The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (review)

The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport is a collection of stories taken from Hendricks's experiences at the border during her years as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. She was first sent to cover illegal immigration (a hot button issue even a dozen years ago), and she describes how her first impression of the border left her feeling "as if the two sides of the line were parallel worlds cut off from one another" (4). Yet there is no real line in the sand, marked like the line on a map. Instead, as she came to find on subsequent trips over the years, the border is "a dynamic region that straddles the boundary and extends into two countries. It's a place that's alive with the energy of cultural exchange and international commerce, freighted with the burdens of too-rapid growth and binational conflicts, and underlain by a deep sense of history" (4). Each of the "human stories about people and communities along the entire length of the border ... seeks to illuminate something about a particular area and a particular issue," and, in doing so, each establishes a relationship with people and brings to light how complex the border really is (9).

One way that Hendricks establishes complexity is through stories that illustrate the intimacy between border communities and the interconnections in residents' lives. Border inhabitants are often busy dealing with issues at the border in a compassionate and intelligent manner, without waiting for politics to catch up. One area where this can happen is in medical services. Hendricks tells the story of Ambos Nogales (referring to the towns of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora). As Hendricks relates, "before the U.S. government erected a two-mile-long, fourteen-foot-tall steel wall in 1994 between the two Nogaleses ... , the two towns used to share annual parades and a sense of civic and cultural unity" (82). Now they share the struggle to access medical care for immigrants who are injured or ill on this side of the border, plus a commitment to treat with compassion people who are not native to either town. Hendricks's story covers the relationship between two overburdened hospitals, Holy Cross in Arizona and the Hospital General in Sonora. Each is committed to helping all people, and they share the information and resources necessary to get it done. Hendricks quotes the director of Holy Cross as saying that "one of the things we're trying to do in health care is blow up the wall" (82). The creativity and interconnection between the two hospitals is admirable, but the border is also a place where the problems of treating the uninsured and the undocumented (on both sides of the border) are writ large.

In this story, as in all the stories in the book, Hendricks refuses to simplify or to elide the difficulties at the border. However, she also refuses to simplify the relationships and the strong web of connected lives that intersect at the borderlands. She writes in her conclusion that "to turn the border into a dividing line is to ignore and undercut the ways in which it is a meeting place" (195). There are many problems at the border: drugs, illegal immigration, crime, and health care among them. However, Hendricks's stories bring these to life while reminding readers of the rich, shared history and culture at the borderlands that many people from both sides call home.