The neocons love to turn the spotlight on incidents when an undocumented immigrant has a brush with the law. They use those events in an effort to make others believe that people of color are something to be feared.
So it won't be a surprise that you won't hear them tell the story of Manuel Jesus Cordova Soberanes who was on a two-day walk from Mexico and just eight hours from Tucson when he encountered a lost nine-year-old Anglo boy.
According to the Associated Press, "The two would spend the next 14 hours together before a group of hunters found them and called for help. U.S. Border Patrol agents took Cordova into custody, and Christopher was flown to a hospital in Tucson.Christopher was reunited with family over the weekend and Cordova was taken back to Mexico."
Cordova told the news service, "I am a father of four children. For that, I stayed," Cordova said in Spanish from his home in Magdalena de Kino in the Mexican state of Sonora. "I never could have left him. Never."
If he had left, authorities say it could have meant death for the boy, 9-year-old Christopher Buztheitner, who had an injured leg, was dressed in shorts despite the desert cold and had just lost his mother in a car crash.
Cordova sacrificed his future to save the life of a stranger and while, legally, he had to be sent back home, America would do well to have more people like him.
And it's likely we do, but we never hear their stories.
- Jim Grinstead
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