Overview
- An entertaining and engaging portrait of the diversity of place and people in the dynamic and important region of the US/Mexico desert borderland
- Offers an anthropological view of such issues as the political and cultural force of borders, ethnic identity, uses of the landscape (place/space)
- Contributes to the growing genre of ethnographic fiction through the lens of border studies, an academic sub-field of increasing importance
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology (PSLA)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Taylor brings an ethnographer’s eye, ear, and many years of experience to this fictional portrait of life along the US/Mexico desert border. In these linked short stories, readers are taken on a wild ride from San Diego to Nogales, into Mexican and Chicano neighborhoods, failed spas and defunct mining towns, rambling Native American reservations and besieged Wildlife Refuges. Along the way they will share the conflicts, calamities, and occasional triumph of an engaging cast of characters. While these tales treat such familiar border themes as drug- and people-smuggling or hybrid and conflicting cultures and identities, they do so with a literary flair that revels in the rich diversity of border life as well as in its ambiguity, ambivalence, irony and often unexpected humor.
Reviews
“If I were able to capture what we know to be true of the border region as well as Lawrence Taylor has done in this work, I would be famous. Taylor’s men and women are Mexicans and Anglos and others at their best and worst and everything in the middle—as we are all—but Taylor has really pulled it off with care, love, affection, and respect. Bravo!”
—Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, Regents’ Professor and Presidential Motorola Professor of Neighborhood Revitalization, Arizona State University, USA
“In Taylor’s Tales from the Desert Borderland, the U.S.-Mexico borderline exists, but everyday people and their extraordinary lives shape this engaging, stimulating and every so often humorous literary geography. From ethnographic fiction to memoir, to travel log and creative non-fiction, and enhanced by Hickey’s evocative and enigmatic photography, Tales crosses numerous literary boundaries, resulting in highly-nuanced portrayals of the past and present western borderlands, and which just might lead to possibilities for a more humane future of the region.”
—Celeste González de Bustamante, Associate Professor of Journalism, University of Arizona, USA
“A prolific and creative scholar, Taylor has produced a series of articles as well as volumes that resonate with many audiences. My favorite is Tunnel Kids, a book I used often and to great effect in years of introductory anthropology courses. With this collection he has brought the full powers of his story telling ability to bear on a topic he has come to know through prolonged contact and inquiry with people and place.”
—Jeffrey Cole, Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Anthropology, Connecticut College, USA
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Lawrence J. Taylor is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Maynooth University, Ireland. The author of classic ethnographies Dutchmen on the Bay and Occasions of Faith, Taylor has been working and writing on the US/Mexico border since the mid-1990s, publishing first The Road to Mexico (1997), followed by the prize-winning account of liminal border lives, Tunnel Kids (2001) and Ambos Nogales: Intimate Portraits of the US/Mexico Border (2002). As in this volume, each of these books was produced in collaboration with artist Maeve Hickey.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Tales from the Desert Borderland
Authors: Lawrence J. Taylor
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35133-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-35132-8Published: 10 March 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-35133-5Published: 09 March 2020
Series ISSN: 2946-4218
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4226
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXVII, 167
Number of Illustrations: 8 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Popular Social Sciences, Ethnography, Ethnicity Studies, Latin American Culture, Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Crime