Footnotes to myself

Amexica, Ed Vuillamy

For a while now I’ve kept extensive reading notes. A few of the quotes, ideas, and observations are thrown into what I write, but a lot never finds a place.

This series is my attempt to make use of that surplus. Not quite a book review, but not quite a summary either; something a little more like marginalia. Here are the bits I underlined, and here’s why I thought they were worth underlining. Some of it will be thematic, some of it fragmentary, all of it deliberately loose. Enjoy.

Amexica: War Along the Borderline, by Ed Vuillamy

Keeping up with the news of ICE riots in America and the Trump Administration’s line that much of their actions were targeted against Mexican cartels, I realised I should probably get some background on the problem; whilst this book is a little dated, it promised to do just that.

Ciudad Juárez lives cheek by jowl with the United States and its 'twin city' El Paso, on the other side of the frontier. Sometimes the proximity is surreal: from the campus of the University of Texas in El Paso, one sees, in the foreground, the diligent enjoyment of life - students strolling to and fro. Across mid-distance, less than half a mile away, runs the border in two forms: an articulately harsh wall decorated with barbed wire and the trickle of the Rio Grande. And beyond the boundary, one of the poorest barrios - or colonias as they are called here - in Mexico: a bleached, ramshackle shanty town called Anapra, thrown up out of wood and corrugated iron on the edge of a burgeoning city. The desert dirt and dust on which Anapra is built is criss-crossed by outlaw electricity supply cables to the barrio huts. El Paso and Juárez form the heart of, and midway point along, this singular strip of land conjoining two countries. The borderland is a place of paradox: of opportunity and poverty, promise and despair, love and violence, beauty and fear, sex and church, sweat and family. Even the frontier itself is a dichotomy, simultaneously porous and harsh. The US border patrol recognises the contradiction in its recruiting billboard on Interstate 19 north of Nogales, Arizona, advertising 'A Career in Borders, But No Boundaries'

This tone is repeated throughout much of the book; the comparison between the two is marked, but Vuillamy spends much more of the books in Mexico, clearly trying to expose and explain Mexico’s problems for an American audience.