By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border - Softcover

Urrea, Luis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385484194 ISBN 13: 9780385484190

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1996

Synopsis

By the Lake of Sleeping Children explores the post-NAFTA and Proposition 187 border purgatory of garbage pickers and dump dwellers, gawking tourists, and relief workers, fearsome coyotes, and their desperate clientele. In 16 indelible portraits, Urrea illuminates the horrors and the simple joys of people trapped between the two worlds of Mexico and the United States—and ignored by both. The result is a startling and memorable work of first-person reportage.

About this title

Review:

This novelistic portrait of Tijuana garbage pickers and dump dwellers is variously funny, sad and startling. Americans who think that they have encountered real poverty in the south Bronx will be in for a shock when they read this book. And yet this is not a story of desperation. Urrea (born of a Mexican father and an American mother) does not ask pity for his subjects. Neither does he repeat childish political slogans about inequality (except to make them sound silly). Rather, he reveals the fascinating lives of resourceful Mexicans living along the border.

From the Back Cover:

Luis Alberto Urrea's first book, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border, was a haunting and unprecedented look at what life is like for those living on the Mexican side of the border, eking out only the barest of lives not far from the white sands and coral reefs of Southern California. His poignant, widely acclaimed account of the struggle of these people to survive amid the abject poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and legal and political chaos that reign in the Mexican borderlands vividly illustrated why so many are forced to make the treacherous and illegal journey "across the wire" into the United States. Written with the same unflagging curiosity, compassion, mordant wit, and novelistic sense of detail that made Across the Wire "a work of investigative reporting that is also a bittersweet song of human anguish" (Los Angeles Times), By the Lake of Sleeping Children explores the post-NAFTA and Proposition 187 border purgatory of garbage pickers and dump dwellers, gawking tourists and relief workers, fearsome coyotes and their desperate clientele. In sixteen indelible portraits, Urrea illuminates the horrors and the simple joys of people trapped between the two worlds of Mexico and the United States - and ignored by both. The result is a startling and memorable work of first-person reportage.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0385484194
• ISBN 13: 9780385484190
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208