The Road to Mexico (Southwest Center Series)

The road between Tucson, Arizona, and Magdalena de Kino, Sonora, runs straight and true. Slicing through miles of rolling desert and faraway blue mountains, it could be just another fast way to get from here to there. But if the traveler has a taste for adventure and time to spare, this road can be a rich and unforgettable ride. Equipped with camera, pen, and a lively curiosity, photographer Maeve Hickey and writer Lawrence J. Taylor set out to capture whatever might come their way on the road to Mexico. They roamed and rambled, they stayed well off the beaten track, and they talked to nearly everyone they met, from wisecracking waitresses to landed gentry to street urchins dressed in rags. Their book brings to life the calf ropers and casinos, the saints and sinners, the mariachis and miracles in a no-man's-land that sometimes seems to belong neither to the United States nor to Mexico. Following the footsteps of earlier travelers-traders, warriors, missionaries, and explorers-these modern pilgrims take a hands-on approach to their journey. Throughout, both writer and photographer convey the sizzle and spice of a land where Indian, Mexican, and Anglo worlds have collided, coexisted, and melted into each other for centuries. Their eye for the hidden telling detail carries the reader straight into the action, and their zest for excitement spurs any traveler to drop everything, grab a bag, and hit the road to Mexico.

History

Taylor, Lawrence

Hickey, Maeve

Americas

University of Arizona Press

Winner of the Southwest Book Award!Beneath the streets of the U.S.-Mexico border, children are coming of age. They have come from all over Mexico to find shelter and adventure in the drainage tunnels that connect the twin cities of Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona. This book opens up the world of the tunnel kids and tells how in this murky underworld of struggling immigrants, drug dealers, and thieves, these kids have carved out a place of their own.Two parallel tunnels— each fourteen feet wide and several miles long— drain the summer rains from Mexico to the United States. Here and in the crumbling colonias you'll meet the tunnel kids: streetwise El Boston, a six-year veteran of the tunnels; his little pal Jesús; Jesús' girlfriend, La Flor, and her six-month-old baby; wild Negra; poetic Guanatos; moody Romel and his beautiful girlfriend, La Fanta. They form an extended family of some two dozen young people who live hard-edged lives and answer to no one in El Barrio Libre— the free barrio.Lawrence Taylor and Maeve Hickey met these kids at Mi Nueva Casa, the safe house built to draw the youths out of the tunnels and into a more normal life. The authors spent two summers with tunnel kids as they roamed all over Nogales and beyond in their struggle to survive. In the course of their adventures the kids described their lives, talking about what might tempt them to leave the tunnels— and what kept them there.Hickey's stunning portraits provide a heart-stopping counterpoint to Taylor's incisive prose. Story and photos together open a window into the life of the tunnel kids—a world like that of many homeless children, precarious and adaptive, albeit unique to the border. Where most people might see just another gang of doped-up, violent children, Taylor and Hickey discover displaced and sometimes heroic young people whose stories add a human dimension to the world of the U.S.-Mexico border.A guide to classroom useComments from a program that's used this title

Tunnel Kids

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Evoking the startling contrasts, brutalities, radiant beauty, and resilient people, these astonishing duotone photographs and penetrating essays reveal the ironic embrace of Nogales. The would-be immigrant caught in the tunnel between Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona, knows life is dangerous and surprising. Being robbed by roving bands of teenagers or even being flushed through to the United States by a torrential rain only to be caught by border patrol agents are both possibilities. In Nogales, Arizona, pampered California produce brokers in their hotels float lazily unaware, just yards from the tunnel that brings in immigrants and drugs. In Nogales, Sonora, old cobblestone neighborhoods meander into new ramshackle colonies towards the edge of the city, and a group of tunnel kids make a home in the house of a jailed drug lord.
 Yet beneath the harsh realities there is another cultural world that flows softly and easily over the border, like the Anglo and Mexican ranchers with intricately tooled boots who cross cattle from Mexico to the United States or the Mexican-American mariachi singer with a beaming smile and an aunt who wishes she would stick to country-western. A paltry Mexican bullfighting arena holds the anxious young picador awaiting his first trial and a handsome matador, having just skirted death, who ceremoniously presents his hat to an admiring fan. And just beyond the late-night taco truck in Arizona, a homemade shrine to Our Lady of Guadalube glimmers above Nogales Wash with outstretched arms.

Ambos Nogales: Intimate Portraits of the U.S.-Mexico Border (A School for Advanced Research Resident Scholar Book)

School for Advanced Research Press

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Books by Hickey, Maeve