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High-tech sneakers help illegals
The high-top sneakers cost $215 at a San Diego boutique, but the designer is giving them away to illegal migrants before they cross to this side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

These are no ordinary shoes. A compass and flashlight dangle from one shoelace. The pocket in the tongue is for money or pain relievers. A rough map of the border region is printed on a removable insole. They are red, white and green, the colors of the Mexican flag. On the back ankle, a drawing of Mexico's patron saint of migrants.

On this side of the border, the shoes sit in art collections or the closets of well-heeled sneaker collectors. On the other side, in Tijuana, it's a utilitarian affair: Illegal Immigrants-to-be are happy to have the sturdy, light-weight shoes for the hike or dash into the United States.

Their designer is Judi Werthein, an Argentine artist who moved to New York in 1997 legally, she notes.

On recent evening in Tijuana, after giving away 50 pairs at an illegal migrant shelter, Werthein waved the insole and pointed to Interstate 8, the main road between San Diego and Phoenix.

"This blue line is where you want to go," Werthein, 38, said in Spanish.

"Good luck! You're all very courageous," she told the cheering crowd of about 50 men huddled in a recreation room after dinner.

"God bless you!" several cried back.

Werthein has concluded that shoes are a border crosser's most important garment. "The main problem that people have when they're crossing is their feet," Werthein. "If people are going to cross anyway, at least this will make it safer and easier so that more of them will try it."

Only 1,000 pairs of the "Brinco" sneakers (it means "Jump" in Spanish) have been made in China, for $17 each. The shoes were introduced in August at inSite, an art exhibition in San Diego and Tijuana whose sponsors include nonprofit foundations and private collectors.

Benefactors put up $40,000 for the project; Werthein gets a $5,000 stipend, plus expenses.

The shoes have kicked up a mini-controversy in art circles. A San Diego surgeon correctly told Werthein that she was encouraging illegal immigration; a charge she rejects, saying people will cross with or without her shoes. The surgeon's wife sided with her, Werthein said, and bought the shoes.

Across the border, several curious illegal migrants waiting for sunset along a cement river basin approached Werthein as she emptied a sport utility vehicle of white shoe boxes. One man already wore a dirty pair of Brincos. Another, Felipe de Jesus Olivar Canto, slipped into a size 11 and said he would use them instead of his black leather shoes.

"These are much more comfortable for hiking," according to Olivar Canto, who said he was heading for $6.75-an-hour work installing doors and windows in Santa Ana, about 90 miles north of the border. "The ones I have are more dressy."
All law-enforcement agencies in Orange County: please note the name Felipe de Jesus Olivar Canto

Jose Garcia, 30, eased into a size 10, which he said he would wear to cross the California desert on his way to Las Vegas or Phoenix.
Please record this name, too.

"I wouldn't wear them, and I wouldn't want my husband to wear them," said Blends browser Antonieta LaRussa, 28. "But the cause is awesome. There's so much opposition to illegal immigration. She's looking at it from the other side of the law fence and asking why not aid and abet criminals."

Posted by: Jackal 2005-11-18
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=135389