The wind doesn't need a passport : / stories from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands Tyche Hendricks.

"Portions of this work originally appeared, in different form, in the San Francisco Chronicle series "On The Border."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Elsa: "we want to hold our kids close forever" -- McAllen/Reynosa: "most people here work in the maquiladoras" -- Hachita: "a fence is only as good as its weakest point" -- Nogales/Nogales: "if they get sick here, we care for them"-- Sells: "O'Odham first and American or Mexican second" -- Mexicali: "the wind doesn't need a passport" -- Jacumba: "the border is a sham" -- Tijuana: "a constant drumbeat of killings."

"Award-winning journalist Tyche Hendricks has explored the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by car and by foot, on horseback, and in the back of a pickup truck. She has shared meals with border residents, listened to their stories, and visited their homes, churches, hospitals, farms, and jails. In this dazzling portrait of one of the least understood and most debated regions in the country, Hendricks introduces us to the ordinary Americans and Mexicans who live there -- cowboys and Indians, factory workers and physicians, naturalists and nuns. A new picture of the borderlands emerges, and we find that this region is not the dividing line so often imagined by Americans, but is a common ground alive with the energy of cultural exchange and international commerce, burdened with too-rapid growth and binational conflict, and underlain with a deep sense of history." -- Publisher description.