By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border

This novelistic portrait of Tijuana garbage pickers and dump dwellers is variously funny, sad and startling. Americans who think that they have encountered real poverty in the south Bronx will be in for a shock when they read this book. And yet this is not a story of desperation. Urrea (born of a Mexican father and an American mother) does not ask pity for his subjects. Neither does he repeat childish political slogans about inequality (except to make them sound silly). Rather, he reveals the fascinating lives of resourceful Mexicans living along the border.