Downgrading.

Feb. 27, El Paso Fox Plaza.
Last night we moved from one mall to another in the same city and traveled down the American social ladder, in the country that dreams itself without a class system: we moved from Suburbia to the Barrio. Sunland Park Mall was all corporate Americaland, undistinguishable from one coast to the other, all the brand names you expect to see clustered around the soulless comfort of the air-conditioned mall; Fox Plaza, as this mall is called, is five minutes away and less than a mile away from the border (you can see Mexico from here,) and it looks and feels every bit like Mexico as well, only slightly neater. There are the ubiquitous dollar stores, clothing stores with names like "American Girl," a JC Penney that looks like it hasn't been remodeled since the fifties, people sit on cast off office chairs on the sidewalk to keep an eye on their fare, Spanish is ubiquitous, Latino pop songs blare out of a corner store called La Discoteca ("the nightclub") with an assortment of wigs, old toy boxes, a poster for Tahiti body oil and sunglasses in the window.