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Taylor brings an ethnographer's eye, ear, and many years of
experience to this fictional portrait of life along the US/Mexico
desert border. In these linked short stories, readers are taken on
a wild ride from San Diego to Nogales, into Mexican and Chicano
neighborhoods, failed spas and defunct mining towns, rambling
Native American reservations and besieged Wildlife Refuges. Along
the way they will share the conflicts, calamities, and occasional
triumph of an engaging cast of characters. While these tales treat
such familiar border themes as drug- and people-smuggling or hybrid
and conflicting cultures and identities, they do so with a literary
flair that revels in the rich diversity of border life as well as
in its ambiguity, ambivalence, irony and often unexpected humor.
Winner of the Southwest Book Award! Beneath the streets of the
U.S.-Mexico border, children are coming of age. They have come from
all over Mexico to find shelter and adventure in the drainage
tunnels that connect the twin cities of Nogales, Sonora, and
Nogales, Arizona. This book opens up the world of the tunnel kids
and tells how in this murky underworld of struggling immigrants,
drug dealers, and thieves, these kids have carved out a place of
their own. Two parallel tunnels-- each fourteen feet wide and
several miles long-- drain the summer rains from Mexico to the
United States. Here and in the crumbling colonias you'll meet the
tunnel kids: streetwise El Boston, a six-year veteran of the
tunnels; his little pal JesAs; JesAs' girlfriend, La Flor, and her
six-month-old baby; wild Negra; poetic Guanatos; moody Romel and
his beautiful girlfriend, La Fanta. They form an extended family of
some two dozen young people who live hard-edged lives and answer to
no one in El Barrio Libre-- the free barrio. Lawrence Taylor and
Maeve Hickey met these kids at Mi Nueva Casa, the safe house built
to draw the youths out of the tunnels and into a more normal life.
The authors spent two summers with tunnel kids as they roamed all
over Nogales and beyond in their struggle to survive. In the course
of their adventures the kids described their lives, talking about
what might tempt them to leave the tunnels-- and what kept them
there. Hickey's stunning portraits provide a heart-stopping
counterpoint to Taylor's incisive prose. Story and photos together
open a window into the life of the tunnel kids--a world like that
of many homeless children, precarious and adaptive, albeit unique
to the border. Wheremost people might see just another gang of
doped-up, violent children, Taylor and Hickey discover displaced
and sometimes heroic young people whose stories add a human
dimension to the world of the U.S.-Mexico border.
A guide to classroom use
Comments from a program that's used this title
The road between Tucson, Arizona, and Magdalena de Kino, Sonora,
runs straight and true. Slicing through miles of rolling desert and
faraway blue mountains, it could be just another fast way to get
from here to there. But if the traveler has a taste for adventure
and time to spare, this road can be a rich and unforgettable ride.
Equipped with camera, pen, and a lively curiosity, photographer
Maeve Hickey and writer Lawrence J. Taylor set out to capture
whatever might come their way on the road to Mexico. They roamed
and rambled, they stayed well off the beaten track, and they talked
to nearly everyone they met, from wisecracking waitresses to landed
gentry to street urchins dressed in rags. Their book brings to life
the calf ropers and casinos, the saints and sinners, the mariachis
and miracles in a no-man's-land that sometimes seems to belong
neither to the United States nor to Mexico. Following the footsteps
of earlier travelers-traders, warriors, missionaries, and
explorers-these modern pilgrims take a hands-on approach to their
journey. Throughout, both writer and photographer convey the sizzle
and spice of a land where Indian, Mexican, and Anglo worlds have
collided, coexisted, and melted into each other for centuries.
Their eye for the hidden telling detail carries the reader straight
into the action, and their zest for excitement spurs any traveler
to drop everything, grab a bag, and hit the road to Mexico.
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