIFFERENCE relates the injustices during a time so pertinent to the history of ethnic inequality. The history of the Rio Grande River affected the citizens living on both sides of the border - the imperialistic haughty `northern Americans' and the culture of a generation of Hispanics. To the author's credit she opens her book with a Prologue that relates the interaction of an elderly Mexican physician for both animals and humans, Fred Juelson, who is returning to Texas after a long absence and encounters abuse from some young Hispanic ruffians - a move that sets the tone for Juelson's recollections over the years of how time has changed the little town of Mercedes at the Texas- Mexican border. The story is fact-based fiction - a technique that allows the drama to bend to the will of the writer yet offer a valid exam of life and conditions during the time and location of the story. Wisely, Ragsdale incorporates supernatural incidents predicted and caused by the healers (`curandera'), and those practicing witchcraft - a factor that yields a sense of drama and a fine reflection of Mexican culture. There are murders, forbidden love affairs, conflicts and tensions that well describe the milieu and hence the history of a silent people, the victims of the animosity that raged at the border. Reading Ragsdale's book will underscore the problems we currently are encountering with the bitter debates over immigration of a people who were the first inhabitants of this `land of opportunity'. It makes you think and reprioritize the effects of history on today's culture.
