By the Lake of Sleeping Children - by Luis Urrea (Paperback)

About the Book

The award-winning author of Across the Wire delves into the post-NAFTA and Proposition 187 border purgatory of garbage pickers and dump dwellers in By the Lake of Sleeping Children. In 16 indelible portraits, Urrea illuminates the horrors and the simple joys of people trapped between the two worlds of Mexico and the United States--and ignored by both. 10 photos.

Book Synopsis

By the Lake of Sleeping Children explores the post-NAFTA and Proposition 187 border purgatory of garbage pickers and dump dwellers, gawking tourists, and relief workers, fearsome coyotes, and their desperate clientele. In 16 indelible portraits, Urrea illuminates the horrors and the simple joys of people trapped between the two worlds of Mexico and the United States--and ignored by both. The result is a startling and memorable work of first-person reportage.

From the Back Cover

Luis Alberto Urrea's first book, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border, was a haunting and unprecedented look at what life is like for those living on the Mexican side of the border, eking out only the barest of lives not far from the white sands and coral reefs of Southern California. His poignant, widely acclaimed account of the struggle of these people to survive amid the abject poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and legal and political chaos that reign in the Mexican borderlands vividly illustrated why so many are forced to make the treacherous and illegal journey "across the wire" into the United States. Written with the same unflagging curiosity, compassion, mordant wit, and novelistic sense of detail that made Across the Wire "a work of investigative reporting that is also a bittersweet song of human anguish" (Los Angeles Times), By the Lake of Sleeping Children explores the post-NAFTA and Proposition 187 border purgatory of garbage pickers and dump dwellers, gawking tourists and relief workers, fearsome coyotes and their desperate clientele. In sixteen indelible portraits, Urrea illuminates the horrors and the simple joys of people trapped between the two worlds of Mexico and the United States - and ignored by both. The result is a startling and memorable work of first-person reportage.

About the Author

Luis Alberto Urrea was born in Tijuana to an American mother and a Mexican father. He graduated from the University of California, San Diego, in 1977. After working as a film extra, he joined a crew of relief workers helping the poor on the Mexican side of the border. In 1982, he went to Massachusetts, where he taught Expository Writing at Harvard. Currently, he lives in Boulder, Colorado.