Living on the Edge of America: At Home on the Texas-Mexico Border (Wardlaw Books) - Hardcover

Maril, Robert Lee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0890965056 ISBN 13: 9780890965054

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press, 1992

Synopsis

On the southern edge of America a diverse group of people lead ordinary lives in rather extraordinary circumstances. Mexican Americans, Anglos, and Mexican nationals meet there, in the subtropical beauty of the Rio Grande Valley and amid conditions of extreme poverty and social inequality, and create a distinctive blend of cultures, languages, and attitudes toward life. The stories that emerge are stories of individual victories, daily standoffs, and brutalizing defeats.

Writer-sociologist Robert Lee Maril tells some of these stories, observed and absorbed during the thirteen years he lived and taught in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. In those years, he grew used to the limpid heat, the smell of possum sweating in the moonlight outside his bedroom window, the young men studying to become gasoline mechanics, and the young women walking across the stage as the first in their families to graduate from college. The stories he tells are vivid and affecting, filled with palm fronds groaning in a burning wind, bulging pink gecko eyes under the porch light, Mando’s karate academy, professors who study rocks and flies, and the small but important victories of junior high students whose families do not speak English. They are stories that recognize the forces at work in people’s lives which are beyond their control, but also the qualities of courage, humor, resignation, and sometimes despair that translate those forces in the crucibles of individual lives into unique experiences.

The warm, personal accounts that make up this book give a vivid impression of what it is to live in one of the poorest but most intriguing regions of the United States, a region that has much to teach about America’s present and future.

About this title

About the Author:

ROBERT LEE MARIL, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Washington University, worked in the Valley first as a reading teacher for migrant farm workers, then as a college teacher and researcher. He also served as a consultant to a health agency for low-income women before he and his wife, Andrea, started a tricultural junior high and high school in Brownsville. He now teaches at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of Cannibals and Condos, and Texas Shrimpers, both published by Texas A&M University Press, and of Poorest of Americans.

From Publishers Weekly:

An atmospheric and slightly surreal quality enriches this paean to the Rio Grande Valley by Maril ( Cannibals and Condos ), a sociologist who moved from upstate New York in 1975 and wound up teaching in Brownsville, Tex., for the next 13 years. At first overwhelmed by the heat and the palmetto bugs, he soon adjusted to the climate--meteorological and cultural--of the region. These recollections are sympathetic quirky portrayals of the mostly Mexican and Mexican-American people Maril taught, worked for, hung out with and in two cases, served as foster parents for. Especially notable are his descriptons of the landscape, as when he writes about the smell of ``the hyperventilated blend of rich desert air, diesel fumes, orange blossoms, human sweat, at base, the aroma of thick stands of mesquite resistant under the stars.'' Occasionally he lapses into a sociologist's obsessive noting of details, interesting or not. But mostly this is a zesty account of Tex-Mex life.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0890965056
• ISBN 13: 9780890965054
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200