Crossing - Softcover

Manuel Luis Martinez

3.83

18 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0927534800 ISBN 13: 9780927534802

Publisher: Bilingual Review Pr, 1998

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Novel. In CROSSING, Manuel Luis Martinez explores the American obsession with mobility, the irrepressible hope that there must be something better somewhere and the relentless desire to move on in search of this elusive goal. Inspired by a newspaper account of thirteen undocumented workers left to suffocate in a boxcar outside El Paso, CROSSING tells the story of Luis, a boy who leaves his small town in Mexico to seek his fortune in the United States. Martinez was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, and is now an assistant professor in the English department at Indiana University in Bloomington.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Inspired by the story of 13 undocumented immigrants who were left to suffocate in a boxcar outside El Paso, Mart!nez's occasionally stilted but harrowing debut tells the story of 16-year-old Luis, who leaves his impoverished native village in Mexico for the U. S. and finds himself caught by a "coyote," or immigrant-smuggler, in a deadly swindle. By the end of his journey north, locked with 12 other men in a train car, Luis will have witnessed several crossings: from one country to another, from one life to another, from child to adult, from home to hell, from life to death. As the car gathers allegorical significance and the men face death by thirst, Mart!nez shows us the paths that have led them to their little hell on wheels. Unfortunately, the novel's language feels as sapped of energy as the trapped men, and the story rolls on about as slowly as the train. Yet the simplicity of the premise and of Mart!nez's prose allows moments of poignancy and captures the characters' deadly struggle, with thirst and one another, to survive.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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