Border Crosser
One Gringo's Illicit Passage from Mexico into America
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Johnny Rico is back. After risking his life as an Afghanistan stop-loss soldier, an experience he described in the cult phenomenon Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green, he now dares to embed himself on both sides of America’s most dangerous domestic conflict–the war for and against illegal immigration–in an exhilarating new exercise in immersion journalism.
The gonzo author–part Hunter Thompson, part George Plimpton–explores a seemingly insoluble issue by getting his hands dirty and his boots on the ground. As a “typically spoiled American” who doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish, he takes it upon himself to try to cross the Mexican border into the United States illegally.
Eager to tell the story from all sides–or simply to get good material for his book–Rico also travels treacherously with the Border Patrol, meets extreme immigrant advocates who publish maps for illegals, visits a modern-day “underground railroad” in Texas, and hunts for miscreants with angry vigilantes.
In such hot spots as the Tecate Line, a forty-five-mile stretch of hills on California’s southern fringe, and Arizona’s Amnesty Trail, the single busiest part of the U.S. border, Rico encounters Los Zetas, the paramilitatry group that has taken over Mexico’s drug cartels, interviews the volunteer Minutemen, who believe in an imminent and apocalyptic Mexican invasion, and tries to recruit coyotes (human smugglers, usually fortified by meth and cocaine).
In his heedless and openly opportunistic style, Rico unearths more truths about this explosive subject than most traditional reporters could ever hope to. Border Crosser is another knockout from this new-generation journalist, at once a concerned citizen, courageous spy, and unparalleled author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The vexed issue of illegal immigration is goosed in this raucous, hammy odyssey. Rico, a self-proclaimed gonzo journalist and "soft, white... middle-class American" with no Spanish, set out to portray the Mexican migrant experience by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, and spends the book searching the border's 2,000-mile length for a safe, convenient place to do so. Such does not exist along a frontier controlled on one side by the U.S. Border Patrol and on the other by drug cartels and gang-affiliated coyotes, and Rico's quest eventually reduces him to an almost authentic state of semicriminal desperation. Along the way, he debates and mocks ideologues on all sides, from nutty Minutemen border vigilantes to na ve open-border activists. The book is more about writing a book about the border than it is about the border. Rico himself, with his exaggerated angst, is always the showy central character, and many of his encounters parading his Minutemen T-shirt before offended Mexican-Americans, soliciting coyotes in a Mexican strip-joint are transparently staged. Still, when he takes the spotlight off himself, he conveys an arresting panorama of an out-of-control borderland full of seething rancor and foolish dreams.