<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML> The little Texas town of El Cenizo, just south of Laredo on the Mexican border, recently implemented a statute decreeing that all city business be conducted in Spanish.  Under another new city law, city employees are forbidden, at the risk of losing their jobs, to help La Migra catch undocumented workers.                         <<"About 75% of the people at meetings here only speak Spanish,"                       said Mayor Rafael Rodriguez. "The other 25 always had to translate. . .                       . If you talk only English and they don't speak enough English to                       understand the meetings, people got mad."                            In a town of about 1,700, where virtually every resident is an                       immigrant, married to an immigrant or the child of immigrants, the                       laws reflect not so much a rejection of American culture but                       acknowledgment of a border culture dominated by the Spanish                       language and haunted by Border Patrol search vehicles.>> Full text: <A HREF="http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/NATION/UPDATES/lat_spanish990813.htm">El Cenizo: Town Speaks the Language of its People / Claudia Kolker (LA Times)</A>    </HTML>