Hardship on the border

- Joe Burgan

I recommend "Across the Wire : Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border" By Luis Alberto Urrea. Summary: Much has been written about the hardships faced by Mexicans who have illegally crossed over into the United States, but until now almost no attention has been paid to the terrible living conditions these people suffer "across the wire" (behind the Mexican border), which forces so many of them to make the dangerous journey to the U.S. Review: Urrea, a Mexican-born American, worked from 1978 to 1982 for a Protestant aid group in Tijuana, and he wrote these fragmentary, evocative tales of heartbreak and hope for the San Diego Reader after he returned to the region in 1990. ``Poverty is personal: it smells and it shocks and it invades your space,'' Urrea declares, and he admits to being thrilled by both the goodness and the squalor he knew intimately. He visits the dumps where people live, their possessions a bed and a car-battery-powered television. He travels with a Tijuana cop, working ``a city of famed vice,'' and learns how the cop extracts sexual favors from American women. In one arresting chapter he records his father's death in a car accident, the tragedy compounded by police and funeral costs and a battle with the father's insurance company. Urrea ends with a manic, magic ``Christmas story,'' about a gift giveaway organized by a San Diego rock radio station and attended by a band called the Trash Can Sinatras. There Urrea reunites with Negra--who as a little girl made a shrine out of the doll he gave her, and who says, ``I never forgot you, Luis.''