Linda Ronstadt On The Border, The Fence, & Immigration

(This photo of Linda Ronstadt is from the website called Back To Rockville.)

I have admired Linda Ronstadt for most of my life. She has one of those rare singing voices that is so good it makes you just listen in awe (much like the the awesome voices of the late singers Patsy Cline and Minnie Riperton). But it is not just her voice that is special. She is a special person in general.

She recently appeared on the radio show of Diane Rehm, and here are a few comments from Ms. Ronstadt's appearance on that show.

"Well, the politics were getting so gnarly in Arizona. I just, I mean, I grew up in Arizona, I love it. I'm a part of the desert. I feel like, really, I'm from the Sonoran Desert, which is — extends to both sides of the border. I'm really from that part of Mexico also. And I hate that there's a fence, you know, running through it."

"There wasn't a fence running through the Sonoran Desert when I was growing up. In fact, when I moved back to Tucson, there wasn't even a fence running through it."

"While I was there, it was building; we just turned around and all of a sudden it was there, this horrible thing that destroyed economies on both sides of the line. I know my own father's business was very dependent on the goodwill and business and trade from people in northern Mexico. We knew their families and went to their weddings and baptisms and balls and picnics, and we had a great time with them. Because my dad had a huge hardware store, and they came up to Tucson (to) do their shopping."

"We regularly shopped in Nogales. It was a wonderful place then, and had beautiful things in the stores and had wonderful food. And when they put that fence up, they cut all that commerce off and that's what creates understanding and awareness of each other and good trade relations."

"The place where my grandfather was born is 3½ hours southeast of Tucson, and I love that culture down there — it's beautiful; what lovely, lovely people. The little town that I go to is called Banámichi, a series of farms and ranches that hug the convolutions of the Sonora River and they're farming and ranching with the kind of irrigation that they've done for hundreds of years; it's a very sustainable way of living and people are lovely, quite refined and very well educated."

"There should not be a question of legal or illegal immigration. People came and immigrated to this country from the time of the Indians. No one's illegal. They should just be able to come."

"We allow Cubans to come in and say that they're refugees. Well, in Cuba — I've been there, you know — people are fed, people are housed, people are clothed. There isn't violence in the streets. Here, people are coming from places where there's just terrible violence. Parts of Mexico that are incredibly violent, and Honduras, which is just unspeakably violent right now."

"These children are just fleeing for their lives, their parents are just sending them out because it's the only way that they have of living — into a terrible, dangerous journey and an uncertain future in the United States that is populated with people that seem to hate them — that's how desperate they are."