Here are 100 books that Juarez fans have personally recommended if you like
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I became passionate about the Mexico/US border question after meeting someone who is now a close friend, a Mexican academic who introduced me to some of the issues. She helped me write Saint Death as a way to explore the politics of ultra-capitalism, in the form of multinational business, and the action of drug cartels.
For a closer look at the way drug cartels work, Wainwright suggests we need to think of them in terms of big business, for that is what, underneath the extreme violence and horror, they are.
What drug lords learned from big businessHow does a budding cartel boss succeed (and survive) in the 300 billion illegal drug business? By learning from the best, of course. From creating brand value to fine-tuning customer service, the folks running cartels have been attentive students of the strategy and tactics used by corporations such as Walmart, McDonald's, and Coca-Cola. And what can government learn to combat this scourge? By analyzing the cartels as companies, law enforcers might better understand how they work,and stop throwing away 100 billion a year in a futile effort to win the war" against this global,…
I became passionate about the Mexico/US border question after meeting someone who is now a close friend, a Mexican academic who introduced me to some of the issues. She helped me write Saint Death as a way to explore the politics of ultra-capitalism, in the form of multinational business, and the action of drug cartels.
Dodson was an officer for the ATF working along the border with Mexico. He stumbled across the scandal behind Operation Fast and Furious, and rather than keeping quiet, he took the risky step of whistleblowing on covert operations by US government agencies in collusion with the drug gangs of Mexico, and the death of Border Patrol Agent, Brian Terry.
A hard-hitting inside account of the Fast and Furious scandal—the government-sponsored program intended to “win the drug war” by providing and tracking gun sales across the border to Mexico—from whistle-blower and ATF agent John Dodson.
After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, John Dodson pulled bodies out of the wreckage at the Pentagon. In 2007, following the shooting massacre at Virginia Tech, John Dodson walked through the classrooms, heartbroken, to cover up the bodies of the victims.
Then came Arizona. The American border.
Ten days before Christmas, 2010, ATF agent John Dodson awoke to the news he had dreaded…
I have always strived to speak out when surrounded by silence, whether in person through my own voice, or through the books I have written and had published. Not because I am heroic or noble, but because I am angered by suppressed truth, and I believe reality should be shown as it is, not as people believe it should be. That is why the books I chose are so important to me, because they fearlessly exposed the truths the respective authors were determined to show, risks be damned. I hope these books inspire you as much as they have inspired me.
I loved this book because of the many years I spent living in Mexico and the deep connection I have to that country, culture, and its people. The sheer potency and ferocity from which the various authors wrote of the tragedies and struggles plaguing contemporary Mexico was astounding.
With bravery that is hard to fathom, the collection of celebrated journalists exposed the realities and truths of their beloved country that government officials, police, and military have killed to keep silent. I was angry, sad, moved, and inspired all at the same time while reading this book, and it showed me the power of writing as realistically as possible without compromise.
With contributions from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary - it has the power to change the world's view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the country's many sorrows.
Supported the Arts Council Grant's for the Arts Programme and by PEN Promotes
Veering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The so-called "war on drugs" has been a brutal and chaotic failure (more than 160,000 lives have been lost). The drug cartels…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
I became passionate about the Mexico/US border question after meeting someone who is now a close friend, a Mexican academic who introduced me to some of the issues. She helped me write Saint Death as a way to explore the politics of ultra-capitalism, in the form of multinational business, and the action of drug cartels.
I wanted to include a book here on ‘Holy Death’ herself, Santa Muerte, but there simply isn’t a good one. There’s a terrible one published by a once respectable academic publisher, but I can’t recommend it. Instead, there are some passages on Santa Muerte in this huge and significant piece of work: Lomnitz’s encyclopedic book digs into Mexico’s deep roots to explore the long relationship the country has with Death, of which the still growing ‘cult’ of Santa Muerte is but one emanation.
Death and the Idea of Mexico is the first social, cultural, and political history of death in a nation that has made death its tutelary sign. Examining the history of death and of the death sign from the sixteenth-century holocaust to contemporary Mexican American identity politics, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz’s innovative study marks a turning point in understanding Mexico’s rich and unique use of death imagery. Unlike contemporary Europeans and Americans, whose denial of death permeates their cultures, the Mexican people display and cultivate a jovial familiarity with death. This intimacy with death has become the cornerstone of Mexico’s national identity.…
As a writer, I’ve been deeply influenced by Southern literature—especially the work of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Even though I’m not from the South myself, I am drawn to Southern writers’ immodesty. I believe much of contemporary literature is too timid. It is about the mundane, the everyday. It does not elevate; instead, it diminishes. Much of the literature of the South is biblical in its sensibilities. It is unafraid to deal with the big universal issues with language that is equally big and universal. It does not pander to modesty or postmodern selfconsciousness. It is audacious. It’s the kind of writing that made me want to write.
Mixing Faulkner’s gothic language with McCarthy’s sense of history, Blake writes a story of two brothers torn apart by circumstance and their experiences in the Mexican-American War. Blake captures that sense of aimless wandering that echoes Faulkner’s stories—the rootless characters meandering across the country, not only unsure of their destinations but maybe even indifferent to them. To me, one of the most profound twists in the book is that the brothers don’t seem to care which side of the war they participate in. They are itinerants whose purpose in the world is simply circumstantial; they are instruments of universal forces that they neither question nor understand.
The offspring of a whore mother and a homicidal father, Edward and John Little are driven from their home in the Florida swamplands by a sching parent's treacheries, and by a shameful, horrific act that will haunt their dreams for the rest of their days. Joining the swelling ranks of the rootless--wandering across an almost surreal bloodland populated by the sorrowfully lost and defiantly damned--two brothers are separated by death and circumstance in the lawless "Dixie City" of New Orelans, and dispatched by destiny to opposing sides in a fierce and desperate territorial struggled between Mexico and the United States.…
“Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.” Frederic Raphael. When I was a child, a relative often told stories of a cowboy gear clad cousin who visited our New York family from Texas and claimed he’d once served in Pancho Villa’s army. These tales were the spark that eventually led to Viva, Rose! and my interest in storytelling as well. There’s something about the combination of lived experience and fiction that I find irresistibly engaging and exciting. I’ve worked as a journalist, ghostwriter, and editor, but my happiest happy place is writing and reading stories birthed from a molten core of real life.
This book was inspired by the author’s family stories of the Mexican Revolution. When government armies destroy twelve-year-old Petra’s village and home, she’s forced to lead her grandmother, younger sister, and baby brother through the trackless desert to survive. They encounter kindly monks, ruthless federales, and a band of Villistas who want Petra to join them, but she never veers from her determination to take her family to safety and freedom. This is a powerful read, and I’m thankful and appreciative for the insight it offers into war’s effect on helpless citizens, and the enormous courage, strength, and determination required of every refugee forced to flee their homeland.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
My writing career has been in middle grade and YA, but as a reader I’m always trying to branch out. When I was a kid, literature opened the door to the whole world, and as an adult, I’m still exploring. When I read work in translation I can feel the literary connection to other writers and thinkers and simultaneously appreciate the differences that arise through geographic and cultural heritage. I hope my selections here might help readers like myself who enjoy reaching out to new voices and places.
Translated from Spanish and 128 pages in length, Herrera’s short novel is a beautiful evocation of one woman's journey from Latin America to the US. Evoked with the brushstrokes of a fairy tale and suffused with a luminous surreality, the book has stuck with me. This is Herrera’s first novel to be published in English, and it has made quite a splash, giving me hope that more will soon follow.
Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of the most arresting novels to be published in Spanish in the last ten years. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there's no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to…
My interest in diplomatic history began in earnest when I read A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918, during my undergraduate education. I was fascinated by how nations interacted with each other over time. The pairing of immigration history came much later, during my doctoral program. I was drawn to how immigration historians discussed not just the dynamics of the movement of people, but the nature of nationality and nation, citizen and foreigner, citizenship and personhood. Studying immigration pointed me to Mexican history, which inspired me to ask the question that formed the basis of Risking Immeasurable Harm: how did tensions over immigration affect U.S.-Mexican relations?
I love this book because it was one of the first scholarly works to consider what is now commonly accepted among researchers of US-Mexican relations: that borders are fluid.
This thin volume gives a concise history of the US-Mexico border. It treats border zones as distinct, rather than peripheral, spaces in the nation. In the case of the United States and Mexico, the border region is neither American nor Mexican but rather an amalgamation of both. The implicit statement being, of course, that treating the physical border between the two countries as rigid and categorical is fallacious.
I also love this book because it debunks the almost predetermined ways in which borders are viewed. Instead of prescribed lines on a map that make perfect sense on the ground, borders are moving (sometimes literally, often times figuratively), and fashioned by various demographic, economic, political, and military factors. A foundational book for…
Now available: Troublesome Border, Revised Edition!Martínez reviews the history of the border region and reveals the web of relationships that link one side with the other, delineating the social, economic, and cultural predicaments of its population to emphasize the estrangement between the "binational" periphery of each nation and the core societies. Troublesome Border offers readers an understanding of the border through the events most crucial to its development, and provides an opportunity to reassess the true nature of its unique problems.
As a second-generation immigrant, I knew very little of my family’s migration story. My grandparents never really learned English despite living in the US sixty or more years. In my twenties when the country was undergoing turmoil about immigration reform once again, I began looking at the immigrants all around me (and in literature) and identifying what we had in common—how our lives intertwined and were mutually dependent on one another. In 2007 I traveled 8,500 miles around the perimeter of the US by bicycle on a research trip to collect stories from immigrants and those whose lives they impacted. I wrote two books based on that experience.
The Devil’s Highway is the 2001 story of the tragedy that befell 26 men and boys from Veracruz who cross the Mexico/Arizona border led by human smugglers who get lost on a stretch of desert known as the Devil's Highway.
Urrea is known for his direct and clear reportage style of writing. As he depicts what happened to these men seeking a chance at the American Dream, Urrea does not lose sight of the broken system of immigration, the border patrol, the smugglers or the criminal enterprise of which they are part.
The actual walk and the deadly mistakes made by their “guide” are not shared until Part Three of the book. Through the recollections of walkers and creative non-fiction he recreates dialogue that captures the motives and dreams of these ill-fated men.
A widely-praised piece of investigative reporting examining the journey of 26 men who in May 2001 attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of Southern Arizona through the region known as the Devil's Highway. So harsh and desolate that even the Border Patrol is afraid to travel through it, the Highway has claimed the lives of countless men and women - in May 2001 it claimed 14 more. History of high acclaim from the author of The Hummingbird's Daughter.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
Ever since I was a child, I would hide in my special place and dream away. Reality was rarely the best place to be, even as an adult I fantasize, I step away from reality without ever truly stepping away. Mafia Romance, paranormal, and fantasy excite me, but add in a little touch of real to the story and now even reality makes you wonder. This was the basis for The Devil’s Eyes. I took a new world and mixed in a little bit of what we know is true and a little bit of what-if and a lot of dark and sexy.
It’s not your typical romance. It’s dark, twisted, gritty, and full of – Damn! I love the bad boys with an ounce of good deep inside. I love women who can come from nothing and are not easily swayed and dominated. The drama pulls you in so deep you feel as if you are there, you can smell it, feel it, and see it all happening right in front of you. Even better you’re the character.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Black Sunshine and Sins & Needles comes an enemies-to-lovers dark romance between a ruthless cartel leader and the fiery woman he kidnaps.
For Luisa Chavez, a twenty-three-year-old former beauty queen, a better life has always been just out of her reach. Sure, she’s had men at her feet since she was a young teenager but she’s never had the one thing she’s craved – security. Having grown up in near poverty, her waitressing job in Cabo San Lucas can barely let her take care of herself, let alone her ailing parents. Every…
