Record Display for the EPA National Library Catalog

RECORD NUMBER: 45 OF 206

Main Title By the lake of sleeping children : the secret life of the Mexican border /
Author Urrea, Luis Alberto.
Other Authors
Author Title of a Work
Lueders-Booth, John,
Publisher Anchor Books,
Year Published 1996
OCLC Number 34409817
ISBN 0385484194; 9780385484190
Subjects Tijuana (Baja California, Mexico)--Social conditions ; Mexican-American Border Region--Social conditions ; Ragpickers--Mexico--Tijuana (Baja California) ; North America--Mexican-American Border Region ; Social history
Internet Access
Description Access URL
Contributor biographical information https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1702/96011784-b.html
Publisher description https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1702/96011784-d.html
Holdings
Library Call Number Additional Info Location Last
Modified
Checkout
Status
EJAM  HN120.T52U773 1996 Hispanic Collection Region 3 Library/Philadelphia, PA 11/12/2014
Collation xvii, 187 p. : ill. ; 21 cm.
Contents Notes
Introductory matters: Home of the brave. -- A lake of sleeping children. -- Dompe days. -- The pink penitentiary. -- Words in collision. -- Borderland blues: six impressions. -- In the wet. -- The bald monkey and other atrocities. -- The stupidity of evil: adventures in the woman trade. -- A day in the life. 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.