Recent Research on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Down By the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family. By Charles Bowden. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. Pp. 433. $27.00 cloth.)

Huesos en el desierto. By Sergio González Rodríguez. (Barcelona, Spain: Editorial Anagrama, 2002. Pp. 334. $18.86 paper.)

Genders In Production: Making Women Workers in Mexico's Global Factories. by Leslie Salzinger. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. 217. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.)

Fronteras No MÁS: Toward Social Justice at the U.S.-Mexico Border. By Kathleen Staudt and Irasema Coronado. (New York and Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. 204. $69.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.)

Ethnography at the Border. Edited by Pablo Vila. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. 345. $63.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.)

Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. By Pablo Vila. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Pp. 290. $42.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Colonias And Public Policy in Texas and Mexico: Urbanization by Stealth. By Peter M. Ward. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Pp. 287. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Interest in the U.S.-Mexico border has increased significantly in recent years, with both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, there are a greater number of social science studies of the border. On the negative side, issue-driven coverage of the border, both journalistic and scholarly, often leaves a lot to be desired.

The long history of sensationalist journalistic treatments of the border reflects American uneasiness about the edges of the nation-state and its ambiguous relationship to the Midwest and East Coast centers of power and mainstream culture. As a liminal zone, the border has become a repository for fears about racial mixing, cultural purity, moral decadence, economic decline, and political threat. Hence lurid accounts of violence, drugs, and illegal smuggling pervade journalistic representations of the border. Enter Charles Bowden, a gifted writer of fiction and non-fiction accounts of nature and the American Southwest. Bowden's award-winning 1998 book Juárez: The Laboratory of our Future presented a scary tableau of a world gone awry: a dreadfully unjust, polluted nightmare reminiscent of the movie Blade Runner. In Bowden's Juárez, teenage girls slave away mercilessly in toxin-spewing factories (run by heartless North American capitalist exploiters) while in the street, vicious gang members and drug traffickers terrorize the population. If you did not get the message, the startling photographs of cadavers, billowing smokestacks, and urban sprawl and decay hammer home the point. These images and Bowden's prose were powerful enough to bring accolades to the author and photographers, and spark controversy in the El Paso/Juárez area where a forum to critique Bowden's representation of the border was held at a local art center. Local writer Debbie Nathan also wrote a rebuttal of Bowden's book.

Undaunted, Bowden produced a longer and more detailed account of border crime, corruption, and vice—the best-selling Down by the River, a riveting story of the killing of the beloved brother of a Mexican-AmericanU.S. Drug Enforcement Administration(DEA) agent, Phillip Jordan, and the Jordan/Forti family's desperate attempts to obtain justice. Written with Bowden's usual panache and vividness, Down by the River is a remarkably intimate, detailed look inside a Mexican American/Mexican border family. The strength of the book is its revealing illustration of family dynamics, Catholic religious practices, and barrio life in El Paso. Few social scientific treatments of border families can match the vigor and depth of Bowden's descriptions.

But what of the usefulness of Bowden's broader arguments about drug trafficking, law, and violence along the border? As in his earlier work, the writer sees a border netherworld, perhaps more powerful than official society, in...