The Wind Doesn&39t Need a Passport Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands [Hardcover]

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 therecowboys 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.

Tyche Hendrickscovered immigration and demographics for many years at theSan Francisco Chronicle. She is an editor at KQED public radio and a lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

There are other books dealing with life at the border, but none as intelligent, searching, objective or encompassing as Tyche Hendricks' vivid evocation of this region--its people, its landscape, its industry, its problems and its unique culture. Peter Schrag, author ofNot Fit for Society: Immigration and Nativism in America

This vivid, evocative book made me think of the Robert Frost line, 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall.' Tyche Hendricks' multilayered portrait of the human communities that transcend the U.S.-Mexico border should remind us all of what an artificial thing barriers, fences and checkpoints are. Maybe, just maybe, someday we, like so much of western Europe, can do without them. Adam Hochschild, author ofBury the Chains

This is an ambitious undertaking and Hendricks excels, finding stories alS8