Read your way through the US-Mexico border region
Which books and authors should I bring?
A key feature of frontier culture is the appeal of a bargain. For decades, the clarion call of cheap exhaust (“mofle”) shops drew tourists south; now it’s cheap dentures and Viagra. So let’s offer a one-stop classic, the anthology “Puro Border: dispatches, snapshots and graffiti from La Frontera.” Edited by Tijuana’s greatest literary son, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, along with El Paso’s late great Bobby Byrd and his son John William Byrd, this wild anthology covers the good, the bad and the ugly. Many of the greatest frontier thinkers and writers are featured on the cover: Charles Bowden, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sam Quinones, Juan Villoro, and Doug Peacock (model for the infamous hero from Edward Abbey’s novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang”), among others. Funky, funny, literary, angry – it will show you things you may have wondered about and things you may not have imagined.
What writers or books will help me feel the spirit of this place?
Even if you don’t read poetry, the borderlands need it. In a place that is opulent and austere, strange and homely, full of symphonies of languages and accents, smells and sounds, silence and gritty music, nothing can touch the experience of being there like poetry. It’s no coincidence that most of the writers on my list are also poets. They will transport you.
Ophelia Zepeda, a 1999 MacArthur Fellow, is a Tohono O’odham poet with such elegant and precise rhetoric, such integrity of culture and vision, that you miss her quiet genius at your peril. She returned the songs of the Tohono O’odham to the land. Come to the chapels of her books “Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert” And “Where clouds are formed.”
I highly recommend a book that gives me endless joy as a reader and endless inspiration as a writer: Harry Polkinhorn and Mark Weiss’ seminal anthology “Across the Line / Al Otro Lado.” It encompasses the broad and surprising corpus of Baja California’s poetry, from native chants to postmodern epics, and includes works that reflect the flavored cross-genre/cross-cultural/cross-border adventures the writers foresee in the depths of this decade.
Arizona’s first poet laureate, Alberto Rios, born in Nogales, Ariz., is a true frontier writer. Though all his poetry books are excellent, “A Little Story About the Sky” remains my favourite. Of particular interest to this list is, however “Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir.”