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Ready for some futbol? Don't tell me that the soccer stars from Brownsville's Gladys Porter High--my alma mater--aren't as American as they come.

Article Excerpt
Speedy Gonzales, the famous cartoon star of the fifties and sixties, has been in the news again lately. It seems the image of the "fastest mouse in all Mexico" was evoked recently at the boys' 5A state soccer championship, pitting the nationally ranked Coppell Cowboys, from North Texas, against the Porter Cowboys, from Brownsville, the southernmost city on the U.S.-Mexico border. In an effort to belittle their opponents, the Coppell fans held up a poster showing Speedy Gonzales about to be squashed by a large shoe. The sign read "Stomp on Brownville!" (And no, that's not a typo.) When officials forced Coppell to remove the sign, the Porter fans continued cheering for their underdog team with the chant "!Si se puede!" ("Yes, we can!"), a call to action recovered from the era of Cesar Chavez's marches with the United Farm Workers of America. The Coppell fans answered this with their own chant of "USA! USA!" implying that the Porter players and their fans were not citizens of the United States. And when that didn't work, one of the fans called out, "You suck, you beaner!" In the end, though, their taunts were as effective as Sylvester the Cats were on Speedy Gonzales. Porter won 2-1 in overtime.

Interestingly enough, this was all happening while Congress debated an immigration reform bill, including the possibility of a seven-hundred-mile wall along our southern border (one end of which would pass about a mile from Gladys Porter High School, my alma mater), and while hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants and their supporters marched in cities across the U.S., also chanting "!Si se puede!" Soon several thousand National Guard troops would be deployed to assist the Border Patrol in certain areas, including South Texas.

What the Coppell fans and the players on the charged soccer field probably didn't realize was that their reaction toward a group they assumed was not American could hardly be...

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