Beyond the Border Line

The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
by Tyche Hendricks

Reviewed by Erica E Phillips

The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport, by Tyche HendricksBeyond its physical demarcation, the border between the United States and Mexico is, above all, a region – and one rich with humanity. In her first book, veteran immigration reporter Tyche Hendricks has compiled many of the stories she came across during her travels through the region, characterizing it as “defined by its proximity to the border and to the country on the other side.”

Through vivid storytelling, Hendricks illuminates not only the unique history of the borderlands, but its people, culture, and politics. Beginning at the East end of the border, the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, and journeying as far as Tijuana at the western end, Hendricks visits many of the unknown outposts of the borderlands – some divided by a muddy river, others by tall metal fences.

The human stories in The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport originate on either side of the line, but more often they exist on both sides – the business manager of a Mexican maquiladora, who lives on the U.S. side and commutes through customs every day; the schoolchildren living on the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation, which straddles the border between Arizona and Sonora, who catch the school bus at an opening in the barbed wire border fence each morning. The line is an everyday reality for them, a “permeable membrane where commerce and culture, air and water, workers and students, pollution and disease flow back and forth daily.” Were it not for this very real line, much of the region’s industry – and thus many of its thriving cities – would not be here.

Perhaps most poignant is Hendricks’s careful alignment of many parallel narratives on either side of the border. In McAllen, Texas, a wealthy housewife struggles with her social position. She moved from rural Kansas into a suburban subdivision, where her comfortable home has a pool and air conditioning. A mother on the other side of the border in Reynosa, Tamaulipas emerges from a shack, breaks down a wooden crate to build a fire, and de-feathers a chicken for her husband’s supper. Both of the women’s husbands commute to the same Mexican factory for work each day – one as a manager and the other as a laborer.

Hendricks uses the border region as a way of addressing the core of several continent-wide issues: the bi-cultural existence of two peoples with distinct histories; the monumental economic disparity; land-use; illegal immigration; health care; energy and pollution regulation; and the narcotics and firearms trades.

She visits hospitals and health care facilities on both sides of the border in Nogales. When undocumented immigrants suffer injury or dehydration as a result of a dangerous border crossing, they arrive at facilities on the U.S. side. Meanwhile, many U.S. citizens pass through customs every day, seeking out affordable medical and dental services on the Mexican side. The facilities exchange equipment, patients, coordinate transfers and share supplies, just as any number of hospitals existing in the same city would do.

In one of the more provocative chapters, Hendricks looks into the co-dependent energy relationship between Mexico and the United States. Peering through the fences surrounding a power plant development in Mexicali, watching for endangered birds in the marshes of the Colorado River delta, or listening to the pounding wind’s energy potential atop the cliffs in La Rumorosa, Hendricks paints a complex picture of the water and air pollution crises along the border. In Baja California, power plants are harvesting energy using harmful processes unregulated by the Mexican government-processes that have been outlawed in the United States. But the majority of the energy produced is transferred back to the United States for consumption. As the blowing wind and flowing rivers carry pollution between the two nations, one environmental sciences professor comments to Hendricks: “They say the wind doesn’t need a passport or a visa.”

Further Reading: Illegal: Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone by Terry Greene Sterling and Crossing with the Virgin: Stories from the Migrant Trail by Kathryn Ferguson, Norma A. Price, and Ted Parks

*Photo courtesy Tom Peck.


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