Thursday, July 1 12:30pm - 1:30pm
Atlantic Room at Tides, Thoreau Center
From a distance, the U.S.-Mexico border looks like a dividing line. In her new book, The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, journalist Tyche Hendricks shows us that that border is actually a region. A complex, multi-faceted, often-misunderstood, bi-national terrain, it is more borderlands than borderline.
Many people have lives on both sides: they cross daily for work, school, family, shopping. Pollution and disease flow back and forth. Extensive trade and economic activity tie the United States and Mexico together. And there's a shared history and culture. But with a stalled immigration policy and a raging drug war, it's the people who live in the borderlands who are bearing the brunt of the violence, the political friction and the pressures of the recession.
Hendricks traveled through the border region and gathered some remarkable stories -- from emergency rooms and factory floors, farm kitchens and jail cells. She saw American and Mexican cowboys, environmentalists, nurses and nuns wrestling with shared bi-national problems. A better understanding of the borderlands -- and the way the United States and Mexico are connected there -- could help policymakers reach more lasting solutions that benefit both countries.
Tyche Hendricks reported on immigration and immigrant communities at the San Francisco Chronicle for many years. She has taught at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and took her international reporting students to Tijuana last winter. She is now an editor for The California Report on KQED Public Radio. The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands is out this month from the University of California Press.
Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.
