Volume 28, Number 16 · October 22, 1981
Borderline Cases
By John M. Crewdson
On the Border: Portraits of America's Southwestern Frontier
by Tom Miller
Harper & Row, 226 pp., $12.95
The Border Economy: Regional Development in the Southwest
by Niles Hansen
University of Texas Press, 225 pp., $8.95 (paper)
'The border means more than a customshouse, a passport officer, a man with a gun,' Graham Greene said. 'Over there everything is going to be different…. The man seeking scenery imagines strange woods and unheard-of mountains; the romantic believes that the women over the border will be more beautiful and complaisant than those at home; the unhappy man imagines at least a different hell; the suicidal traveler expects the death he never finds.' That Greene wrote those words after visiting not Hong Kong or Trieste but Laredo should come as no surprise. The Mexican border—the very words are a metaphor for starting over—has been the inspiration for more feverish literary fantasies than that. The immediate significance of the border, however, is no longer to be found in the frequently overblown notions of romance or promise it provides south-bound travelers and writers, especially writers—Mexico, as Paul Fussell says, makes Anglo-Saxon authors go all to pieces—but in its distinction as the only international frontier in the world that separates a largely impoverished nation from a highly developed one. To the extent that the border still offers the promise of a fresh start it is not for those moving south, but north.
Review, 4682 words
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