Luis Alberto Urrea''s Across the Wire offers a compelling and unprecedented look at what life is like for those refugees living on the Mexican side of the border—a world that is only some twenty miles from San Diego, but that few have seen.  Urrea gives us a compassionate and candid account of his work as a member and "official translator" of a crew of relief workers that provided aid to the many refugees hidden just behind the flashy tourist spots of Tijuana.  His account of the struggle of these people to survive amid abject poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and the legal and political chaos that reign in the Mexican borderlands explains without a doubt the reason so many are forced to make the dangerous and illegal journey "across the wire" into the United States.            More than just an expose, Across the Wire is a tribute to the tenacity of a people who have learned to survive against the most impossible odds, and returns to these forgotten people their pride and their identity.  

From the Trade Paperback edition.

By the Lake of Sleeping Children explores the post-NAFTA and Proposition 187 border purgatory of garbage pickers and dump dwellers, gawking tourists,and relief workers, fearsome coyotes and their desperate clientele. In sixteen indelible portraits, Urrea illuminates the horrors and the simple joys of people trapped between the two worlds of Mexico and the United States - and ignored by both. The result is a startling and memorable work of first-person reportage.

Rediscover Rudolfo Anaya: mythmaker, master storyteller, American original “The godfather and guru of Chicano literature.” —Tony HillermanA writer powerfully attuned to the land and history of his native New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya (1937–2020) is one of the giants of Latino literature. Over the course of a remarkable and acclaimed literary career, Anaya redefined the American experience for generations of readers. Anaya broke new ground with his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, a mythic work that captures the richness and complexity of history, community, and place in the American Southwest. Set just after World War II, Bless Me, Ultima revolves around the young boy Antonio and his quest to understand his identity and the demands of his future. Although his mother’s heart is set on his entering the priesthood, Antonio is drawn to the charismatic Ultima, an elderly curandera or healer who embodies the ancient wisdom of the pre-Columbian past.  The 1979 novel Tortuga draws on Anaya’s experience of suffering and recuperation after a diving accident as a teenager. Its hero, nicknamed “Tortuga” because his body cast encases him like a turtle’s shell, grapples with the realities of bodily pain as he discovers that true healing is spiritual as well as physical. The story reverberates with local folklore about a mountain, also called Tortuga, home to a sleeping spirit who will one day awaken and journey onward to the sea. Weaving these threads together, Anaya creates, in the words of editor Luis Alberto Urrea, “a tapestry inside of which he was encoding an entire history of our very souls.” In the 1992 novel Alburquerque (restoring the “r” to the city’s original name), a young Mexican American boxing champion discovers that his white biological mother had given him up for adoption at birth, and he must now reevaluate everything he thought he was. The winner of a PEN West Fiction Award, the novel brims with emotionally powerful characterizations, political commentary, humor, and lyrical writing that reveals Anaya to be, once again, an indispensable American fabulist.

            Luis Alberto Urrea''s Across the Wire offers a compelling and unprecedented look at what life is like for those refugees living on the Mexican side of the border—a world that is only some twenty miles from San Diego, but that few have seen.  Urrea gives us a compassionate and candid account of his work as a member and "official translator" of a crew of relief workers that provided aid to the many refugees hidden just behind the flashy tourist spots of Tijuana.  His account of the struggle of these people to survive amid abject poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and the legal and political chaos that reign in the Mexican borderlands explains without a doubt the reason so many are forced to make the dangerous and illegal journey "across the wire" into the United States.            More than just an expose, Across the Wire is a tribute to the tenacity of a people who have learned to survive against the most impossible odds, and returns to these forgotten people their pride and their identity.  

From the Trade Paperback edition.

By the Lake of Sleeping Children explores the post-NAFTA and Proposition 187 border purgatory of garbage pickers and dump dwellers, gawking tourists,and relief workers, fearsome coyotes and their desperate clientele. In sixteen indelible portraits, Urrea illuminates the horrors and the simple joys of people trapped between the two worlds of Mexico and the United States - and ignored by both. The result is a startling and memorable work of first-person reportage.

Rediscover Rudolfo Anaya: mythmaker, master storyteller, American original “The godfather and guru of Chicano literature.” —Tony HillermanA writer powerfully attuned to the land and history of his native New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya (1937–2020) is one of the giants of Latino literature. Over the course of a remarkable and acclaimed literary career, Anaya redefined the American experience for generations of readers. Anaya broke new ground with his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, a mythic work that captures the richness and complexity of history, community, and place in the American Southwest. Set just after World War II, Bless Me, Ultima revolves around the young boy Antonio and his quest to understand his identity and the demands of his future. Although his mother’s heart is set on his entering the priesthood, Antonio is drawn to the charismatic Ultima, an elderly curandera or healer who embodies the ancient wisdom of the pre-Columbian past.  The 1979 novel Tortuga draws on Anaya’s experience of suffering and recuperation after a diving accident as a teenager. Its hero, nicknamed “Tortuga” because his body cast encases him like a turtle’s shell, grapples with the realities of bodily pain as he discovers that true healing is spiritual as well as physical. The story reverberates with local folklore about a mountain, also called Tortuga, home to a sleeping spirit who will one day awaken and journey onward to the sea. Weaving these threads together, Anaya creates, in the words of editor Luis Alberto Urrea, “a tapestry inside of which he was encoding an entire history of our very souls.” In the 1992 novel Alburquerque (restoring the “r” to the city’s original name), a young Mexican American boxing champion discovers that his white biological mother had given him up for adoption at birth, and he must now reevaluate everything he thought he was. The winner of a PEN West Fiction Award, the novel brims with emotionally powerful characterizations, political commentary, humor, and lyrical writing that reveals Anaya to be, once again, an indispensable American fabulist.