From the Bookshelves: The Wind Does Not Need a Passport, Working the Line
Tyche Hendricks, The Wind Does Not Need a Passport: Stories From the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of California Press 2010). ABSTRACT: Award-winning journalist Tyche Hendricks has explored the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by car and by foot, on horseback, and in the back of a pickup truck. She has shared meals with border residents, listened to their stories, and visited their homes, churches, hospitals, farms, and jails. In this dazzling portrait of one of the least understood and most debated regions in the country, Hendricks introduces us to the ordinary Americans and Mexicans who live there—cowboys and Indians, factory workers and physicians, naturalists and nuns. A new picture of the borderlands emerges, and we find that this region is not the dividing line so often imagined by Americans, but is a common ground alive with the energy of cultural exchange and international commerce, burdened with too-rapid growth and binational conflict, and underlain with a deep sense of history.
David Taylor, Working the Line (Radious Books, 2010). ABSTRACT: David Taylor’s photographic examination of the contentious territory that is the U.S./Mexico border is organized around a series of approximately 260 obelisks that demarcate this boundary, and which were installed in the late 1880s. In the course of pursuing this project, Taylor earned a remarkable degree of access to U.S. Border Patrol, the agents of which often refer to their job in the field as “line work”—a term that is also an apt description of the time Taylor has spent documenting these obelisks. He has acquired a privileged insight into the intertwined issues of border security, human and drug smuggling, the construction of the border fence and its impact on the land, and has portrayed immigration issues in a way that humanizes a difficult and sensitive social and political issue. Taylor’s compelling images capture the deep complexity of the politics and people of this terrain.
KJ