By the lake of sleeping children : the secret life of the Mexican border /

In a year when language, drugs, and immigration status mark national divisions as intensely as the traditional razor's edge of race, these books invite readers to explore the borderlands where the U.S. and Mexico meet. The Byrds gather essays by 16 poets, journalists, painters, activists, and artists, all intimately familiar with the territory along the 2,000-mile "disappearing line." Some authors, such as Richard Rodriguez and Ruben Martinez, will be familiar to media mavens outside the region; others write for such publications as Texas Monthly, The Texas Observer, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine (Barbara Ferry, Debbie Nathan, Dick Reavis, Alan Weisman); two are MacArthur fellows (Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Gary Nabhan). They share fascination with and concern about the border experience, as its myth has developed through history, and as its reality is deeply affected by harsh new pressures such as NAFTA. A rich source of insights about a too easily stereotyped region. The Byrds' collection includes an excerpt, "None of Them Talk about Their Dreams," from Urrea's new book, which explores the impact of time and NAFTA and Proposition 187 on the hardscrabble lives and desperate hopes of the Tijuana poor Urrea described in Across the Wire (1993). Perhaps because his own roots lie in both Mexico and the U.S., perhaps because he experienced poverty and insecurity (though not generally situations as extreme as those of the dump dwellers and garbage pickers he describes here), Urrea vividly captures the all-too-invisible people with whom we share a troubled, militarized, disappearing border. --Mary Carroll

Urrea has an almost evangelical zeal to communicate the sad lot of Mexico's "untouchable class," a border population abandoned by their country, at times by their own kin. This collection of repportage, like his Across the Wire, originates in Urrea's years helping California missionaries deliver food and medicine to orphanages and inhabitants of a moldering garbage dump near Tijuana. Here, people's lives are wholly delimited by this universe of decomposing waste. They mine their livelihood in hidden treasures‘a can of food, cast-off clothing, scrap wood for a house. Passions fester and erupt; nobility and sacrifice coexist with greed, cruelty and rage. A dual government of armed toughs and community respect prevails. In 10 stark, intimate, riveting essays, Urrea passes no judgment, but attempts to show why his subjects risk all for the chance of something better across the border. Their privation provokes incomprehensible acts, incomprehensible unless one has been in their situation. Urrea has shared their lives and he emerges with strong opinions on those responsible for such misery, and fears of what it forebodes for the course of America's future. Well worth reading in our age of escalating xenophobia. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Urrea returns to the setting of his well-received first book, Across the Wire (not reviewed), for another look at the impact of NAFTA on the lives of those who live in the direst poverty on the US-Mexico border. Urrea was born in Tijuana, the son of a Mexican police official and an American mother. As he wryly observes, ``The border runs down the middle of me.'' Fluently bilingual, he is unusually well equipped to write about the town of his birth and the border area it bestrides. Although he readily admits that there are many parts of Tijuana that are not characterized by the squalor of which he writes, he is drawn once again to the lowest of the low, the basureros, the families living in cardboard boxes and makeshift shacks near the city's huge garbage dump, surviving by picking through the rubbish found there each day. The portrait of daily life that emerges is not without its familiar contours--readers of Alex Kotlowitz and Jonathan Kozol will recognize the plight of children raised in such circumstances. But there is little in the day-to-day experiences of Americans that compares to the sheer grinding misery of the lives that Urrea depicts. Yet, as his book repeatedly demonstrates, the people of the dump possess a dignity and independence that is admirable. The work of the garbage-pickers is governed by clear rules, and as the book's final chapter makes overwhelmingly clear, this is a community in the best sense, quick to give a helping hand and solicitous of its constituents. Written in no small part as a response to California's Proposition 187 and the false hopes stirred by NAFTA, the book is a stinging and impassioned answer to the anti-immigration wave cresting in American politics today.