Luis Urrea - Across the Wire. Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border

Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of Across the Wire and By the Lake of the Sleeping Children, both non-fiction books about the U.S.Mexico border; several novels, including Into the Beautiful North and The Hummingbirds Daughter; and several collections of poetry. He is a professor of creative writing at University of Illinois at Chicago.

Nonfiction

The Devils Highway: A True Story

Nobodys Son: Notes from

Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border

By the Lake of the Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border

Nobodys Son: Notes from an American Life

Wandering Time

Fiction

Into the Beautiful North

The Hummingbirds Daughter

In Search of Snow

Six Kinds of Sky

Poetry

The Fever of Being

Ghost Sickness

Vatos

Advance praise for Luis Alberto Urreas
ACROSS THE WIRE

Luis Alberto Urreas fine and passionate book about the Mexican poor is nothing less than a travel book to the strange and enduring territory we call the human soul.

Richard Rodriguez,
author of Hunger of Memory

Across the Wire tells of a poverty so immenseit carries over generations, crosses borders, follows lives beyond death, and will haunt your sleep.

Ana Castillo,
author of The Mixquiahuala Letters

Across the Wire graphically portrays life on the trash dumps of Tijuana, a life Luis Alberto Urrea shared with los de abajo, those who scratch out a living in the nightmarish world of the dompes.

Those interested in the U.S./Mexico border should read this vivid portrayal of the people who survive in this cesspool which society has created, then forgotten. Urrea has written a work full of despair, yet with flashes of hope, a story which will continue to haunt us. Those forgotten people, Urrea reminds us with compassion, are fellow human beings.

Urrea deserves recognition for his work among the poor, for reaching out to help the families and the children, and for having the guts to write the story.

Rudolfo Anaya,
author of Bless Me, Ultima

Across the Wire takes you across the cold, objective language and reality described by political discourses into the human tears and laughter that make up daily life at the U.S./Mexico border. I applaud Luis Alberto Urrea for daring to think, speak, and write with emotion for daring to feel in a time of reason.

Laura Esquivel,
author of Like Water for Chocolate

Like its title, Across the Wire is a book that stands at the border between tenderness and anger, death and life. It is an examination of love at the center of devastation, a work of witness, compassion, and finally, of hope.

Linda Hogan,
author of Mean Spirit

Perhaps only Luis Alberto Urrea could have written this book. Not only because he is a bilingual Chicano, born in Tijuana and raised in San Diego, but also because he is genuinely driven by compassion. Urrea never thinks of the poor as a stereotypic they; he never lets us forget that humor, devotion, and even love can coexist with the most desperate circumstances. A more simplistic writer would anesthetize us to these lives by letting us imagine the poor as dehumanized; Urrea shows us that full humanity persists in situations we would not know how to endure. Across the Wire is mostly a book about human suffering, but it never loses hope, and that hope is earned because it is grounded in no illusions. As Urrea says in the end, you do what you canand he has done what few could do in writing this book.

Lowry Pei,
author of Family Resemblances

Whether in Egypt, Manila or Tijuana, families who live among garbagethe most abject human living conditions imaginableare a testament to the spirit of survival. Urrea captures this spirit in his inimitable fashion: straightforward, with plenty of humor, but no gratuitous pity. We learn about life on the U.S./Mexican border, and we learn about ourselves.

I recommend this book for the general reader, but also for undergraduate students in sociology of poverty, community studies, U.S. and Mexican anthropology and history, and border studies.

Evelyn Hu-DeHart
Director, Center for Studies of Ethnicity
and Race in America (CSERA),
and Professor of History (Mexico and
Latin America/Caribbean), University of Colorado at Boulder

F IRST A NCHOR B OOKS E DITION , J ANUARY 1993

Copyright 1993 by Luis Alberto Urrea
Photographs copyright 1993 by John Lueders-Booth

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

A NCHOR B OOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The stories in this collection are true. Some names and identities and, especially locations have been changed. In all cases, accuracy has been preserved in spite of considerations of security.

Most of the pieces gathered in this volume originally appeared in the San Diego Reader, many of them under different titles. They include Los Cementeros, Christmas Story, Fathers Day, Good Friday, Happy Birthday, Laura Patricia, The Last Soldier of Pancho Villa, Meet the Satnicos, Negra, Pamplonada, Tijuana Cop, all the sections of Sifting Through the Trash, and, finally, portions of the Preface and Prologue.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Urrea, Luis Alberto.
Across the wire: life and hard times on the Mexican border / Luis Alberto Urrea: photographs by John Lueders-Booth.1st Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.

1. Tijuana (Baja California, Mexico)Social conditions. 2. Tijuana
(Baja California, Mexico)Economic conditions. 3. Mexican
American Border RegionSocial conditions. 4. Mexican-American Border
RegionEconomic conditions. I. Title.
HN120.T52U77 1993
972.2dc20 92-12680

eISBN: 978-0-307-77374-6

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

For Von

T here is a joke told on the border, and it is relished or denounced with equal levels of resignation. It is either a witty take on Cold War rhetoric or a racist epithet politically incorrect in every way. It refers to the hopelessly tattered yet imposing borderline, where thousands of Mexicans pour across every week under helicopters and infrared night-scopes. It refers to the obscure secrets that fester behind the wires, the dastardliness of Mexico that grows into popular myth in our imaginations.