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   Introduction Interviews and Borders Interviews and borders fascinate me. All types of borders: personal and political, local and distant. I enjoy crossing most borders, experiencing what’s on the other side, meeting other people and cultures I would otherwise never know. That compunction to embrace and transit borders coexists well with my habitual delight in hearing personal narratives. I love to interview. By definition, a good interview crosses borders both for the interviewee and the interviewer. The interviewee, under circumstances ideal for the interviewer, reveals more than he or she expected or intended when the conversation started, and the interviewer—me in the case of this book— learns about himself as he asks questions and hears the answers. The key to turning a simple question-and-answer session into a gripping and revealing interview is active listening. And constructive active listening is hard work. After over four decades of asking questions for a living, I have come to prefer the term conversation to the word interview. A consequential and intriguing interview stars both players; it is a theatrical give-andtake . The German word for it works perfectly: Unterhalten means both conversation and entertainment. As a journalist, I’m convinced storytelling success requires that the tale both entertain and inform. I’ve studied and reported on lives lived on both sides of the Mexican– American border since the 1960s. Before I began asking questions professionally , I made the all-but-mandatory California coming-of-age high school summer vacation trip across the border to Rosarita with a couple of classmates; and the Mexican authorities turned us back when we tried to travel south from Ensenada, because we were underage and lacked written parental permission. That event started me thinking seriously about border politics and the idea that a state authority could curtail my wanderings. xx introduction Later, as a correspondent for NBC News, I reported extensively on the spectrum of drama around our southwest border and then wrote a book analyzing Mexican migration north. I gave it the deliberately unsettling title Wetback Nation because I came to believe we Americans needed a fresh look at a rapidly worsening national tragedy. I’ve also examined the southern border from an academic perspective, studying the Mexican diaspora living and working in the United States, and as an element of my Cultural Studies PhD I’ve crossed and come up against plenty of other national borders: the DMZ and its barbed wire separating North and South Korea, the Iron Curtain, Mexico’s southern border luring undocumented Central Americans north, the nominally passive Canadian–U.S. line, Pakistan’s wild North-West Frontier Province and Afghanistan at the Khyber Pass, refugee camps in Jordan just the other side of Iraq, and post-Wall Europe, with its borders passport-free once you’re inside the Schengen zone. We all cross lines—political, cultural, social, familial, personal— continually. We’re not static and in one place, ever. Get up in the morning and stumble to the bathroom. There is probably a door on that bathroom. Do you close it? That probably depends on who is in the house with you. If you’ve been sleeping with a friend or a lover, or just sharing a bed for convenience, you’ve faced a border before the bathroom. “Get back on your side of the bed,” you may have mumbled if your companion disturbed your sleep. Or, “You’ve got all the covers!” We are surrounded by borders. They provide us with security and comfort, limits and definitions. Crossed, some borderlines generate fear, hate, rage, and war. Once in the bathroom, perhaps you decide to close the door. You might want some privacy while you go about your morning routine. Or maybe you don’t want to disturb your companion with the noise you make, and closing the door creates some sound barrier. If the door is equipped with a lock, you face another decision: create complete privacy by pushing on the button on the knob or allow your companion(s) to choose whether to respect the indication that you made when you shut the door that you wish privacy. Of course, in most modern American houses, you can defeat the bathroom door lock by sticking a bobby pin or a nail into the hole in the knob on the outside of the door. So the security of your privacy in the bathroom depends on an expectation [18.216.121.55] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 23:29 GMT...

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