CUTTING FOR SIGN - Hardcover

Langewiesche, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679411135 ISBN 13: 9780679411130

Publisher: Pantheon, 1994

Synopsis

A portrait on the 1,951-mile border that divides Mexico and the United States shows how one line can divide the first and third worlds and can reflect the ideals and fears of two nations. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

William Langewiesche is the author of seven previous books: Cutting for Sign, Sahara Unveiled, Inside the Sky, American Ground, The Outlaw Sea, The Atomic Bazaar, and, most recently, Fly By Wire. He is the international editor for Vanity Fair.

From Kirkus Reviews:

From frequent Atlantic contributor Langewiesche--a former pilot who worked the Texas-Mexico border--a terse, clear, tough- minded account of life on both sides of the line. (The title-- jargon used by customs officials on Arizona's O'odham Indian reservation--means searching for and reading the tracks of immigrants and drug-runners.) Langewiesche begins and ends his journey in the tense little Texan border town of Marfa (named, improbably, for a character in The Brothers Karamazov), where he lived for years. In between, he travels the line from Tijuana in the west all the way east to Brownsville/Matamoros on the Gulf of Mexico. He describes the waves of immigrants coming across to San Diego; the futile efforts of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to slow the traffic north; INS racism and brutality; the corruption, on both sides of the border, of law-enforcement officials protecting and profiting from the drug trade; the horrendous working and living conditions in Juarez and Matamoros as US business invests heavily in maquilas, the assembly plants where Mexico workers make less in a day than US workers make in an hour. Langewiesche sketches memorable portraits of unsung heroes and saints, Mexican and American, working to protect the rights of ``illegales'' in California or of fellow workers--mostly women, mostly young--in the maquilas. A little more Mexican history and culture, a greater sense of what's destroyed back home when Oaxaca villagers pick up and move north, would have given tragic depth to Langewiesche's report. Still, the author shows us the appalling human reality behind business-page slogans and shibboleths--NAFTA, the global economy, the free market--and he makes the border itself look as arbitrary, strange, and inevitable as the Berlin Wall in its day. And of equal geopolitical significance. Compassionate, risk-taking reporting: timely and valuable. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0679411135
• ISBN 13: 9780679411130
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 247