Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border

A compelling and unprecedented look at life on the other side of the border.  Despite the numbers of people crossing over to the U.S., hundreds more remain behind in abject poverty.  Urrea worked closely with them and provides a compassionate and candid account of their lives.

Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire offers a compelling and unprecedented look atwhat life is like forthose refugees living on theMexicanside of the border a world that is only some twenty miles from San Diego, but that few have seen.Urrea gives us a compassionate and candid account of his work as a member and "official translator" of a crew of relief workers that provided aid to the many refugees hidden just behind the flashy tourist spots of Tijuana. His account of the struggle of these people to survive amid abject poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and the legal and political chaos that reign in the Mexican borderlands explains without a doubt the reason so many are forced to make the dangerous and illegal journey "across the wire" into the United States.
More than just an expose, Across the Wire is a tribute to the tenacity of a people who have learned to survive against the most impossible odds, and returns to these forgotten people their pride and their identity.

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Luis Alberto Urrea was born in Tijuana to an American mother and a Mexican father.  He graduated from the University of California, San Diego, in 1977.  After working as a film extra, he joined a crew of relief workers helping the poor on the Mexican side of the border.  In 1982, he went to Massachusetts, where he taught Expository Writing at Harvard.  Currently, he lives in Boulder, Colorado.