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BY THE LAKE OF SLEEPING CHILDREN

THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MEXICAN BORDER

Urrea returns to the setting of his well-received first book, Across the Wire (not reviewed), for another look at the impact of NAFTA on the lives of those who live in the direst poverty on the US-Mexico border. Urrea was born in Tijuana, the son of a Mexican police official and an American mother. As he wryly observes, ``The border runs down the middle of me.'' Fluently bilingual, he is unusually well equipped to write about the town of his birth and the border area it bestrides. Although he readily admits that there are many parts of Tijuana that are not characterized by the squalor of which he writes, he is drawn once again to the lowest of the low, the basureros, the families living in cardboard boxes and makeshift shacks near the city's huge garbage dump, surviving by picking through the rubbish found there each day. The portrait of daily life that emerges is not without its familiar contours—readers of Alex Kotlowitz and Jonathan Kozol will recognize the plight of children raised in such circumstances. But there is little in the day-to-day experiences of Americans that compares to the sheer grinding misery of the lives that Urrea depicts. Yet, as his book repeatedly demonstrates, the people of the dump possess a dignity and independence that is admirable. The work of the garbage-pickers is governed by clear rules, and as the book's final chapter makes overwhelmingly clear, this is a community in the best sense, quick to give a helping hand and solicitous of its constituents. Written in no small part as a response to California's Proposition 187 and the false hopes stirred by NAFTA, the book is a stinging and impassioned answer to the anti-immigration wave cresting in American politics today.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-385-48419-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Anchor

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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