The Devil's Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea
This is the story of a group of men who have become known as the Yuma 14. They are the fourteen illegal immigrants who died attempting to cross the Arizona border in May, 2001. And what a terrible and upsetting story it is. Unknown numbers of these illegal immigrants die every year making the dangerous crossing on foot over one of the most inhospitable stretches of terrain in the world. But the Yuma 14 constituted the largest known number of such immigrants to die at one time.
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Border Crossings by David L. Fleming
The book is ased on an actual incident in relations between the U.S. and Mexico when, in 1916, Pancho Villa's bandidos, led by Antonio Salazar, raided the small town of Columbus, New Mexico. The border between the two countries in those times was a more tense and seemingly less well-defined place at the beginning of the century. Certainly there was less coming-and-going between the two countries then.
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The Annexation of Mexico: From the Aztecs to the Imf, One Reporter's Journey through History by John Ross
Ross, a social activist, poet and working reporter based in Mexico City, has a lively and irreverent style. It makes his book an enjoyable read, despite the sometimes heavy material. His thesis is that outsiders, and most especially the United States, have never stopped trying to control or annex "this enormously rich, indescribably poor nation" in one way or another for centuries. Usually this was accomplished through plain old land-grabbing. Today the process continues through economic instruments such as indebtedness, NAFTA and the war on drugs.
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