The border between the United States and Mexico extends 1,951 miles. Among the people who live along it are a migrant laborer huddled in a makeshift camp, a Chicano cowpuncher, a Pima Indian who makes his living tracking drug smugglers across the desert, and the millions crowded along the border in Mexicali.
In this beautifully written, unerringly insightful book, William Langewiesche allows us to see this boundary in all its political, moral, and emotional complexity. Whether he is patrolling the border with officers of the U.S. Immigration Service or talking with the desperate men and women who cross it every day, reviewing its history of brigandange and invasion or predicting its future in an age of dwindling water supplies and unfettered trade, Langewiesche is always engaged in what trackers call “cutting the sign”—reading the marks that human beings have made on this contested land and decoding the meaning they hold for the rest of us.
“Spellbinding. . . . The reportage [is] high art . . . for Langewiesche painstakingly uncovers the connections between elusive clues as he searches out the border and its people.”—Boston Globe
“Combining trenchant observations with an understated style, Langewiesche, a correspondent for the Atlantic, limns people and places on the troubled U.S.-Mexico border. Traveling from affluent San Diego, Calif., to poverty-ridden Brownsville, Tex., the author zig-zags across the frontier, describing border guards and human rights monitors, maquila managers (business technicians) and labor organizers and the frustration and foreboding among them all.”—Publishers Weekly
“. . . [T]his well-written volume is a thoughful introduction to the complex people and issues of the borderlands.”—Library Journal
“. . .[T]he author shows us the appalling human reality behind business-page slogans and shibboleths—NAFTA, the global economy, the free market—and he makes the border itself look as arbitrary, strange, and inevitable as the Berlin Wall in its day. And of equal geopolitical significance. Compassionate, risk-taking reporting: timely and valuable.”—Kirkus Reviews
